The right to benefits ...

... Barbarians on the Thames by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Resentment is a powerful, long-lasting emotion that usually is self-serving and dishonest (I have never heard a criminal complain that his defense lawyer is upper-class, as he often is), as well as useless. Resentment is undoubtedly part of everyone’s psychology, at least potentially, and few of us have never heeded its siren song. A population’s general level of resentment, however, is not a natural phenomenon that one can analyze in purely mechanical terms, as if it increased geometrically with the Gini coefficient. Britain itself has been far more unequal in the past without widespread riots’ breaking out, so it is clear that we cannot understand people’s behavior without referring to the meanings that they attach to things.