Useless Eaters

Any society must face the Iron Law of Net Production, or decline.

I’d never heard of EBT TikTok before last week. The term originated with a trend started by welfare recipients who, before the government shutdown, would flaunt their cartloads of EBT purchases or discuss ways to game the SNAP benefits system. Some sell their EBT cards for cash. Others buy fake nails or DoorDash. Such posts inflame the working poor, who feel they must work overtime to subsidize the profligacy of the idle while making ends meet.

If the shutdown continues into November, many EBT cardholders are warning of widespread theft and looting to gain benefits they believe they’re entitled to—especially those who have many children who are wards of the state. A few working-class voters say they’ll defend stores, and these viral messages paint a starker picture of an ongoing showdown between the working class and the dependent class, a conflict Karl Marx himself probably never imagined. The Lumpenproletariat has become the dependent class.

With this, I won’t seek to adjudicate the morality or politics of these programs or their perverse incentives. Instead, I want to point to something more fundamental—an iron law that is civilization’s scaffolding.