The Entitlement Machine; Or, Why The Democrats Will Always Have A Political Advantage

Republicans need to recognize that they will always start any election, contest or debate from behind the sticks. It will always be first and fifteen because Democrats have a built-in advantage in elections.

Their policies cater to the worst in human nature. They reward the short term, punish the prudent, and erode the cultural preconditions of a functioning republic: responsibility, restraint, and reciprocity. Policies that indulge negative traits may feel humane in the moment but generate long-term civic fragility—and while the consequences may not be immediate, they are unavoidable.

We can debate whether it is fair or foul to have a federal income tax—and one so steeply progressive that 47 percent of income-earning Americans carry no income-tax liability. But the consequences of such a system are no longer theoretical. When nearly half the population contributes nothing to the cost of federal activity, the incentives shift in ways economists have long understood. People behave differently when they bear no financial stake in the outcomes they support. This is moral hazard dressed up as compassionate governance. If a policy costs you nothing—indeed, if someone else is footing the bill—why not vote for more spending, more subsidies, more redistribution?

A politics built on other people’s money is not merely fiscally unsound; it is psychologically seductive. Progressive policy design increasingly caters to four deeply rooted but negative human tendencies: dependency, risk displacement, infantilization, and grievance incentives. These traits are not partisan inventions—they are part of human nature. The divide exists because one side has learned to weaponize them.

Consider the latest fights over health-care subsidies. During COVID, Democrats enacted temporarily enhanced Obamacare subsidies, sold as emergency measures. But once installed, they immediately triggered predictable behavioral dynamics. What critics call “government generosity,” the public experiences as an upgrade in lifestyle. When the pre-COVID baseline was about to be restored, the reaction was not gratitude for the windfall but outrage at its removal.

This is the cycle of hedonic adaptation—people normalize benefits almost instantly—and loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than equivalent gains. Withdraw something that was never permanent, and the emotional response is sharper than the pleasure felt when it arrived. These tendencies feed entitlement, the belief that a conditional benefit has become an irrevocable right. The envy that follows—resentment toward anyone perceived to have “more”—becomes political jet fuel.

You can see this psychology play out in real time. Watch videos of people complaining about the temporary pause in SNAP benefits during the recent government shutdown. The reaction was not, “This is a logistical gap.” It was fury that something “owed” to them had stopped even briefly. In these clips—raw, emotional, often misdirected—you witness hedonic adaptation, loss aversion, entitlement, and envy operating simultaneously. Progressive politics thrives in this emotional ecosystem.

But subsidies are only the surface expression of a deeper architecture of dependency. When government benefits become the central organizing principle of economic life, personal agency contracts. Systems designed to help people end up trapping them, not through malice but through structure: welfare cliffs that punish earnings, housing programs that penalize marriage, college-aid formulas that reward borrowing rather than saving. A constituency stabilized by reliance reliably votes to preserve the system that sustains it.

Layered atop dependency is risk displacement. As the state assumes responsibility for ever more dimensions of life—health care, debt burdens, housing, childcare—individuals rationally outsource decision-making to government. If Washington will fix the consequences, why not make riskier choices? Student loan forgiveness illustrates this perfectly. When borrowers hear repeatedly that debts will eventually be erased, over-borrowing ceases to be a mistake and becomes a strategy. The risk is not eliminated; it is shifted to taxpayers who played no role in the original decision.

Then comes infantilization, the erosion of the expectation that adults are responsible for themselves. In the progressive worldview, individuals are not actors but subjects acted upon—shaped by systemic forces, wounded by invisible structures, forever in need of expert supervision. The message is unmistakable: adults cannot be trusted with conflict, judgment, or self-direction. Treat people like children long enough, and they will behave like children, demanding that the state manage every discomfort.

Finally, the most potent of these incentives: grievance culture. In an identity-based political framework, suffering—real or imagined—becomes currency. Policies that distribute resources or status based on demographic categories encourage people and institutions to emphasize victimhood rather than competence. The result is a politics where competing grievances become the primary mode of civic engagement.

Together, these four tendencies form a self-reinforcing ecosystem: dependency reduces agency; risk displacement normalizes irresponsibility; infantilization lowers expectations for maturity; and grievance incentives transform personal dissatisfaction into political identity.

The tragedy is not that these incentives exist—they always have. The tragedy is that modern politics treats them not as problems to be corrected but as levers to be pulled. A society governed by its worst instincts cannot sustain the prosperity and stability that once made those instincts survivable.