Letting the Government Fill Our Pockets

As one would expect John Derbyshire inclines toward conservative perspectives on the distribution of government handouts:

Such attitudes are in any case so quaint and fogeyish now, they are as far beyond praise or blame as the wearing of a tricorne hat would be. They are relics of the time before Anglo-Saxon civilization collapsed into hedonism, dependency, ethnic masochism, consumer credit, and trillion-dollar national deficits. In Liverpool today, one household in three is "economically inactive" — that is, contains no working adults. In Britain overall the statistic is one household in eight. No doubt parts of the U.S.A. are as bad.

The rub comes with the fact that he has reached an age at which the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have both determined that it's time residents are good and bought with handouts: He is now receiving pension payments from the latter and Social Security disbursements from the former. Does that make him a hypocrite?

Whether or not it does, conservatives aren't quite as apt to consider hypocrisy the biggest sin known to man, as progressives hypocritically seem to insist on a regular basis. Personally, I'll be apt to take any money thrown my way. It's not as if my refusing it sends it back to the person from whom it was taken, and especially in my continuing circumstances, my use of it will be lest wasteful than others' might be.

Perhaps it's enough for a conservative to strive not to be dependent on government handouts and therefore not beholden to those who would perpetuate them. That, one suspects, is the main attraction to politicians of ensuring that everybody's got at least a finger in the till.