The entitlement mentality knows no boundaries

Yesterday a woman pulled up to a Burlington Coat Factory store in Columbus, Ohio, in a stretch Hummer limousine. She debarked and announced to all around that she had just won a huge jackpot in a lottery and that she would buy everyone there up to $500 worth of goods. The AP tells what happened.

"Well, of course, people like to hear that," Deakins said. "Apparently they were in line calling relatives who were not at the store and told them to come."

People flooded the registers as cashiers began ringing up purchase after purchase, but Brown had not yet paid the bill, Deakins said. At least 500 people filled the aisles and another 1,000 were outside trying to get in, he said.

But the woman had not won the lottery at all and could not pay for anything. Finally, she climbed into the limo and exited the scene.

That's when angry customers, realizing they weren't getting free coats, began throwing merchandise on the floor and grabbing clothes without paying for them, Nace said.

"Everybody was like, 'I still want my free stuff,' and that started the riot," he said. "It looks like (Hurricane) Katrina went through the store."

Police said they have no way of tracking down the customers who stole items and fled, but they're reviewing surveillance video.

Here's my point: the woman promised people free stuff but she couldn't deliver. Even after learning that she had no money to pay for what she had promised, "Everybody was like, 'I still want my free stuff.'" They thought that they were still entitled to free clothing even after learning that the promise was made fraudulently.

Which means that they think that someone owes them, cost be darned. Lest you think that this type of world view is confined to the economic class of people depicted in WCPO TV's video of the incident, take a look at part of a 2007 speech by former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich.



Richard Fernandez, who studied under Reich, says that this video segment does not exactly present what it appears to.

Although Reich is liberal he is also incorrigibly intelligent and his remarks were framed as a speech by a hypothetical candidate, who for perverse reasons, could only tell the truth. His main point was that the truth was untellable. And although his politics are left of center, his hypothetical unspeakable speech slaughtered every sacred cow the Berkeley audience held dear. ...

Richard lists Reich's points thus:

A solution in Iraq is going to be tough.
Treating more sick people will mean younger people will pay more.
It’s too expensive to treat older people at the end of their life “so we’re going to let you die”.
If we use government to control costs there will be “less innovation” in medical technology and you should not expect to live much longer than your parents.
Global warming can only be tackled by a carbon tax which is going to cost you a lot of money.
We’re going to have to pay teachers more for quality education — costing you more — but we have to be willing to fire the turkeys despite the unions.
Anyone who does an unskilled, repetitive job will lose it in the near future to outsourcing or automation. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
A minimum wage doesn’t help as much as an earned income tax credit.
Helping people at the bottom earn more is going to cost higher income people more money.
Medicare will bankrupt the nation unless something is done and will impoverish the youth.
The best way to ameliorate global poverty is to do away with farm subsidies.

Reich obviously did not just read off these bullets one by one to his UC Berkeley audience; they took about 15 minutes to explain. Here is Richard's kicker.

The student audience, which at first clapped enthusiastically as Reich started to tell his unspeakable “truths” stopped clapping by the end. Reich had uttered the fundamental heresy. You really can’t have something for nothing. Pulling in one direction meant giving way in another. He went on to say that America was hopelessly addicted to fantasy; that anyone who got up on stage and reeled off the points he had made was politically dead.

"You really can't have something for nothing." It is the most basic rule of economics,according to Milton Friedman, who put it this way: There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

Eventually the piper must be paid. The inability to distinguish between costs and price is a signal mark of the entitlement mind and nowhere more evident than in those advocating universal, government-provided health care insurance. See a full explanation in my post, "I Want Health Care Free."