One thing about Americans is we tend to confuse generosity and entitlement. Even across the political spectrum, we have a fairly distinct sense of what people should have, but a foggy sense of how people should get it. For example, few would argue that society's poor, indigent, and mentally ill should be left to die in the streets. Some think that we should collect taxes to fund systematic government programs to provide baseline care and sustenance for the poor, while others think that we should rely on the generosity of private individuals and organizations to meet these needs. But in either case, what one group calls a charity and the other an entitlement are both ways of conceiving of the same basic thing as a mixed issue of both.
In some ways this confusion is a positive thing, bespeaking honesty about what I think is a genuine American desire to be helpful and charitable toward the less fortunate. On the other, this confusion is a serious problem that allows us to talk about what people should have but then to choose to do absolutely nothing to provide it.
Perhaps the best example of the kind of confusion of generosity and entitlement that I'm zeroing in on is the American custom of tipping. Though tipping is so commonplace and ingrained in American commerce that we seldom think on a daily basis about why we're doing it, injecting a foreign visitor into the conversation has a way of forcing us to explain and justify the practice, which is considered odd and confusing by most of the wider world. Our responses typically cover two points: 1) tipping is an incentive for better service (and service is generally better, in a loose sense, in America); 2) our service staff are not well compensated for their work in either pay or benefits, and rely on tips in order to earn about minimum wage.
Though I'm inclined to find both of these justifications for tipping to be plausible, I think they constitute a major problem, rather than a distinctly American solution.
Let's consider the first point, service. I am one of those people who regularly says (and means) that I don't pay, or want to pay, for service when I eat at a restaurant. This is to say I don't go to a restaurant to be waited on or to boss people around or to have things brought to me the instant I request them, etc. I go to a restaurant for the food. The service is just a necessary complication of purchasing food in restaurants, a function of the fact that they won't let me pick it up from the kitchen and bring it to my table myself, and a faraway secondary concern (so much so that I often choose takeout places, street carts, and counter service restaurants precisely to avoid the weird and uncomfortable scenario in which someone must bring me the food that I order and tend to me while I'm eating it).
But let's for the sake of argument say that service matters to us, because though I think it's overrated by most Americans, it does truly matter to many. Let's consider that a restaurant is a business. The product that restaurants offer is primarily food, but also service and atmosphere in many cases. This means that restaurants employ both people to prepare the food and people to bring it to us. All of these people, though perhaps working on different components of the product, are under the employ of a single business, the restaurant. The bill we pay at the end of our meal does not get broken down into 'food' versus 'decorator' versus 'service,' no more than when we buy a stapler our receipt says 'alloys,' 'assembly,' and 'marketing.' The point I'm making is that when we eat at restaurants, food is the main draw, but it's also a component of the whole product; which means the cost of service, and all other operating costs of the business, are included in our food bill. We may think of the bill as reflecting a menu price listing for a food item, but those prices are themselves set according to a much more complex formula, which necessarily includes considerations of labor costs, electricity, and other components of overhead balanced against expected revenue and a desired profit margin (to put it crudely).
This leads into the second justification for tipping, which is the low pay of service staff. Let us consider, again, that the responsibility of a business is to pay its labor costs, which in the case of restaurants means paying at least a minimum wage to its service staff. This means that restaurants are being at best disingenuous by advertising a lower food cost, then deferring the remainder of the actual cost of the total product slyly onto the consumer through the expectation of a tip for the service staff; or, at worst restaurants are simply expecting not to have to pay their service employees because customers will be generous enough to pay them instead. Notably, tipping defers the responsibility for getting paid onto the service staff, rather than the employer accepting what should be the employers responsibility to pay their staff).
The obvious question here is a leading one: shouldn't service employees be entitled to pay for their labor? And, as a corollary, shouldn't the employer, not the consumer, be responsible for paying the people it employs?
Quite obviously we would all expect that someone who works a job is entitled to compensation, and that compensating employees is the direct responsibility of the employer. Nevertheless, we've gone so far down the path of confusing generosity with entitlement that for some designated kinds of service, like table waiting, hair cutting, bar tending, cab driving, and the like, we've unthinkingly accepted that it is not the responsibility of the people who own and run these businesses to pay their own employees, but somehow our responsibility as generous, well meaning consumers.
How absurd is this?
In my view, this is just one (albeit extensive) example of what is unmistakably the greatest, most expensive, most pervasive form of entitlement in American society: the entitlement of businesses and corporations. No other segment of society, at either the individual or institutional level, is as entitled and needy and demanding as the business sector. This is so pervasive now that whereas only one political party is likely to advocate for 'entitlement' social programs for the poor or unemployed, both parties in our two-party system regularly step over each other's tongues trying outdo one another over how (small)business friendly they are, how much they'll aim to coddle and hand-hold businesses, how willingly they'll bend over backwards for the sake of businesses, and how dogmatically 'pro-business' they are. Despite how on-the-face-of-it ridiculous is the claim, we've rushed to dub (small)businesses the 'engines of the economy,' and to singularly credit businesses for 'creating jobs.' The idea that any credit for economic growth, including that which is reasonably generated through business, could go to research breakthroughs, educators (for training all those employees), forward-thinking investors in both the government and the private sector, etc., for 'job creation' is anathema in today's climate of coddling and aggrandizing the business sector.
I happen to think that a business can be a great thing when it provides a product or service with honesty and integrity that people honestly want, and when it owns the risks and responsibilities involved in this endeavor. I'd rather pay more for my meal and walk away knowing that tipping isn't expected of me by an entitled business that's deferred its responsibility of compensating its employees onto me, hoping I'll be generous with my own money while forcing its employees to hope the same, or risk not being paid for their work. This is the kind of slippage from a well established definition of a reasonable entitlement (pay for work) into the murky realm of generosity, which is itself a fine thing when it's not exploitatively taken for granted. Sure, when I frequent an establishment and get to know the staff there, I'm inclined to show generosity (in tips) for their willingness to be especially kind and attentive to me; but in every other exchange, why should you or I shoulder this burden? Are we not just feeding irresponsible and lazy business behavior?
