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Originally Posted by scottw
NO!...it's not human to like "free stuff" because most understand that "stuff" isn't free, the perpetuation of the entitlement culture has just created the illusion and belief it's there for the taking and it's ok to participate...after all...everyone else is ...and conceding that "we all depend on something" as though that statement bears any relationship to an inane statement like "Perhaps we're all just dependent" like millions contractors, transportation workers and attorneys thriving under the chaos of regulatory change is just participating in inane diversion from subject...
human history is a perpetual struggle against dependence on those that foster dependence and use it to improve their own condition usually beginning with phony benevolent promises and ending in violence and misery
equating interdependent relationships that we might willingly enter into with dependent relationships that we may be forced into (for our own good or the good of the state) by a bureaucratic fiat or that employment in that bureaucratic state somehow entitles insulation from the realities of employment in the real world again entertains this stupid notion and deflects from the issue
"free stuff" and the idea that there should be no shame in living through the labor of others is a seed that has been sewn in this society for most of the last century by the "ruling" class, as it is being called....it is intended to weaken the human spirit and create a society that is more malleable to the whims of the "ruling class" which has clearly overspent it's promises...
conceding that "perhaps we're all just dependent" is handing over you life and the lives of your children to the ruling class who have no intention of slowing the growth of their state and is regulation and intrusions....makes me sick 
dependence IS antithetical to freedom.....if "Perhaps we're all just dependent" then we are all losing freedom, many of us willingly it seems....this notion that greater dependence on a central government and all of it's wisdom and bread and circus will somehow make us freer people is a false promise...just ask the people of Detroit |
There IS an element of liking free stuff in the human condition. It may be more of an extension of humans liking to GIVE free stuff. There is a good feeling in sharing your stuff with others, and a disappointed feeling if they refuse the gift. So the giving and taking is reciprocal. But there is only satisfaction in giving or taking free stuff if it is voluntary. That is what makes the free stuff truly free. And, even in that "free" association, there is an element of price for the exchange--gratitude by the receiver, love (or duty) by the giver and, perhaps, infinite determinate variables. Perhaps, the most common voluntary free giving is gifts to your children--determined by the price of love.
But if the "giving" is forced, the element of "liking" changes to "hating." And for the receiving, since it comes from no-one in particular to love or appreciate, there is no gratitude. But it does come from a government or bureaucracy, and in our the case from an administrative State, a "benevolent" one which insists that you're entitled to the gift, so there is no need for thanks. Rather, the need is to demand. Of course, the ever-present price, in this case, is a dependent loyalty to that government or bureaucracy that gives you stuff. That loyalty, both ways, to and from the giver and taker, is the string attached to the gift. Rather than a relationship between child and parent nourished by love which teaches the child to grow with values of love and dependence on "your own," it creates a dysfunctional relation between a childlike dependence on a dispassionate and neglectful, rather abusive, government "parent" who treats the child, from a distance, as a token of its power and largesse, and who never teaches its children the value of growing up into a self-dependent and loving adult. It creates a selfish child who expects to be given stuff and who only learns that all you have to do to keep getting it is to keep the givers in power. That element of humanity that breeds the richness of life, its give and take, is transformed into a mean existence of taking without giving in a personal way. It is, as you say, a destruction of the human spirit. It is that sort if dependence which is antithetical to freedom. And, as you say, speaking of dependence in general--on weather conditions for instance, or health, or on self and family, on the stability of the universe and the grace of God--as if it were in the same category as dependence on an all powerful central government deflects from the issue. It is that sort of "equivalence" that blinds us from the truth.