roachboy

lebell: i do not see any separation between what the word means to me and what i see as its social functions. and i do not see how any such separation could be made. if the idea of the thread is purely subjective associations with the word, the results would still be more or less the same.

i am not sure that i see how you make a distinction between the "safety net" and the redistribution of wealth. unless we are talking about different things across the metaphor fo safety net--which is possible.

in general, i see the redistrubtion of wealth as necessary for system stability--capitalism as a set of economic relations is profoundly destructive of teh social solidairty that the system itself relies on to function--the redistribution of wealth in general is a way of countering some of these effects.

as a term, entitlement--when it refers to redistribution of wealth--is simply a way of obscuring the issue--because right ideologues like to argue that poverty is the fault of the poor and not of the systems of distribution of economic and cultural capital (the right position on this is to my mind wholly absurd, but that's maybe another thread)
it follows that a term like "entitlement" would be functional, in that it erases all social aspects of and and all problems connected to poverty and responses to it and focusses resentment on a (largely fictional, but no matter) sense of "deserving something for nothing"--a simple-minded way of viewing this that has the appeal of making its object as simple as the logic being used to "describe" it.

personally, i think this among the more thoroughly disengenuous tendencies in conservative ideology--the terms are obviously geared toward making the redistribution of wealth something easy to opppose--but this serves as a cover for the retracting of the state in general--which is most understandable as a means for reducing political risk in the longer run. the right has no better idea than anyone else of what the longer-term implications of globalizing capitalism will be for americans. they have no plan--but then neither does anyone else. but they assume that these effects will be difficult to bear for many--so the response appears to be to cut political losses by trying to reduce the involvement of the state in regulating social differentiation. because the state makes political those areas of social regulation that it gets involved in, situations of great uncertainty can be understood as posing unacceptable risks for the political class as a whole.

the term entitlement, then, is a term the right uses to frame one aspect of its preferred mode of class warfare. nothing more, nothing less.

as for ayn rand...i too read her main books and so can only extend my sympathies to you for having done the same. but as i dont have anything good to say about her, and because saying those things would maybe divert the thread, i'll leave it at that. what i have to say about her theory of "entitlement" i worked into the above.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite