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Nothing you say is wrong on its face. Bill and Shelley are boomers milking the system in all the legal ways they were told they could. Oscar and his wife are a young dumb couple who, as you noted, are far from the worse Caleb has had on his show. They're only making the culture war rounds because they're illegals. They're also young enough that it's hard to declare they are going to be lifetime parasites--at least Oscar is working!
I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy. It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.
Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.
Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse. How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end? We could also talk about Iraq, and Ukraine, and Israel, and Argentina, all can be plausibly defended as providing some value to American interests, but fuck that's a lot of money we're giving to non-Americans.
You may or may not have seen the latest trend in ragebait: all the (mostly black) people screaming on TikTok about how their EBT is about to get cut off if the government shutdown doesn't end. The comments are the usual: noticing how many expensive braids and fake nails and tattoos and the like these people wear, asking why Single Mom of 6 does not have a father in the picture, etc. Lots of nutpicking with juicy videos from welfare defenders openly telling poor people to steal from Walmart, single moms haughtily declaring they "don't want to work," etc. Numbers thrown around like $4000-$6000/month in welfare (which I seriously doubt).
These stories are understandably infuriating. They make for very easy ragebait to amp up working Americans who see a bunch of lazy, shiftless people getting fat on their tax dollars. I won't lie and say I would not enjoy seeing some of these "parasites" get made to work or go hungry as much as any Randian.
But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.
That you find their parasitism morally acceptable doesn't make it not-parasitism. The parasitism here isn't old people demanding expensive medicare; it's demanding to be subsidized in that. Generally I would consider pensions not-parasitism (since they're delayed compensation), but what I mentioned earlier -- unions getting pensions in "negotiations" where the other side of the table has been bribed through political support -- makes them something bad.
We can only know if they're a parasitical "class" if these people are actually representative of some class rather than being one-offs. The retired couple seems most likely to be such; surely there are many such couples similarly situated. The financially irresponsible DREAMER seems more unique, or at least I hope so.
But this includes the people in the videos you were complaining were just ragebait! Or, at least, it includes the absent single fathers who aren't in those videos. Sometimes there really is something to be mad about, and just trying to gesture at some other group who is worse doesn't help.
People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism. If you think workers should not receive pensions, you can advocate for ending pensions (and indeed, that is happening, and will probably happen even in the few places where pensions still exist, like government employment). You can complain about unions and their tactics, but the individuals who expect to collect on the benefits they were promised are not being parasites for expecting a legal obligation to be fulfilled.
As for old people demanding expensive medical care, we have discussed before the diminishing returns of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Grandma alive for another month, and those are legitimate ethical debates, but an old person who wants health care and reasonably expects to receive it even if it is more expensive (because they are old) is not parasitism unless you're prepared to advocate for the ice floe health care plan.
If you actually read my post, instead of just rushing to chew on my heel as usual, you'd have seen I admitted I also feel the rage and find these people infuriating. My point is not "A worse than B, therefore you should not be angry at B." My point is if you're concerned about the broad dysfunction of society and how to fix it, A is actually more impactful than B and you should consider that B might be an emotive distraction. By all means, let's squash the parasites as well, but let's be clear about motives.
People who are net negatives are parasites irrespective of the method they've used to swindle the rest of society. If they have managed contracts which state they should receive more from the system than they have contributed, then these people are a drain. It makes little difference whether they then extract this tribute with sword and cutting throats or through the laws of a bullshit system of their construction. What obligation do later generations have to maintain a Ponzi scheme which they did not vote for, and in some cases was constructed before they were given the right to vote. If the elderly have unilaterally erected a contract in my behest, that I should be drained for their benefit, then what is this contract worth? Surely, tyranny by lawfare is still tyranny.
Indeed, let us then abnegate all prior agreements we no longer consider binding on us because we don't like the costs. This will be very reformative and beneficial.
Perhaps it would be. It seems to work for foreign policy. Tautologically if we remove contracts which are harmful to society, then society will benefit. Of course, you'd have to factor in the increase to future counter party risk evaluations. But perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with if boomers had operated under the assumption that future generations would annul any one-sided agreements that they should be robbed. And now is a good time as any to set new precedent. Surely, anything will beat continuing our civilizational death spiral in Boomertopia?
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If that obligation was obtained corruptly, I think they are.
Transfer payments are huge. Trying to point to some bigger but much more nebulous problem looks like a distraction to prevent doing anything about transfer payments.
If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?
Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.
"Bigger but more nebulous problems" are indeed harder to "do" something about than raging at welfare moms on TikTok. I don't fault people for taking the ragebait and going for the low-hanging fruit per se. You don't want to fix transfer payments because you have a rational economic plan to do so and you want to make things better for anyone else. You want to fix transfer payments so you can laugh as Laquisha is kicked onto the street. And I'm not even completely faulting you for that! I have not become as blackpilled as you, though my heart is increasingly bitter, but I have started to accept that schadenfreude is one of the few satisfactions left to us.
