Fascinating video on the founder of the modern-day entitlement state.  It was none other than Otto von Bismarck, who invented social welfare to frustrate the demand for democratic rule.

The people wanted the power of self-determination.  Von Bismarck did not want the poeple to have that power, so he bought their compliance with free stuff.  Sound familiar?

Here’s the video from DickMorris.com:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb34etEVIFw

We are sometimes criticized for writing about the economy, freedom, etc., on these pages.  Best to focus on pro-life issues, they say.

There is some merit in that assertion.  In our Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA), we teach pro-life activists how to convince even atheists and communists that abortion is wrong.  Even if they believe we are wrong about politics, economics, etc., that does not justify killing a child.

But it’s important for us to understand how saving children is related to saving the economy.

Over the past 50 years, a deadly idea has been growing in the collective American psyche:  the notion that all of us are “entitled” to whatever we need, and sometimes even what we want, and we have no responsibility to work for it or pay for it.  The list of “entitlements” includes food, shelter, health care, a college education, etc., … and the list is growing.

Entitlement, along with its twin monster Dependency, are cultivated and used by political charlatans as tools for obtaining and consolidating political power.  They make outrageous promises, but of course, those promises must be kept by somebody else (i.e., the productive class), if they can be kept at all.  But it really doesn’t matter if they can be kept or not, because the people on the receiving end are “entitled.”

As to paying for the promises?  Well, somebody else can worry about that tomorrow.

Couple that general sense of entitlement with the non-stop portrayal of free sex on TV, in movies, at school, etc.  Everybody is having sex, nobody gets pregnant, and nobody gets STDs.  In the popular culture, sex is just an expected part of teenage life.  So it’s easy to see how young males would think sex without responsibility is just one more item on their long list of “entitlements.”  All a boy has to do is get a girl to give in to his “request,” and when she does, it’s all good.

Since contraception so often fails or is simply forgotten (source), recourse to abortion is necessary for having sex without responsibility, so abortion must be a “right” as well.  They will even say it, “But if I agree with you about abortion, I’ll have to give up sex!”  Not necessarily, but they might have to accept responsibility, and of course, responsibility is antithetical to entitlement.

Some are more callous than others, “Yep, my girlfriend has the right to kill my child, and I’ll do anything in my power to make sure she does, but the ultimate guilt … er, decision … is hers!”

The more we promote the entitlement philosophy, the more abortions we will have.  The politicians who work hardest to cultivate entitlement/dependency also promote the most extreme child-killing policies, because responsibility and entitlement are incompatible values.

Conversely, although the 2010 elections were not a pro-life mandate, per se, but rather a mandate to roll back entitlements gone wild, the result was a record number of pro-life laws passed at the state level in 2011.  Many of the newly-elected lawmakers who promised fiscal sanity also worked to protect children and moms from abortion.

Furthermore, we must always remind ourselves that the first order of business for the political class is to stay in power.  That means paying off powerful political allies like Planned Parenthood.  They tell us our money will go for food, shelter, education, health care, etc., for people who need it.  But in reality, they take money from the productive class and use much of it to grow the bureacracy and pay off their political friends.

You know about Solyndra, but the half-billion they got is chump change.  Planned Parenthood stands to take in billions of dollars (that’s “billions” with a “b”) annually from ObamaCare (source).  (Annually means every year, for all you people in Rio Linda.)  The more we feed the beast that is our federal government, the more entitlement, dependency, and abortions we will have.

What do you think?  Please comment!

We’ve all seen the rioting in the UK, Greece, Italy, and France.  We have to wonder if it can happen here.  If the Left has successfully created in our youth an entitlement culture and a predisposition for mob-like behavior, then the answer is “probably so.”

To really understand the mob mentality, read Ann Coulter’s book, Deomonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.  You don’t have to be a Coulter fan to learn a lot from this book.  She begins with a detailed analysis of the French Revolution, drawing heavily on Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

Le Bon — a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist — was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology.  His ground breaking book The Crowd paints a disturbing picture of the behavior of mobs.  Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob.  Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.

She goes on to identify the mob-like behaviors of the modern liberal/progressive:

[L]iberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought.  According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob:  “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. … To exaggerate … and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known …”

Liberals love slogans because “laws of logic have no action on crowds.”  Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready association of ideas.”  He could be referring to the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”

To see what happens when a people abandon logic and reasoning, take a look at the riots going on in the UK.  Listen to the words of these young mobsters who blame the riots on “conservatives” and “rich people”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pblS1DuBU

There’s no logic to it.  But there is a lesson for the rest of us.  It really doesn’t matter how much wealth you confiscate from the producers and give to the looters and moochers, it’s never enough.

You can hear these young people blaming the producers — the very people who pay for their educations, health care benefits, and Lord knows what else — for the rioting.  It makes no sense.  It’s just like hearing liberals/progressives blaming taxpayers for the debt crisis here.  It doesn’t matter how much the taxpayers provide, it’s never enough.  The takers want more and more and more.  If they don’t get it, watch out!

Although several factors have been identified as contributing to the UK rioting, the sense of entitlement to OPS (other people’s stuff) is a major one.  From the Wall Street Journal:

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

According to Reuters:

“It’s been building up for years.  All it needed was a spark,” said E. Nan, a young man in a baseball cap surrounded by other youths in Hackney in east London.  “We ain’t got no jobs, no money … We heard that other people were getting things for free, so why not us?”

Consider this essay by Max Hastings entitled “Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters.”  In this piece, he asks who is to blame for the rioting, and then he answers:

The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

***

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

He concludes:

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable.  They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions.  Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense.  Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

There it is, the liberal mob in action.  And the entitlement mentality that infects the UK is threatening to engulf our own society.  Unless we work and pray and work to stop it.