Curmudgeon's Corner

Entitlements Unlimited?

Posted by Al Campbell on June 22, 2012

Quality of Life, Political, Economy, Taxes

The Supreme Court for the European Union decided a case on Thursday that pretty well ties a big bow around all the problems that the 27 member countries of the Union have today.  We know that entitlements are sinking the economies of the EU countries.  We know that bail-outs are the order of the day for EU countries.  We know that people simply cannot seem to understand that there has to be a limit to what they receive from their governments.

But I didn’t really understand to what degree this sense of entitlement had risen until seeing this Court decision.

The four to six weeks of annual vacation in Europe are, as the article points out, near and dear to the citizenry in the EU.  As one court said, “The purpose of entitlement to paid annual leave is to enable the worker to rest and enjoy a period of relaxation and leisure.”

This case dealt with the unfortunate person who fell ill during his or her annual leave period.  The first issue dealt with the person who had scheduled a leave but then fell ill before the leave began.  The courts had earlier found that this person was entitled to re-schedule the leave instead of being forced to use part or all while ill.

The decision yesterday carried that further.  It is now the law of the land in the European Union that anyone who falls ill while on his or her annual leave is entitled to take another annual leave.

I wonder if the next case won’t be one to determine how many times this rule can be used in one annual period of time?  What if a truly unfortunate person is taken ill during the second annual leave?  Shouldn’t he or she be rewarded with a third annual leave in that one-year period of time?  If that is the case, then how could the court not permit the really, really unfortunate person a fourth ‘do-over’ if he or she was struck down by illness again?

Maybe the EU moniker for the European Union actually stands for Entitlements Unlimited.

Is this a portent of the future facing us in the United States if we continue to dole out more entitlements that are simply necessary for the common welfare of the country?  Can there ever be a finite end/limit to the number of entitlements or is that simply too cruel, as it seems to have been found in Europe?