Entitlement Steals Your Power

Why Expecting Others to Fix Your Life Robs You of Agency and Dignity

There’s a storm brewing in Washington, and it’s not just political, it’s moral. The federal government has been shut down for weeks. Senate Democrats refuse to pass a clean continuing resolution, one they themselves supported just months ago. They claim to be standing firm for healthcare funding and extended ACA subsidies. Meanwhile, an estimated 42 million Americans are set to lose their SNAP benefits starting November 1st. That number is staggering. It’s a number that should break our hearts, but it should also wake us up.

This shutdown, irrespective of who’s to blame, has peeled back the curtain on something far deeper than partisan dysfunction. It has revealed a cultural sickness, a quiet but devastating epidemic of entitlement.

Entitlement steals your power. It whispers that you are a victim. It convinces you that someone else, government, employer, or benefactor, owes you something. And in the process, it robs you of the most precious gift God has given you: agency, the ability to act and choose your own path.

The Corrosion of the American Soul

When I was sixteen, fresh out of high school, I wanted to come to America for college. My parents refused. “You are too young,” my father said. “Americans are very independent, and you are not yet ready for that.”

That statement shaped me. America was known for independence. It was the land of pioneers and dreamers, the nation that carved prosperity from wilderness and built liberty from principle. But today, something has changed.

The American spirit of self-reliance, the heartbeat of our national character, has atrophied. We have traded the rugged frontier spirit for the fragile comfort of dependence. We now measure compassion not by the hands that work but by the hands that receive.

Yes, there are those who genuinely need help. Compassion demands that a civilized society provide for its vulnerable, the disabled, the elderly, disadvantaged children, and the truly destitute. But when dependence becomes a way of life, when entitlement becomes an expectation rather than an emergency measure, freedom itself begins to decay.

The Trap of the Modern Safety Net

Social safety nets were never meant to be hammocks. They were meant to be trampolines, temporary supports to help people bounce back onto their feet. But over the decades, we’ve twisted compassion into control.

Instead of empowering citizens to rise, government programs often ensnare them in cycles of poverty, dependency, and despair. Politicians use welfare as a bargaining chip, promising to “take care of you” while quietly taking your power. The more people rely on the government for their basic needs, the easier it becomes for politicians to manipulate them.

Dependency is not compassion; it is control dressed in the language of care.

We have created a system where millions of Americans now wait anxiously for the next government check, where a shutdown in Washington means hunger in homes that should be self-sustaining. This is not freedom. This is not dignity. This is bondage by convenience.

Freedom and Responsibility are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other. When you hand over your responsibility to someone else, whether to government or to circumstance, you surrender your freedom along with it.

This is the moral paradox of entitlement: it feels like power, but it produces paralysis. It promises safety, but it breeds stagnation.

The Bible teaches, “If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) That isn’t cruelty, it’s wisdom. Work is not punishment; it is purpose. It gives life meaning and dignity. When a person is robbed of that sense of purpose, their soul begins to wilt.

True compassion isn’t about perpetual provision, it’s about restoration. It’s about helping people rediscover their capacity to create, to build, to work, to lead. That’s the American promise: not comfort, but capacity.