Life's Pleasures Quote by L. Neil Smith

The line is built like a moral appeal and lands like a trap: it borrows the soft-focus authority of “for the children” to sell a hard-edged political argument about scarcity and deservingness. L. Neil Smith, a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer with a taste for polemical clarity, isn’t trying to adjudicate Medicare policy so much as stage a values referendum: redistribution as theft, sentiment as camouflage.

The specific intent is to reframe social welfare as a zero-sum raid across generations. “Take food from the mouths” is not policy language; it’s a nursery fable image of direct harm, an accusation designed to bypass budget spreadsheets and go straight for parental panic. Then comes the kicker: “to buy prescription drugs for old people.” The elderly aren’t portrayed as citizens with claims earned or needs shared, but as a consuming bloc whose survival is purchased with someone else’s deprivation. It’s a deliberately abrasive swap: “children” as innocence, “old people” as expense.

The subtext is more cynical than it first appears. By ending with “and we must do it... for the children,” Smith mimics the exact rhetorical move he’s indicting: invoking kids as an all-purpose shield. The ellipsis signals a knowing pause, a wink at how political language launders self-interest into virtue. Contextually, this sits comfortably in late-20th-century American fights over entitlements, taxes, and the “greedy geezer” trope. It’s not a plea for intergenerational solidarity; it’s an attempt to make solidarity sound like complicity.