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It sounds like watching these people buy their groceries at your indirect expense made you feel like a chump. I read this article years ago and I still think about it a great deal.
Exactly.
It's not about the math. It's about being made to feel like a fool.
Scott had that post recently about crime rates and spent a lot of time talking about shoplifting, and I think one big difference is that shoplifting when I was young seemed like something really risky. And now with self-checkout, it just seems like I'm only paying because I'm a chump.
Aside: City Journal used to be a publication I really liked, then I saw their college rankings where they weighed Jewish Issues higher than any other aspect of college, and essentially rigged it to get goofy ass answers, and since then I've been really confused by them.
Those sound like pretty standard "old GOP" positions to me. Fiscally conservative, fanatically supportive of Israel and Jews.
I'm not debating their CW bona fides, just the goofiness of it. It's embarrassing.
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Yes, that's exactly it (and the article lives rent-free in my head, too). It seems like there is something at least once a week that makes me feel like a chump for getting up, going to work, trying to do a good job, trying to avoid taking any government cheese I don't feel entitled to (which is all of it), and then seeing hordes of grasshoppers scam the system. It's a good thing I don't live in Minnesota because I don't think I could handle the level of chumpitude that I'd feel there.
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Yes, this is precisely the thing. Recently I saw a fact making the rounds that 40% of Stanford students were officially classes as disabled. This is a similar case. Or take for instance, getting pets classified as service animals so you can take them with you on airplanes. The problem is that there will always be a marginal case that feels unfairly excluded.
You ultimately have to draw the line between "eligible for accommodations" and "ineligible" somewhere, and there will always be people just to the left and just to the right of that line, and there will be very little absolute difference separating them. The difference in accommodations will feel arbitrary and cruel and those with excessive empathy will push to expand it to include those previously just on the wrong side of the line, to alleviate the arbitrary cruelty. But now the line has moved and the process repeats with a new group just to the left and just to the right of it.
Very few of these cases have a clear enough Schelling point to hold the line from this sort of gradual expansion and abuse.
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