Over at Quadrant, our altruistic doctor elaborates on the modern obsession with turning benefits into rights with the inevitable ingratitude or grievance that follows.

The provision of tangible benefits as of right not only creates a psychological dialectic between ingratitude when a right is fulfilled and grievance when it is not, but it imposes forced labour on everyone in order to pay for the fulfilment of those supposed rights, which are not free gifts of nature but have to be provided by human activity.