Wherever you look these days, there are people demonstrating for their "rights." These "rights" are the right to take money from other people so that the demonstrators can have free this and free that. If education and health care are to be free, who pays? The demonstrators could care less.
Look at Greece. There are daily and massive demonstrations demanding that their failed welfare state continue to support the "entitled." It is always someone else that should pay for all of the things that the "entitled" want. Everything is a fundamental "right" without obligations on the part of the entitled to fund anything. There are no obligations to be imposed on the entitled. After all, they are the entitled.
What about Italy and Spain? Who pays? Their answer is the same as the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) crowd. They payers are "the rich." As if the rich had enough assets to keep all of these entitled folks going on indefinitely. The move to "get the rich" has historical precedents and none of them are very attractive for average people.
The Russian and Cuban experiments were long playing disasters for the average person living through those experiments. It's worth noting that even those "leveling" societies had their privileged. The Castro family lives in a style that America's rich would love to aspire to.
People with responsibilities, kids to take care of, old folks to support and the like don't have time to camp out in make-shift camps around the US and the world and make posters with four letter words describing their hatred for capitalism.
When winter comes, the OWS gang will retreat to the warmth of their comfortable homes or back to their "entitled" college community.
The truly disadvantaged don't have time for this stuff. But the truly "entitled" can camp out for years on end before retreating to a more comfortable lifestyle that they are "entitled" to.
The rest of us have to work for a living.
Milton Friedman noted long ago that the only societies that have ever produced for the average person were capitalist societies. Such societies also produced rich people as a by product of raising the standard of living of the average person. You can see the fruits of capitalism today in China raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Chinese. Capitalism is what is needed if the average person is going to have a fair shake.
But, the entitled are not interested in capitalism. They are mainly interested in getting their "rights" at the expense of others.
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