Glenn Reynolds’s column “It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning” appeared on the Washington Examiner site on Sunday, and it discusses Charlie Sykes’s new book A Nation Of Moochers: America?s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.
As some of you probably know, the term moochers is prevalent in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
At any rate, Reynolds says:
In today’s America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who’ll keep them coming. The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can’t muster enough votes to put this to a stop.
Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul’s vote.
But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.”
“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.”
I think they’re spot-on with that bit of epistemology that some people, particularly legislators, demonstrate: People who work hard and succeed will always work hard and succeed, regardless of the obstacles, because they like the struggle. The profits and benefits they receive from that struggle are secondary. They produce because they have the ability to produce. And the rest of society can simply, indeed has some moral right, to tap into those benefits.
But instead of takers and makers, I think we’ve got a different paradigm here: Fraggles and Doozers:
Within Fraggle Rock lives a second species of small humanoid creatures, the pudgy, green, ant-like Doozers. Standing only 6 inches (150 mm) tall (knee-high to a Fraggle), Doozers in a sense represent anti-Fraggles; their lives are dedicated to work and industry. Doozers spend much of their time busily constructing all manner of scaffolding throughout Fraggle Rock using miniature construction equipment and wearing hard-hats and work boots. No one but the Doozers themselves seem to understand the actual purpose of their intricate and beautiful constructions.
Often they accompany their building with marching songs and various Doozer chants. To ensure that they always have a steady stream of work to do, Doozers build their constructions out of an edible candy-like substance (manufactured from radishes) which is greatly enjoyed by Fraggles. They actually want the Fraggles to eat their constructions because “architecture’s supposed to be enjoyed” and also so they can go on to build again. This is essentially the only interaction between Doozers and Fraggles; Doozers spend most of their time building, and Fraggles spend much of their time eating Doozer buildings. They thus form an odd sort of symbiosis. In one episode, the flavor of the Doozer sticks is augmented by adding other flavors, such as tomato and mustard.
This symbiosis becomes integral to the episode “The Preachification of Convincing John” where Mokey calls upon the Fraggles to stop eating the Doozers’ constructions—because they spend so much time making them. Fraggle Rock quickly fills with constructions and the Doozers have no space left in which to build. After running out of space, the Doozers finally decide to move on to a new area because the Fraggles won’t eat their constructions, and there is even a tragic scene with a mother explaining to her daughter that Doozers must build or they will die, and so they must find a new place to live where they can build and hopefully find Fraggles who will eat their constructions. Overhearing this, Mokey realizes that she has inadvertently disrupted a vital symbiotic relationship through ignorant good intentions. As a result, Mokey frantically rescinds her prohibition and encourages the Fraggles to gorge on the structures — just in time to persuade the Doozers to stay.
If making money, doing business, and hiring people were some psychological compulsion, wouldn’t we see it continuing in the face of the modern mixed economy system? Wouldn’t those capitalists, like Boxer in Animal Farm, just work harder, more compulsively?
I’m not sure how someone would square the circle that Doozers have to build, I mean, Capitalists have to entrepreneu and exploit the working man with the decline of the economy in the face of too much government Fraggling, but I think a lot of people are just fine with round quadrilaterals in the right circumstances.
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The Doozers got pleasure from having the Fraggles eat their creations. Humans, on the other hand, tend to like their efforts to be a bit more permanent. If you work hard on building something, you tend resent having it torn down to please ungrateful, entitled non-contributing zeros. I am sure there are some for whom the compulsion of working will drive them on, regardless of how little progress they are allowed to make. Their happiness is their work. However, you will also find that there a lot of people who work to live instead of live to work, and will begrudge having to work even harder because people who work less and consume more demand it. In the end you will find people will go Galt, even if they don’t conceive of it in such terms. They have lives they want to live and work is secondary, and when work no longer pays off in supporting their first goal, they chose to spend those hours with friends, family and hobbies – pursuing their own forms of happiness.
Yes, that’s reality.
But some of the Congresspeople and certainly the Occupy crowd might think that the producers of the world are making all that stuff just so that they, the ones who want to dance all day/worries for another day. can just consume the stuff made for them.
I remember reading a Fraggle Rock tie-in book as a child. They described the Fraggles as a people who worked one half hour a week, leaving the other 167.5 hours available for having fun. So the comparison to the Occupy crowd isn’t fair: the Fraggles are much more productive.
The entire Fraggle Rock world was blatant socialist propaganda. The message kids have been spoonfed is that rich people should shoulder the burden in this recession, in other words take from them and give to the ungrateful poor people who just sit around all day doing nothing. It amounts to STEALING. First they came for the people making a billion dollars or more. But sooner or later they will come for the millionaires. It’s disgusting.
Also I have purchased John Donnelly’s Gold based on the description alone. Excellent work, good sir. Now I’m going to quit for the day so I can find out if they can really pull it off–and steal John Donnelly’s Gold!
Thank you, sir. Every bit helps.
I could tell you how it ends and save your afternoon, if you’d like.