A Nation of Moochers (5 page)

Edsall makes the “progressive” case for the “tipping point”: More than one out of every four dollars of personal income in the United States, he notes, is now paid for with tax dollars. The percentage of Americans receiving government-financed medical coverage from Medicare or Medicaid has risen from 21 percent of the population in 1987 to 28.4 percent of the population in 2008, meaning that more than one in four were dependent on taxpayer-funded health care—even before the enactment of Obamacare.

“Over the last two years,” he wrote, “there has been a massive increase in the number of people who have no place to turn except to the government.” The passage of health-care legislation will accelerate the process, since a trillion dollars or so will be added to the totals of government transfer payments.

Edsall, who covered national politics for
The Washington Post
for a quarter-century, surveyed the economic and political scene and sees opportunity for the left: The Great Recession and the nation’s fiscal crisis “and a demographic transition moving the nation closer to a non-white voting majority,” he writes, have “revived, enlarged, and intensified the battle for limited government resources—pitting those seeking to protect what they have against those seeking more.”

Constituencies “seeking more” from government are expanding, writes Edsall, noting that “three previously-marginalized groups—unmarried women, Latinos, and African Americans—made up 43 percent of the total electorate and just over 62 percent of the voters who backed Obama.” (Note here Edsall’s assumption that unmarried women, Latinos, and African Americans by definition support a growth in the dependency culture.)

Edsall envisions “the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States,” and if effectively organized, “such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future.”

Essentially, Edsall and Paul Ryan are making parallel arguments; they agree that the nation is at a tipping point. In that sense, they are both right: The battle lines of the next few decades have been drawn. But where Edsall applauds the rise of a coalition of the dependent, Ryan sees an economic and cultural disaster.

“Before the ‘tipping point,’ Americans remain independent and take responsibility for their own well-being,” said Ryan. “Once we have gone beyond the ‘tipping point,’ that self-sufficient outlook will be gradually transformed into a soft despotism a lot like Europe’s social welfare states. Soft despotism isn’t cruel or mean, it’s kindly and sympathetic. It doesn’t help anyone take charge of life, but it does keep everyone in a happy state of childhood. A growing centralized bureaucracy will provide for everyone’s needs, care for everyone’s heath, direct everyone’s career, arrange everyone’s important private affairs, and work for everyone’s pleasure.”

The Assumption of Incompetence

Ryan, of course, is right: There is a profound difference in the mentality, morality, and politics of the independent citizen and the moocher. You cannot be a moocher without surrendering, roughly in this order: your self-respect, your independence, and ultimately your freedom. Dependency fundamentally changes the relationship between the government and the governed; even a successful supplicant is, after all, still a supplicant. By definition, dependents have to focus on and cling to their sense of victimhood/incapacity. Politically, they must also rely on the acquisition of political favoritism and influence to continue to meet their needs. Moocher Nation is incompatible with the idea of Americans as capable and independent citizens; it is, however, entirely consistent with a vision of America as a land of dysfunctional victims.

Here we come to one of the great dividing lines in debates over the future of American society: The view that encourages independence is based on having at least some confidence that individuals have the capacity to both survive and thrive if they are responsible for their own welfare and prosperity.

This includes a default setting that assumes that the average American is competent to navigate his own life; that parents are capable of raising their own children; and that given a dynamic economy, most Americans are fully able to pursue happiness with only an occasional helping hand. An example: The GI Bill was underpinned by the well-founded assumption that given a chance at a college education, the Greatest Generation would be able to take advantage of the opportunity—and it was. Similarly, in the private sector the decision to make an investment or offer a job is an act of confidence that others will be able to meet expectations and challenges. In contrast, Moocher Nation starts with the assumption that without a handout, people won’t be able to cut it.

Obviously, both assumptions carry a grain of truth. Some individuals are actually quite dysfunctional and unable to thrive in families, schools, workplaces, or society. But when advocates, for example, push for the universalization of free breakfasts in schools, they are not addressing such outliers. Behind and underlining their argument is always the assumption that parents simply cannot be trusted to feed their kids.

The Assumption of Incompetence drives the expansion of both the nanny and the moocher state because rather than starting from the premise that individuals are intelligent, responsible, and capable of (fill in the blank here: caring for their kids; paying for their dinners, cell phones, or cars…), their default position is to assume that most Americans are unable, incapable, and incompetent—and therefore must be cared for.

All of this “caring” is compassionate, but it is also smothering. In effect, the caring class says, putting its arm tightly around the shoulder of the disadvantaged victim, “We care about you so much that we’ll take over from here and run your life for you.” No matter how you cut it, dependency ultimately meets loss of control. While it masquerades as compassion, the Assumption of Incompetence is an attitude that treats its objects with a mixture of pity and contempt and, therefore, not surprisingly, ends up robbing them of both self-respect and self-control. As free-market economist Friedrich Hayek understood, dependence can lead to serfdom, no matter how many euphemisms are applied to it.

