We spend an enormous amount of time talking about the haves and the have-nots, and the conversation usually assumes that the people who have more somehow took it from the people who have less. Sometimes that’s true. There are crooks in penthouses just as surely as there are crooks sawing catalytic converters off cars in parking lots. But there’s another side to this conversation, and apparently we’re not supposed to have it.

Civilization gets built and kept running by the people who contribute to it. Somebody gets up at five in the morning to drive a truck. Somebody else designs the bridge, keeps the electricity on, builds the house, grows the food, writes the software, invents the medicine, or starts the company that ends up employing hundreds of people. Millions of us get up every morning, go to work, pay our bills, and take part in this giant cooperative insanity we call civilization, and because so many people do that, the rest of us get to enjoy an extraordinarily comfortable existence.

Then there’s another group that seems determined to take everything civilization provides and give nothing back except chaos. Before somebody starts screaming about poverty, I’m not talking about poor people. Plenty of poor people work their asses off, and plenty of wealthy people are worthless parasites. How much money you have doesn’t come into it. What matters is what you contribute compared to what you destroy.

We build beautiful public parks, and somebody wrecks the bathrooms. Stores put merchandise on the shelves, and thieves take so much of it that everything ends up locked behind plexiglass. We create government assistance programs to help people get back on their feet, and somebody figures out how to scam them almost immediately. Packages get left on porches, and some asshole follows the Amazon truck around the neighborhood stealing them. And everybody else pays for it, which is why we now need security cameras everywhere, locked display cases, fraud departments, background checks, identity verification, insurance investigations, and seventeen different passwords just to get at our own damn money. An astonishing amount of modern society has been built around accommodating the fact that some people simply refuse to behave.

What really pisses me off is that instead of demanding better behavior from the people causing these problems, we keep asking for more patience, more tolerance, more money, and more understanding from the people who aren’t causing them. I’d like to know when expecting someone to act like a functional adult turned into an unreasonable burden.

Don’t steal, don’t assault people, and don’t destroy things that don’t belong to you. Take care of your kids. If somebody helps you when you’re down, make some effort to get back up, and contribute something to the society you’re benefiting from. None of that is outrageous; it’s the bare minimum for living around other human beings.

Obviously we should help people who genuinely need it, whether that’s the sick, the disabled, the elderly, a struggling family, or somebody who lost a job through no fault of their own. That’s what a decent society does. But compassion is not the same damn thing as throwing out personal responsibility altogether, and if you keep protecting people from the consequences of their own destructive behavior, at some point you’re not being compassionate anymore. You’re enabling them, and making everyone else absorb the cost on top of it.

I’m not suggesting the government should start handing out productivity scores or deciding who’s worthy of existing (God knows they’d screw that up before lunch). What I want is for us to have some standards again, to actually hold people to them, and to let there be consequences when they don’t bother, even if that just means being willing, now and then, to look at someone and say, “No. You don’t get to do that, and the rest of us aren’t obligated to keep paying for it.”

Civilization isn’t some magical resource we stumbled on growing on trees. It exists because generations of people built it and maintained it and paid for it, and because they agreed to certain basic rules so that millions of strangers could live together. It’s sturdier than people give it credit for, too. People need help all the time, they make mistakes, they get bad luck, they fail outright, and the whole thing keeps going anyway. Where it starts to break down, if it goes on long enough, is when people decide that pulling their own weight is optional for them but expect the rest of us to keep carrying them with no limit at all.

So maybe, instead of endlessly asking what society owes the have-nots, we could occasionally ask what they owe society in return. I don’t think the answer is money or wealth, or even productivity. I think it’s a lot simpler than that, and mostly comes down to not making the world worse for the people who are trying to make it better.