Political reporting is full of stories about the need to rein in entitlements, mostly meaning Social Security and Medicare. Remember these are insurance programs for which people pay premiums.
Consider auto insurance. Suppose you buy a car and buy collision insurance for it. The day after you pay your annual premium of, say $1,000, you are involved in a crash that totals your car. Is the insurance reimbursement an entitlement? Of course it is. Is it an unjustified entitlement. Well, if you've been paying car insurance payments for years and never had a claim, you might think so. It's your premiums that are giving the owner who had made only one payment the reimbursement.
The question with Social Security and Medicare is if enough premiums are being paid in to cover the payouts, not whether those who paid in are entitled to the benefits or not. One can question the level of payouts but not the fact that payouts are made.
In both the auto insurance and Social Security cases, the recipients are not determining the benefits. It is either the insurance companies or the Federal Government.
However, there are other benefits that are being determined by the recipients, not some "disinterested" second party.
Consider CEO salaries. It is not an independent group of shareholders that are determining the ever increasing CEO salaries. It is a board often picked by the CEO!
Consider board member salaries and fees. Who determines that board members will get $100,000 plus for five or six board meetings a year plus expenses? The board members! Who determines the stock benefits given to executives and board members to "align their interests with those of the shareholders"? It's certainly not the shareholders.
Consider the "golden parachutes" given to fired executives. Do you think a laid-off worker would receive a few million dollars and lifetime high-value health insurance? If the worker receives any benefits at all, they are often considered entitlements, especially if part of a union contract. Why don't more supporters of "capitalism" recognize the golden parachutes as undeserved "entitlements"?
Consider that corporations depend on employees and customers to succeed. Employees are often treated as costs rather than investments. Customers are often treated as annoyances rather than supporters and free advertisers. And too often, executive pay is inversely related to customer satisfaction. See "Executive Pay and Customer Satisfaction". That certainly smacks of entitlement on the part of the executives.
Consider that the owners of professional sport teams strong-arm cities and states to provide a larger portion of their increasingly expensive stadiums. They argue that the newer, bigger stadium will be an investment in the local economy. I wonder how many of these owners are willing to pay for all the schools, roads, sewers, and so on that modern communities need and provide. Oh, the stadium will pay for those. That sounds like a multi-million dollar entitlement to me.
My guess is that the "entitlement" of Social Security puts more money into a local economy than all the corporate entitlements. My guess is that the "entitlement" of Medicare gives a lot of support to the local health care facilities than all the corporate entitlements, plus the employees of those facilities spend a lot of their wages in the local economy.
In short, an entitlement is something others receive, we only receive what is due us.