Part Two

THE JOYS OF DEPENDENCY

Chapter 3

THE RISE OF MOOCHER NATION

Calling San Francisco a laboratory for Moocher Inc. is inadequate as a description. With its bloated social service bureaucracy, massive antipoverty budgets, and smugly romantic attitudes toward the poor, San Francisco is more like a Jurassic Park for the politicized dependency culture; ideas and policies long thought extinct still roam the streets in the city by the Bay. Without San Francisco, it might be impossible to credibly describe what it was like in cities like New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where the modern mooching culture took root.

San Francisco has not only been conspicuously tolerant, it has been flamboyantly generous: The city has spent billions of dollars and created a vast network of indulgent social service agencies and policies for its street people. When businesses, residents, and tourists complain about dysfunctional behavior, including aggressive mooching, sleeping on sidewalks, or loitering around businesses, the city’s “progressive” elites can be counted on to denounce them as racist or hard-hearted. Measures to enact even modest restrictions on the behavior of the street people are routinely opposed by the city’s civil-liberties-loving, do-your-own-thing crowd.

The results have been … impressive.

The sidewalks in the one-time epicenter of the “Summer of Love,” the Haight Ashbury district, writes Heather Mac Donald in an extraordinary bit of on-site reporting, “have been colonized by aggressive, migratory youths who travel up and down the West Coast panhandling for drug and booze money.”
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The conglomeration of interest groups and advocates and helping professions Mac Donald calls “Homelessness, Inc.” insists that the panhandlers be regarded as “victims” of an uncaring society that has failed to provide sufficiently for their needs. But listen as Mac Donald describes an encounter with “four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.’s current relabeling effort”: “[They] sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. ‘Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you?’ Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby, ‘Dude, do you have any food?’”

This, of course, is mooching boiled down to its purest essence. The young bums have no apparent interest in obtaining housing, temporary or otherwise, and seem to have only the vaguest goals for the future. Many of them, writes Mac Donald, “see themselves as on a ‘mission,’ though they’re hard-pressed to define it. Sometimes they follow rock bands, and other times more mysterious imperatives.… Some are runaways; some are college dropouts; others are years older.”

All they appear to have in common, writes Mac Donald, is an “acute sense of entitlement.”

“I ask the group on the blanket: Why should people give you money? ‘They got a dollar and I don’t,’ Cory replies. Why don’t you work? ‘We do work,’ retorts Eeyore. ‘I carry around this heavy backpack. We wake up at 7 AM and work all day. It’s hard work.’ She’s referring to begging and drinking.”

Mac Donald asks them if they aren’t embarrassed to be begging. “I’m not begging,” one answers. “I’m just asking for money.” He is, Mac Donald writes, “seemingly convinced of the difference.”

Taxpayers do their share in underwriting these lifestyles. Mac Donald encounters a “strapping young redhead trudging down Haight Street with a bedroll and a large backpack” who enthuses about the advantages of electronic food stamp cards, which allow him to access his benefits “wherever he happens to be—whether in Eugene, Oregon, where he started his freight-train route last Halloween, or in California.”

These contemporary street people are practitioners of what historian Fred Siegel has called “dependent individualism,” a sort of militant moocherism, in which individuals believe they are entitled to whatever lifestyle they choose, no matter how dysfunctional, “with an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense.” Siegel cites the story of one angry welfare mother who declared: “I’ve got six kids, and each one of them has a different daddy. It’s my job to have kids, and your job, Mr. Mayor, to take care of them.”
²

Writes Siegel: “The mother was a dependent individualist. Not only was she entitled to public support, but she was entitled to that support on her own terms.”
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The dependent individual is a politically empowered moocher and they were ascendant in the late sixties.

But they can still be found in places like San Francisco, in spite of, or rather because of, the massive ongoing spending on their behalf. The city spends roughly $3 billion on social services, or more than triple the amount spent on police and fire departments. In 2009 alone, without appreciably improving the problem, the city spent $175 million on homelessness, or as Heather Mac Donald calculates, the equivalent of $26,865 in services for each of the city’s 6,514 “homeless” persons.
⁴
For that amount of money, the city could have provided each and every street person an apartment, but advocates continue to push for more spending, blaming the condition of the homeless on the meagerness of existing housing programs. “Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue,” intones the area’s Coalition on Homelessness. “People are homeless because they cannot afford rent.”
⁵

Nonsense, says Mac Donald: “The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do. Further, they are not
looking
for housing. They have no intention of settling down in San Francisco or anywhere else. The affordability or unaffordability of rent is thus irrelevant to their condition.”

But they must be permitted to pursue their bliss … at someone else’s expense. When city residents began pushing for a so-called Civil Sidewalks measure that would give police the right to ticket bums who are sleeping or lying down, homeless advocates denounced them as selfish bigots.
*
“This issue makes me sick to my stomach,” said one advocate. “It makes me sick because we’re putting into place another law that promotes hatred and that will codify economic profiling.”
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