"The Virus that Engulfed Us All"

This is the title of a lecture by Kathleen C. Engel, JD, a "national authority on mortgage finance and regulation, subeprime and predatory lending, and hosueing discrimination," according to the American Institute for Econimic Research ("AIER").  Her entire presention to an AIER forum is available on video.   I read an adaptation of the presentation here, although you may need to be an AIER member to read it.  I recommend either viewing the video or reading the article and also recommend joining AIER.

Ms. Engel is the co-author of The Subprime Virus: Reckless Credit, Regualtory Failure and Next Steps (Oxford Univeristy Press 2011).

ObamaCare, the Supreme Court Ruling, and the Culture of Entitlement: What a Mess

President Barack Obama’s health law [is] designed to expand coverage for 30 million Americans, in part by adding 17 million people to Medicaid. 

But the impact of the high court’s ruling making the expansion voluntary is likely to be compounded by another provision in the law that the justices left intact: In 2014, states are no longer barred from making it harder for adults to qualify for Medicaid. 

Experts worry those two developments taken together could spur some states to reduce the number of people covered. 

States could throw some low-income adults “into a black hole with nowhere to turn for coverage," said Deborah Bachrach, who was New York’s Medicaid director until 2010 and now is special counsel at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a New York law firm. 

-from "States Could Cut Medicaid Rolls In 2014 As A Result Of Court Ruling" by Phil Galewitz, staff writer for Kaiser Health News.

This article needs to read in its entirety.  (Remember, in this case we are talking about Medicaid, not Medicare, which has its own monstrous problems.)

It is not so much ideology that produced this mess, it is the product of an incompetent process, largely political, exercised in a culture that promotes a sense of entitlement in its citizens (and non-citizens) and is without any effective checks against abuse (stealing, for example) that a market-place would generate.  (But maybe that is the ideology.)

Florida's Governor Scott announced last Friday that Florida would opt-out of the Medicaid provisions of ObamaCare, just as described in the article.  Texas is thinking about it, too.

Update:

The Republican governors of four states — Florida, Iowa, Louisiana and South Carolina — have declared that they want to opt out of the expansion. Leaders of half a dozen other states — including Texas, home to one of the largest concentrations of uninsured people — are considering following suit.

-from The Washington Post, July 3, 2012

Entitlement Kills Law Firms

I have been a lawyer for 41 years.  My first law firm, Smathers and Thompson, was a great place to grow up in as a young attorney.  I was a litigator and got to try a case, a jury trial in state court, within a year after starting.   The older lawyers were excellent teachers, and their professional values were first rate.  There were about 24 lawyers in the firm when I started in 1972, which wasn’t the largest in Miami at the time, but it was one of the largest. 

That firm is gone now, and what killed it was the sense of entitlement that swept it like a plague, as we moved into the eighties and a period of unprecedented prosperity for lawyers.  The senior partners felt they were entitled to a slice of the gross revenues off the top, regardless of how those revenues grew, before they divided what was left among all the partners, including themselves.   After all, they had been there the longest, they had “built the firm.”  The younger partners, on the other hand, who had families still to raise (and a good deal more energy), felt they were entitled to more because, well, they needed it to live, as they understood lawyers were entitled to live. 

Finally the firm broke apart when a powerhouse New York firm called Finley Kumble arrived in town and seduced the younger partners and even one of the seniors with cash in amounts that seemed outlandish at the time, seduced them into establishing a Miami component of the NY firm’s national expansion.   I stayed with the remnant (one of the departing partners called us "the gray chevrolets") and we soldiered on until, a few years later, we sold ourselves to another NY law firm, Kelley Drye & Warren.  We felt we were entitled to a high price from the NY lawyers who bought us, and we got it.  After the merger, the NY lawyers felt entitled to tell us how to practice, which made for unhappiness at our end.  That effort ended in 1999, when the NY lawyers closed the Miami office and left us to our own devices.

Freud Discovered This?

Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

-Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death.

Surely, Becker means that Freud discovered this aspect of human nature for himself.  He hardly discovered this for the rest of us.

Is it a hopeless situation?

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

-Philippians 2:1-4

Cross-Fit as an Anti-Entitlement Sport

I confronted the arrogance of the gifted athlete as my children grew up and played sports.  All three played club soccer, and the boys played on the varsity team in high school.  On Macon's team there was a player with a magical leg.  It was like a cannon.  He was terribly gifted.

He was lazy and a problem.  He dogged it during practice.  He would drift during a game until particular moments when he let go with the leg.  His grades threatened his eligibility.  Not a team guy.  Yet the sports world entitled him.  He was a king.  He always played as the less gifted often sat long periods on the bench.

We never heard of him again after high school, although from time to time we discuss him.  What ever came of him?  He was a teenager at the time, of course.  I hope he came to know himself.

