Replies

The “front of the line” here represents people who conflate government with society:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
By conflating the two, socialists (who, recognizing their abuse of “social” when they mean “government” would better be called governmentists) undertake to subvert the role of members of society as patrons of other members of society. In the process of eliminating patrons other than the government, socialists undertake to make “those in the back of the line” utterly dependent on government, thus utterly isolated and utterly unfree.
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. It points out, correctly, that although the label on the pencil says “Eberhard Faber™,” Mr. Eberhard and Mr. Faber did not simply speak the pencil into existence. They had to have a factory built by others, and machinery and equipment, and workers to operate them - as well as the wood, graphite, rubber, enamel, and brass or plastic for the ferrule holding the eraser. And not only does Eberhart-Faber require equipment, workers and supplies, the same is true of all the suppliers of all of those inputs. And the workers themselves cannot exist in a vacuum; they require food, shelter, clothing, etc, etc. In sum, society as a whole contributes - is greater or lesser degree - to the making of a pencil. “You didn’t build that?” Yes - that is absolutely the truth. Society as a whole made the pencil - which is entirely different from saying that the government did it.
The government can indeed, if it sets itself to it, make pencils. But it cannot take responsibility for making them efficiently, or in numbers which correspond to the marginal cost and marginal utility of pencils. Government cannot take responsibility for the simple reason that if it takes on the task of making pencils, its bureaucratic imperatives will lead it to either devote excessive resources to the project, or to make too few pencils of too poor quality. And most likely both - without ever accepting blame and correcting its blunders.
The example of the mine pumps in the Soviet Union is instructive. The government over specified its requirements, down to specifying the death penalty for delivering pumps not painted the correct color - and then did the same sort of thing to the paint maker. The ultimate result was that the paint maker could not deliver the paint to the pump maker, and the pump maker could not deliver pumps to the mine . . . and, far down the line of interconnections, the failure to deliver the paint to the pump maker ultimately made it impossible for the paint maker to ever deliver the paint to the pump maker.
The government is simply too blunt an instrument to do the work of society efficiently; when it comes to maximizing the good to the population, socialism is a paper tiger.

“At the front of the line they can afford (financially and socially, though not morally) the consequences of what they do. They can pay for the stays in rehabilitation centers, the treatments for STDs, and the therapy for their children (who are traumatized by divorce and other issues caused by their parents’ indulgences).

“But at the back of the line the drug use, sexual promiscuity and confusion, and the divorce culture have had far more devastating effects.”

I’ve noticed this, too, but the metaphor in my mind has been about water, and letting it rise. The people in the higher parts of society want the water to play in, and they can often choose to escape it and protect themselves from it when they’re done playing. But the people in the lower parts live with flooding or are even drowned. I saw this in my own life, too, after my father, the family breadwinner, passed away, and have seen it in the lives of the many low-income people I’ve known throughout the years. The people in the higher parts do live with a false sense of security, though, that if they can more easily escape the consequences of sin and moral confusion, then there will never be any. Yet it’s important to remember, too, that these are all generalizations. It says something general about people’s circumstances, but not about them individually.