Kerby Anderson

Addiction is hard to escape. Whether we are talking about drugs and alcohol or gambling or a variety of other addictions. Dennis Prager says one of the hardest addictions to escape is the addiction of getting something for nothing.

The addiction he is talking about is the entitlement addiction. He reminds us that we have lots of examples of people voluntarily giving up drugs, alcohol, or gambling. We don’t have many examples of people giving up their addiction to entitlements.

They are alluring. Giving up cash payments for food stamps, subsidized housing, and free or subsidized health insurance is very hard to do. Liberal politicians know this and thereby enable the behavior by making it relatively easy to obtain and fairly hard to quit. Often the withdrawal symptoms are too much to handle.

Dennis Prager says that is another reason that entitlements addictions are hard to break. It is unique among addictions. Very few drug and alcohol addicts believe they are owed drugs. “Entitlement addicts, on the other hand, believe that society owes them every entitlement they receive—and often more.”

If you think about it, the word “entitlement” sends a message that you have a right to a particular government benefit. So there is a moral component involved in this particular addition. I might mention that many of the callers to my radio program hate that Social Security and Medicare are called entitlements because they rightly point out that they paid into the system.

Entitlement addiction is also hurting the country. The financial cost is significant. The amount spent on entitlements in the last 50 years ($22 trillion) is nearly equal to the U.S. national debt (almost $20 trillion). And the social cost of putting many generations in a position of dependency on the government will have long lasting effects. This is why it will be hard to break the entitlement addiction.