But don't lie to yourself about your motives. Tell me you want to fix some other stuff that doesn't warm your culture warring heart and maybe I'll believe there is some principle involved.
You can join the union, just don't expect any portion of the contract that says something like "the guys we largely helped get elected have promised to let you enslave future generations" to be honored by future generations. You should have the same recourse as a southern slave owner when slavery was abolished, be glad we only take from you the future fruits of your corruption.
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You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.
Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.
Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.
You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?
Okay. I say that glibly: at one time I would have been willing to take a personal hit in the form of reduced or no Social Security for myself if it would "fix" SS. Now I am too jaded to believe that's being anything other than a chump. But sure, at some point transfer payments are definitely going to have to be cut/reduced, and I bitterly hope it's not until after I'm dead.
Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.
I don't know if any union would meet my criteria for being non-corrupt. Nor do I care if those who join the union do an investigation. These questions are irrelevant; if the pension was obtained corruptly, it does not become non-corrupt through either the honest or willful ignorance of the beneficiaries.
You can certainly start a thread talking about Afghanistan or peso-buying. But when transfer payments are brought up and you want to talk about Afghanistan and Argentina instead, it sure looks like a distraction away from transfer payments.
That's a fully generalizable statement. People can argue any benefit you receive is because of some form of upstream corruption. The point is not to whatabout the point about union corruption and whether or not any pension would meet your standards for legitimacy. The point is you can't just abdicate on legal obligations because you don't like how they were created.
Or rather, you can, but you will sometimes be the whom and not the who.
But I'm taking to the wind. We're now burning down anything and everything if it hurts people we don't like. This will end well.
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I have a woman who works for me (Well, for GloboCorp. I'm her manager.) 30yo single mom of two. The state provides her and her kids with free healthcare, Section 8 housing assistance, and more besides. Her kids go to school in one town, do sports in another, and she talks about moving their school district based on petty annoyances. Residency requirements are not a problem because she has told me that you can just lie on them. She was hired as a full-timer, but is down to 15ish hours per week due to latenesses and shrinking availability and callouts. She was actively scouted for promotions at one point (DEI considerations were involved), but she has no interest because making more money might impact how much she collects in transfers from the government. She takes two vacations a year, one usually international.
You're not wrong that she is less of a societal problem than some violent thug committing violent crimes.
But there's a similar theme of standards at play for the both of them. A huge part of the problem with crime is that too many people are sympathetic to the criminals. They believe it would be mean to judge someone just for being a feral rapist. And how many people have ever openly judged my employee for using the system like that? None, of course. We more functional citizens maintain a facade of social equality, no matter how many years we spend watching a perfectly healthy person decline to do more than the barest minimum, because doing more would cut into her TikTok time.
I hit my lowest point fifteen years ago. I dropped out of college after my girlfriend "accidentally" got pregnant to take a construction job with my dad. That was during the GFC, so all the construction work fueled by cheap, bad mortgages dried up until he had no work to offer me. I was getting windmill slammed by male post-partum depression and flirting with total personality collapse (What the fuck even am I if I'm not The Smart Guy? Smart Guys go to college. I'm not in college. What the fuck even am I?). And there came a day when the mother of my children brought me to a government office to apply for welfare.
And that moment, seared into my memory, of sitting in a cubicle while a nice man in business casual asked if I knew how to read... That was the single most humiliating moment of my life. If I hadn't had an infant child I would have preferred to just kill myself. It was so bad it broke through the depression and sparked enough agency to go get a job, any job, no matter how shit. Because a complete downward revision of my life expectations was still preferable to that.
What would my life be like if I hadn't suffered the sin of pride? What would my children's lives be like? How easy would it be to just slip into the permanent underclass? It looks like our society makes that pretty damn easy.
Maybe we should add more friction. Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard. Maybe we should spit at criminals and sneer at welfare recipients, and then do the same to their
retardedgentle-hearted defenders.Maybe we're not being "manipulated to hate".
Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards.
From an emotional point of view, I understand. It's easier to get angry at Welfare Mom than Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex. It's a lot more personal when you meet the parasites and see how they live their worthless lives.
From an economic point of view, though, it really does seem like Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms.
The economic point of view is valid and important, of course.
But the other POV is ruinous to a nation. Allowing people to live off of others' backs without contributing, or while merely pretending to contribute, requires harsh sanction and should not be structurally possible in the first place. Public no-strings-attached welfare is a dead end of social evolution. What does this make of people?
