If Will wasn't a baseball fan, you'd be calling him a hack.
You equating the level of entitlement from 1978 to now, is folly at its best. Maybe you slept through that era, or was eating too much gubmit cheese. 
I was alive and well in 1978. (Well, considering the state of my life at the time, I wouldn't say I was entirely well at the time.) The only cheese I ate was whatever I bought at a supermarket or some specialty store. My point was not to compare "levels" of entitlement between eras but to remind people that entitlement itself as a government M.O. has lived since and long before then. I give you this, which I happened to stumble upon and read around the same time as Mr. Will wrote:
If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power . . .
. . . Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilisation of social power. In fact . . . destitution, unemployment, "depression," and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power . . . [But] the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand-new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living. Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called "the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government"; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for . . .
. . . The State has said to society, You are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself . . .
That was Albert Jay Nock, writing in
Our Enemy, the State---in 1935.
