
The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” - or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security”.
The problem for the western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”) the ritual of work - of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life – has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR.
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