[ExI] rugged individualists

[Damien Broderick]

Far from the whole story, but worth considering (since we've been 
discussing political perceptions):
==========================
Half of Americans Who Get Govt Aid Say They Don’t
KRISTINA CHEW

<Half of Americans who receive government aid in the form of social 
services believe that they have not 'used a government social program.” 
These include:

53.3 percent of those who’ve received federal student loans
51.7 percent of those who’ve received child and dependent care tax credits
43 percent of those who’ve received unemployment insurance
39.8 of those who’ve received Medicare
28.7 of those who’ve received Social Security Disability
25.4 of those who’ve received food stamps

As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing comments,

It’s the 'Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ 
large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive 
policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that 
they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.

[...]

On GOOD magazine, Nona Willis Aronowitz - after pointing to reports of 
Michele Bachmann’s husband getting farm subsidies and also, reportedly, 
$137,000 in Medicaid money - makes a thoughtful point about what the 
above figures say about our culture of 'rugged individualism”:

…the point isn’t really whether or not these people are hypocrites or 
uneducated or ungrateful; more compelling is why they’d see themselves 
as exceptions. Shame about government help is ingrained into our 
culture, and so is the narrative of the 'culture of dependence.” It’s 
not only rightwingers and deficit hawks who feel this way. When my 
contract position ended temporarily, it didn’t even occur to me to apply 
for unemployment to fill the gap until my father suggested it to me. 
When I waved him off, feeling embarrassed, he balked. 'Are you kidding?” 
he replied. 'That’s what those deductions on your paychecks were for.”

We’re on the verge of forgetting (if we haven’t already) that our 
government isn’t just taking our tax dollars for 'its own” purposes. 
'Its own” purposes are ours - we just prefer not to remember until we’re 
really in need. >
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To which I add: Medicare is not, of course, "aid"--it's supposed to be 
an investment people are obliged to make. The fact that the money has 
been (mis)used for other purposes (wars, subsidies for the very wealthy, 
etc) does not change this implied contract.

Damien Broderick