Cross-fit is fine with the non-gifted.  There are plenty of gifted athletes there, but they work just as hard as the rest of us.  They are a pleasure to watch and to know.  We non-gifted "scale down" to participate.  This is acceptable in the Cross-fit world, provisionally acceptable provided you are working your tail off.  We get to see the gifted exhibit their gifts and they are inspirational in some ways, even beautiful.  (I have no doubt that they enjoy exhibiting their gifts.)  They sometimes expressly encourage the rest of us.  The ethic is one of mutual encouragement.  We all pay the same price for the privilege of participating.  Our rewards are related to our efforts not to our gifts.  We are entitled to nothing except the opportunity to show up.

Christianity's Least Credible Claim

The least credible claim of Christianity is that God became a man; that he went from throne to Cross; from omni-entitled to non-entitled.  It is easier to grasp that there is a Creator-God, that he may well be involved in history and perhaps in our own lives, that there is right and there is wrong, that the Bible is somehow "true"; that Jesus was an historical person.  But God become a man?

5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.


8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!


9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

-Phillipians 2:5-11 (New International Version 1984)

The sole entitlement of a Christian is to be like Christ.

Where there is Entitlement, there is no Gratitude

Gratitude transforms relationships.  Entitlement deforms and destroys.

Needs are not Rights

The best marriage book I've ever read (several times) is His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair Proof Marriage, by Willard F. Harley, Jr.  Dr. Harley does not speak of the rights that each spouse has of the other nor of duties, one to the other.  Instead, he speaks of the needs of the husband and the needs of the wife, so different in many respects.  His is sort of a transactional approach: if husband wants a marriage that meets his needs, then he meets his wife's needs.  If wife wants a marriage that meets her needs, then she meets his.  There is very little talk of husband's entitlement or of wife's entitlement.

For example, when a man agrees to an exclusive relationship with his wife, he depends on her to meet his sexual need. If she fulfills this need, he finds in her a continuing source of intense pleasure, and his love grows stronger. However, if his need goes unmet, quite the opposite happens. He begins to associate her with frustration. If the frustration continues, he may decide she "just doesn't like sex" and may try to make the best of it. But his strong need for sex remains unfulfilled. His commitment to an exclusive sexual relationship with his wife has left him with the choice of sexual frustration or infidelity. Some men never give in; they manage to make the best of it over the years. But many do succumb to the temptation of an affair. I have talked to hundreds of them in my counseling offices.

Another example is a wife who gives her husband the exclusive right to meet her need for intimate conversation. Whenever they talk together with a depth of honesty and openness not found in conversation with others, she finds him to be the source of her greatest pleasure. But when he refuses to give her the undivided attention she craves, he becomes associated with her greatest frustration. Some women simply go through their married lives frustrated, but others cannot resist the temptation to let someone else meet this important emotional need. And when they do, an affair is the likely outcome.

From several sources, I have heard the statement, "one has no rights in marriage, only duties."  That is one way to put it, I suppose.  I think I would put it this way,  "one has no rights in marriage, only needs."  If one wants those needs to be fulfilled, then he must meet those of the other.  It's a sacramental bargain, marriage.  There is no entitlement.

Charity as an Entitlement

I discovered that charity is a right in law school.  I remember the day very clearly when we were reading about laws that created government benefits for citizens deemed to be in need, benefits for "poor people."  Those benefits were not called "rights," they were called "entitlements."  I gained this insight in 1970, and I should not have been surprised.  After all, during the decade just before, President Johnson had introduced a package of legislation called "the Great Society," Congress passed it, and it was implemented despite a war going on.  During the Sixties, I had never quite understood that the Great Society package was really a package of artificial "rights."  The use of the word "entitlement" in law school, to describe the benefit and the process by which the beneficiary would receive his benefits, indeed to enforce his right to an entitlement, clarified the matter for me.

Was the choice of the word "entitlement" rather than "right" a deliberate strategy of the lawmakers to confuse the matter?  Maybe not.  Rights, after all, are for every citizen.  "Entitlements," on the other hand, are for the few and they are financed not by the promptings of charity but by the compulsion of taxation.  Government imposes on certain citizens the obligation to pay for the entitlements of other citizens.  These certain citizens are those to whom the market provides those benefits by means of transactions, involving production, buying, and selling, that is, through commerce.  Or they are people who otherwise do not need the benefits or who do not even want them and perhaps find them abhorrent (such as the case of government-provided abortion).

I had been raised on the idea that charity was a moral or a religious obligation, that the obligation was to God not to the recipient, that it was to be offered out of gratitude to the Father, and it was to be smartly done, because it was always better to teach a man to fish rather than to give him a fish and because men, being who they are, will abuse a gift and a blind giver.

The word "entitlement" clarified for me what government had set out to do in the Great Society.  It was interesting and it was disturbing.

Ben Franklin and Poor People

“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

-Ben Franklin 

Easy for a bourgeoisie American to quote, one who has never missed a meal, right?

Would that make Franklin wrong, however?

Furthermore, Franklin would not have us overlook our obligation of "leading or driving" people out of poverty.  In fact, the quote begins with Franklin's declaration, "I am for doing good to the poor." He does not advocate ignoring them, but of assisting them in a particular and deliberate way, that is, in leading or even driving them out of their situation, but certainly in not enabling them to stay where they are.

This seems so obvious, but I am somehow compelled to say it.