There’s no government program that guarantees the right to own a boat.

No section 8, no cash for canoes, no means, that I know of, for people who have not worked for the privilege of owning a boat to get one for free and have the maintenance and operating expenses of the vessel paid for from the sweat of someone else’s brow.

Everyone who is on the water has earned it. They bought the boat, paid for supplies, gas and dockage and most important, if they make a mistake they are going to have to fix it themselves.

This notion occurred to me one day when I was by myself and slipped while tending the mainsail. “Whoa!” I righted myself, “I’m out here alone — and I can die!”

It wasn’t that big a slip in itself, it was more the split second awareness that I had to be more careful because there is no net.

I’m not a major tea party ranter, though the reason that meme has proven persistent is that there is some kernel of validity to the idea that self-reliance is a neglected responsibility.

Once I started riffing on this concept, I looked at my fellow boaters and the water a little differently — the overall community is a shade different than land-based life, where it seems everyone is in your pocket or working a scam to enjoy the easy life. And let me be clear, where I diverge from the tea partiers is that I include a broader list of freeloaders in my estimation — not just garden variety welfare recipients, but the politicians, bankers, lobbyists, retirees, lawsuit beneficiaries, double dippers, the self-handicapped, bogus protected classes and so on. If you take the current attack on freeloading to its logical extreme, the fact is a good deal of the well-to-do slice of society has secured their position by taking their points off the honest labor of others.

But you can’t do that on a boat that’s actually in the water. Even if you obtained your vessel by your little scam of making others pay for it, once you off the dock it’s up to you to fend for yourself and make sure you get back safely.

I think this goes part of the way to explains the bonhomie among the boating class — every one knows that every person they meet has made an effort to get there and stay there, and you are met with a higher level of trust than in ordinary land-based dealings. Where else do people wave to each other as they pass by on the way to their destination?

And since I’m talking politics, there is a subtle phenomenon to this idea of earning your place. Since everyone in boating knows that you earned the right to be there, there is an openness to helping one another that doesn’t exist in the land of scams — it’s a case of assuming the best about someone before learning the worst. Now imagine if our primary society had a shared sense that everyone was doing their best, that they weren’t out to scam you or take what you had earned for yourself? I would say that our society is suffering under a mutual suspicion, that since everyone is working a scam, people are operating with a closed fist. There’s an argument to be made that curtailing entitlements would not only encourage people to work harder but also engender a greater level of cooperation and goodwill among folks that, right now, have good reason to believe their neighbor is getting something for nothing.