I'm fine with addressing both, but most people only want to address the thing that makes them angry in the moment.
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Somehow the people who say that "X doesnt matter, dont be distracted from our great overlords" are never willing to give in on X to get the overlords. It always only doesnt matter in the way where you should do what I want.
Indeed, people who say X doesn't matter would be making a poor argument.
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Transfer payments are the largest Federal expenditures. Granted, most of this is old people and not single welfare moms, but single welfare moms are a not-at-all-insignificant part, and pointing to some nebulous group is just a distraction.
Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?
I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina. Our transfer payments, as you point out, are mostly to old people, and if you want to cut them to the point they are no longer our greatest federal expenditure, you won't just be booting single moms off the rolls.
No, a "distraction" is an attempt to prevent something from being examined by pointing to something else.
Distractions. Social Security was over $1.5 trillion in 2024. Including over $200B not due to the old-age program.
While many people on disability are there fraudulently, it's almost certainly impossible to sort through and get mostly fraud cases pushed out.
Alexander of Macedon had a solution to that sort of thing.
There's lots of possible solutions, they're just all unpalatable. Disability isn't going to get taken away from anyone but the most severe and obvious fraud cases and you know it. Politicians won't suddenly declare that the genuinely disabled aren't getting taken care of, that's not going to happen.
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Without numbers, I'm not convinced there actually are larger problems. All I know is that the overwhelming majority of the federal budget goes to welfare of one sort or another, and not corporate bailouts or foreign adventures. Even if the undeserving only amounted to 10%, that's 10% of a staggeringly large sum.
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Sometimes it seems like the main thing keeping me from doing the "exploit every handout and assistance program the government offers" thing is the capacity to feel shame.
Yeah, somebody in the gooning thread said a huge problem with modern America is that we lack the ability to utilize or feel shame.
I think that's true, but only for certain groups...
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Notably, the old patronage systems often built large things of considerable value. The people being robbed by them often saw significant, tangible improvements in their standard of living as an offset. Can we build a Golden Gate bridge today? Can we build a national highway system? This is a legitimate question, I do not claim to know the answer. I'm worried about what the answer might be, though.
I think you are correct that actual criminals are a much more serious problem than mere fiscal-net-extractors. But as you note, insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, and a lot of other things do too, and it's not as though the existence of a worse thing makes less worse things better. It is also, quite notably, not like the crime is actually being handled either.
Most of my life, I've operated off the assumption that even if these systems, both the fiscal handouts and the crime, are very wasteful but we're rich and we can probably afford it. The world I see around me seems a lot less rich now. Maybe this is the algorythm feeding me rage-bait, but it's not looking stellar for my actual family's finances either.
Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?
We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.
But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.
I think about Robert Moses sometimes (never miss an opportunity to boost Robert Caro). Motherfucker was a petty, vengeful, tyrannical and (in his own way) corrupt bastard. Anti-democratic and considered public monies his to spend and control. But he got shit done. Arguably in terrible ways sometimes. Lots of people have opinions about how New York could have been done better. But he got it done.
No one can get shit done today. After all the bluster and owning the wokes, do you think Trump is actually going to get anything done? Make America Great Again?
I think sometimes about movies like Independence Day or Armageddon. You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?
I don't believe that anymore. We'd be so cooked, as the kids say.
We probably are anyway.
For sure cost disease and other considerations are problem, but on a positive note - when I-95 got shut down a few years ago near Philly it did get fixed real fucking fast.
I suspect if the need is there we can fix stuff quite ably, we just don't bother to or need to most of the time.
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laughs nervously in covid
Yeah I'm with you. I'm not saying that was anything close to world ending (it obviously wasn't, as we are here), but it strongly indicated how such a threat would go down. We would bicker and squabble about what was the right thing to do until it was too late.
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This is what bugs me, though.
Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.
But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.
Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.
A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?
Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.
Oh, firemen too.
We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.
Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.
There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.
I have a family friend, retired Statie. He's been retired my entire life. He just bought a Z06 Vette, which is a bitchin' ride, and I joked that I wanted right of first refusal on it in his will. He bought it essentially because he liked the sound, he doesn't even drive it over 50!, and because he has no kids and too much money and he's gonna die soon.
And he's been very open about working the pension system, and the way every State Trooper cooperates to do it. The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime. So in every barracks they know when it's your years to salary max, and you pick up every possible hour of overtime, and guys coordinate to call out sick at convenient times to get you more overtime, and you get every special assignment to hunt a fugitive or handle an event or whatever, so you look at the salary numbers for these guys and there are always precisely three balloon years to max out their pension.
Relatedly my litmus test for a True Small Government believer is, how do you respond to the data showing NYC has way more firefighters than they need.
