Quote:
Originally Posted by TracyCoxx
Good example. Once you make people feel they're entitled to something you can't get rid of it. It becomes yet another expense that the government pays and burdens the population with through taxes, whether they have kids or not. The end result? A bloated out of control welfare state.
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I forgot to mention one other thing. The United States has the lowest percentage of citizens with passports of any developed country. Most Americans have never been outside of North America. I don't know about you, Tracy -- perhaps that doesn't apply in your case. But the point in general is that Americans presume to know how people in other countries feel, as you reveal in your response.
These people in France didn't feel burdened by taxes. People throughout Europe gladly pay for the social welfare systems they have. Denmark has enormously high taxes and, by nearly every scientific study, the most content and happy people in the developed world. Why? Because they enjoy lives absent from most of the financial stressors that make Americans unhappy (such as having to worry about paying for healthcare, or college, or whatever). The happiness of everyone around them turns into a generalized societal happiness.
No one in France I've ever spoken to thinks of things as "entitlements" the way you use the word. They think of what we call "entitlements" in the United States as willing purchases they and their society have made for the good of all. That's why they protest so vehemently against changes in the social welfare system pushed by the wealthy. It's because they realize that the "individual liberty" that so many in America think Americans possess can be a catchphrase for something quite insidious.