Never Was So Much …

Speaking of British fighter pilots opposing German bombing campaigns over Britain during World War II, Winston Churchill famously declaimed, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few,” counterfactually alleging that the bombing would have been much worse had not the Royal Air Force deployed Spitfires and the like to harry the Luftwaffe’s puny twin-engined “bombers.”

As the actuarial limits bear down on the number of people alive today who could have been alive in 1945, the crescendo of political sympathy for “Holocaust survivors” rockets to new heights long past the point at which all reasonable people felt it could go no further. Recent entries in this sweepstakes for other people’s money bring Churchill’s words above to the mind of anyone who considers just how many of these worthies could in fact even be alive today, much less in need after a lifetime of receiving reparations from the taxpayers of Germany and Austria.

Likewise utterly ignored in the heartrending initiatives of politicians here reported are any, every, and all sorts of numbers: how much this will cost the taxpayers (taxpayers?), how much will each beneficiary receive, how many beneficiaries are there at the present remove, how many were there last year (more? fewer?). It’s disrespectful to the dead to delve into such tawdry matters, you know …

One might hope that, like the number of RAF fighter pilots who rose into the war-clouded skies of Britain to stem the onslaught of Goering’s death machines, the number of Holocaust veterans might finally be dwindling after having attained literally (actuarially) unbelievable heights during the seventy-odd years since their ship came in. But no—quite as predicted six years ago by N. Joseph Potts, the passenger manifest of the Juggernaut of Conscience continues to do what the stories of the Holocaust themselves have always done—defying every law of physics and biology, it grows, and the gross amount paid out by the taxpayers grows with it even without rate increases like these.

If the number of beneficiaries would behave like normal human mortality and fall eventually to one, and from that hardiest one to zero, the inexorable increases in stipends would endow that last survivor with an annual haul of billions, it would seem. Everyone owes everything to the last one. Churchill, move over. But no, more and more snouts have crowded into this trough, to the point where one wonders when the last genuine one might have died out or been shoved aside.

We’ll never know. There will be snouts in this trough, and politicians pouring more of our hard-earned tax dollars into it, until enough of us decide to put a stop to it.