That's interesting. My state government's pension system doesn't include overtime in pension calculations. And it was increased from the highest three years to the highest five years in 2010.
Tbf this is what an 87 year old told me, not necessarily the current system, they might have reformed that trick out of the system by now. Though I've no doubt there are other tricks.
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The disabled vets thing on his channel always gets me. I certainly don't begrudge generous payouts to people who got seriously hurt fighting for their country, but there are people getting 3-4K per month who were helicopter repair techs in the military and auto repair techs now. That just seems bananas, and as he always mentions he has NEVER seen a vat come through his show who does not have 20K+ in disability so it doesn't seem like it is correlated to any actual metrics of desert.
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This reminds me of the (imo excellent) argument against student loan forgiveness. It's been stated here, but I've also seen it in other venues (my cousin was patiently trying to lay it out for people on FB for a while, God bless him for his patience). Johnny chose to skip college or go a far more affordable route for college, sacrificing four years of having fun partying with his peers, but gained the reward of not having student loan debt. Jimmy went to a nice school for four years and has a good time, but has to pay back those student loans the rest of his life. Except now Jimmy wants to get his loans bailed out at everyone's expense (including Johnny!), so he would get his short term reward and also Johnny's long term reward, without having to sacrifice anything. This is a terrible social policy to have, because the Johnnies of the world will (rightly) conclude that they are chumps for doing the right thing, and more and more people will mooch off the system until it all comes crashing down eventually.
Similarly, people like you (rightly) feel like chumps for working hard to get ahead when we refuse to let people face the consequences of their bad decisions. I'm not saying you should join them, because I believe virtuous conduct to be intrinsically valuable, but neither could I really find it in my heart to be mad at you if you did join them. It's a raw deal, doing everything right and watching as those who didn't bother still get away with it.
In fairness, I think that isn't necessarily a prerequisite for time in the service to fuck you up in some way. One of my teammates at work was in the army, and has talked about how even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that. Then there's stuff like hearing damage from doing firearms training without ear protection (my understanding from him is that was a thing, which makes sense because in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation), etc. I'm not saying the guys you are talking about deserve the benefits they are getting, because I don't watch the show and I am willing to assume from your description that they don't deserve the benefits. Just pointing out that not serving in combat shouldn't necessarily be a prerequisite here, as there can be legitimate claims even outside that situation.
This seems to imply large fractions of human history where everyone was psychiatrically disabled.
I dont think thats true. I forgot my ears the first time duck hunting, and I didnt even notice until it was time to reload.
I would not be surprised if that's true by modern standards.
I would also not be surprised if that wasn't the case because historical societies had rituals and other customs for dealing with stresses like this which we've forgotten.
Im not necessarily surprised either, but it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.
People think that negative experiences somehow damage your mind and make it work worse. But while physical pain is a sign that your getting damaged, an experience cannot just damage you. How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity, and there is absolutely no reason to just work worse in reaction to something that happens to basically everyone. It might be an unfortunate sideeffect of a positive adaptation thats triggerd only rarely, or an "out of sample" type error, but it shouldnt be standard.
So on the conventional theory, healing/avoiding trauma is good because less damage is better, and getting less traumatised today is a lot like better nutrition today - but as per above, thats wrong. "Untraumatised" is instead an engineered mental state, like literacy, allowed for but not planned by human nature. This implies some very different things in how we should think about its benefits, potential downsides, and how to maintain it!
Historical research into PTSD and other conditions exists and has answers to some of these questions - life was better in some ways is something worth remembering (working with your hands, having nature around you, strong community). Also keep in mind that people with lots of conditions just tended to die or get killed if they weren't rich/powerful (ex: bipolar, schizophrenia).
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I do believe that to some extent the plight of the "traumatized" (Let's pick on first world child abuse or domestic violence survivors for an example.) is that they were simply left behind by life getting so much better for everyone else that they find themselves surrounded by people blissfully unable to relate to the idea that bad things happen (I'm wildly oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.). When then "engineered" (I think the shrinks call this "securely attached".) become somewhere between the majority to the vast majority depending on what social circles you're running in, it can perhaps be alienating for those stuck by circumstances in the old ways with a different way of looking at people and the world at large.
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Yes, absolutely.
It's also up a lot of other things! Like your attitude, like the sort of things you do after the things, and so many other things. Historians have speculated that maybe the reason WWII caused less PTSD in US soldiers than Vietnam was that there was a longer time returning home on ships to process things together and get mental distance from it. I think our postmodern society has lost a lot of helpful rituals like that.
I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.
By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.
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This (and the pension double dipping thing) are super crazy. I know of multiple people who are mid 30s, work full time as engineers or accountants, and pull in 30k extra income a year because of military disability benefits.
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