By Rick Manning
Fox News discovered the poster boy for decades of social experimentation and a welfare system designed to take away any stigma of dependency — Jason Greenslate — the slacker’s slacker. The twenty nine year old is, who the fictional “Fast Times in Ridgemont High” character Jeff Spicoli would have aspired to become, a guy who mooches places to live from family and friends, surfing every day, partying, and playing his guitar with zero pressure to do anything else.
And Greenslate thanks taxpayers for providing him with $200 a month in free food through the food stamp program.
No apologies or embarrassment, Jason Greenslate revels in taking advantage of the system which provides him with sushi and lobster money. You can almost hear him yelling “suckas” at the 144 million working Americans whose taxes he spends as he screeches off burning rubber from his very nice truck down the streets of La Jolla, California.
But to Jason, he is making the rational choice. If the government wants to give him food, why shouldn’t he take it? If people, who presumably work for a living, put him up in their homes and enable his party til you drop lifestyle, then why should he get a job? If somehow his truck insurance and beer money magically are provided by someone else, why not be a bum?
With a government policy to redistribute income from those who works long hours to be successful and make a life for themselves to support the Jason Greenslate’s of the world, it is fair to question who is the fool?
Is Greenslate wrong for taking the free food offered by the government? Is he wrong for mooching off his less enlightened friends and relatives who trade their time doing menial tasks in exchange for currency, when he gets money for nothing and the chicks are free? Will he be wrong when he signs up for California’s equivalent of Medicaid to cover his Obamacare expenses?
After all, America is telling him, you don’t have to work, we’ll take care of you.
Rather than screaming at Greenslate for wasting his life by taking the easiest path from birth to death, America should be ashamed that he represents exactly what our cradle to grave welfare dependency state inevitably produces. People who make the rational choice to be a bum because nothing more is expected of them are not the problem, they are the consequence.
Their vapid laziness is the result of a nation that excuses failure and has increasingly come to believe that keeping score in children’s games is bad for their little egos.
The purposelessness of dead eyed dopers infesting our nation is the result of a liberal philosophy that crushes ambition as selfish and replaces it with an immoral belief in forced sharing of unearned wealth.
The blasé acceptance of unearned largesse is the embodiment of the “end justifies the means” government thievery that permeates every aspect of the overwhelming federal administrative state.
America does not have a right to exist. Other countries and people’s clamor for our nation’s wealth, and in a world market, we can only survive and thrive if we continue to create, innovate, build and explore.
The Jason Greenslate story is sobering because he is happily nothing more than a parasite which the host has allowed and encouraged to feed off of its body. However, when enough parasites congregate, the body dies, and the parasites don’t even have the awareness to mourn.
A nation whose policies encourage, develop and attract Greenslate parasites both at home and from around the world eventually will either fight back against the contagion or die.
The only questions are which direction will America choose, and is it already too late?
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the Vice President of Communications and Public Policy for Americans for Limited Government.
