"And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."
>There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.
In other words, people who don't work don't eat, except through the charity of people who have decided that they've earned enough to take care of themselves and their families.
More like, if you didn't pay for it, somebody else did.
That is, you can't honestly say you're entitled to anything from "society" because "society" doesn't own anything. Only living, breathing people own things. When someone feels entitled to something (note the passive voice), they are saying that someone else owes them something.
Maybe that's fair, but personifying the argument makes it much more honest, which I believe is the point of the quote.
Yeah, but Thatcher's capitalist-conservatism is open to the same Marxist critique as the American version: these whole "private property" and "owned capital" things are themselves social constructions in the first place, so claiming that you don't owe other people basic human welfare while society owes you a property system that benefits you at everyone else's expense is itself an unfair, uneven entitlement being made by a parasitical minority on the decent, hardworking majority.
