As I’ve said before the Frost family dust up was little more than a push by White liberals to defend the creation of a special welfare state just for them, a sweeping program of “entitlements” aimed at the unambitious, lazy horde of middle aged adolescents who refuse to grow up, take responsibility for themselves and live within their means.
The rabid defense of the frost family came from not just the Democrats who trotted them out in their child and pony show but by the perpetually outraged left wing bloggers who declared that anyone with the temerity to question why a couple with several children, three cars and two properties refuse to work full time to pay for any of those things to be black hearted scoundrels of the worst sort.
And in from the perspective of an Amanda Marcotte or Christy Hardin Smith we are black hearted scoundrels. Any one who dares tell the well off children of the comically selfish baby boom generation finds out more often than not that their basically the first person to have done so seriously.
The Marcottes and Smiths of the world were raised by granola crunching hippies who bent over backward to ensure that their precious bundles of self absorbed neer-do-welldom lived a sheltered life of half hearted hedonism, spoiled expectancy and above all unlimited boundaries.
These are the people who’ve begun living at home well into their thirties if their parents don’t pay for an apartment for them.
This is the generation of $30,000 a year undergraduate degrees and $6 lattes. And often enough their parents pay for both almost indefinitely.
It’s no wonder you have people like the Frosts who are demanding that America step in when their own parents step out. It’s no wonder that it never occurred to the to the Frosts to sell one of their three cars (they only need two, right?) or the commercial property they own. It’s no wonder it never occurred to Mr. Frost, a father whose wife was working part time, that maybe “intermittent” work doesn’t cut it. Maybe a Father bites the bullet and finds a full time job, even if he hates it.
Instead they want to live a teen-agers life. Working part time, buying cars and “following their dreams” while hoping that if their kid gets sick someone else will appear, wallets open, to take care of things. Mark Steyn summed up the attitude best in this editorial:
In France, President Sarkozy is proposing a very modest step – that those who retire before the age of 65 should not receive free health care – and the French are up in arms about it. He’s being angrily denounced by 53-year old retirees, a demographic hitherto unknown to functioning societies. You spend your first 25 years being educated, you work for two or three decades, and then you spend a third of a century living off a lavish pension with the state picking up every healthcare expense. No society can make that math add up. And so in a democratic system today’s electors vote to keep the government gravy coming and leave it to tomorrow for “the children” to worry about. That’s the real “war on children” – and every time you add a new entitlement to the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.
A couple of weeks ago, the Democrats put up a 12-year old S-CHIP beneficiary from Baltimore called Graeme Frost to deliver their official response to the President’s Saturday-morning radio address. And immediately afterwards Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and I jumped the sick kid in a dark alley and beat him to a pulp. Or so you’d have thought from the press coverage: The Washington Post called us “meanies”. Well, no doubt it’s true we hard-hearted conservatives can’t muster the civilized level of discourse of Pete Stark. But we were trying to make a point – not about the kid, but about the family, and their relevance as a poster child for expanded government healthcare. Mr and Mrs Frost say their income’s about $45,000 a year – she works “part-time” as a medical receptionist and he works “intermittently” as a self-employed woodworker. They have a 3,000 square foot home plus a second commercial property with a combined value of over $400,000, and three vehicles – a new Suburban, a Volvo SUV, and a Ford F250 pick-up.
How they make that arithmetic add up is between them and their accountant. But here’s the point: The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader western world. They expect to be able to work “part-time” and “intermittently” but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up healthcare costs. Who do you stick the bill to? Four-car owners? Much of France already lives that way: a healthy wealthy well-educated populace works a mandatory maximum 35-hour week with six weeks of paid vacation and retirement at 55 and with the government funding all the core responsibilities of adult life.
And that’s the point isn’t it. The reason for the anger at conservative commentators over the Frost affair isn’t out of pity for the family, this is about the right standing in the way of the juvenile left’s short sighted fantasy of never having to grow up.
The Marcottes and Smiths of the world don’t want to have to make hard choices, they don’t want to be put in the position of giving up their personal wants to pay for their children, or even themselves. They want no responsibility for themselves at all, just the ability to use their paychecks for beer money and the chance to fall into the warm protective embrace of a vast bureaucracy when the going gets tough.
I know people just like them. I know a kid who just graduated from college and got a decent paying entry level position at NPR. She can’t afford to move out of her parents home on her “measly” 30-something grand a year, but she can afford to treat herself to the occasional $500 hand bag. Her parents still pay for her car. And insurance.
Something tells me she’s on the Frost’s side.
There’s a cost to this selfishness, there are consequences to handing out money to people who don’t need it. Poor people will receive less services. There will be less government support for those who truly deserve it when we start paying for the Frost’s third car and daily Frappacino.
I believe in a welfare system for the poor, especially children and single parent households. I might have even supported expansion of SCHIP if the Dems had brought out a widow and some orphans. But I’ll never support a couple of selfish Liberals who won’t work and are demanding that the money that should go to the most needy Americans go to finance their lavish lifestyle. And neither should you.