My recent back and forth with Dance got me thinking about something else, but has nothing to do with her argument. The odd position on the Left that all problems, including social, health, educational problems, can be entirely or primarily ameliorated by lowering economic inequality, but any social constraints (i.e. bourgeois virtues) on people's actions that might help the problem are dismissed as part of the heteronormative-patriarchal status quo by some parts of the Left too.
For example, young single mothers represent a disproportionate number of the poor. Perhaps things that discourage activities that result in single motherhood (abstinence campaigns, massive social pressure on young fathers to marry the mothers or at least support them, etc) might get at the root cause of the problems everybody is so concerned about rather than economic inequality, which may be a symptom rather than a cause.
The source of this type of thinking, and like many things I loathe, is probably Rawls. Basically, that economic resources were distributed at one point unfairly and we have been laboring under that unfair distribution ever since. If we could just distribute it correctly and fairly, then everything would be okay. Or at least more okay than it is today. The problem, as GEC put it when we had a conversation about the issue a few months ago, is that "There is no just deserts in Rawls conception of justice."
I think that I've used this example before, but it's instructive here:
Since economic inequality makes the American high school educational system unfair, let's assign spaces in the freshman class at Harvard according to lottery. Every hs senior in America is automatically entered, and a computer randomly selects who get to go to Harvard. It's completely fair. Everybody has an exactly equal chance. But if it's completely random, then are potential high-achieving hs students going to study their butts off to get straight A's? I don't think so. I'm sure there's lots of other things they would rather be doing than calculus homework. So, it's fair in that it's equal, but as J.S. Mill feared, that equality
breeds mediocrity.
Rawls uses the veil of ignorance as an effective tool. He says, how would you design the society if you didn't know your place in it? And that's all well and good because you don't know your place in it when you are born. It's total random luck whether you are born in Greenwich, Connecticut or Namibia. The problem arises from trying to "fix" that random luck through policies that redistribute and rerandomize because they take away incentives.
Wealthy, educated, intelligent parents try to instill in their children the bourgeois virtues of hard work and education so that they can get into Harvard and become wealthy, educated, intelligent members of society themselves. Ah, but FLG, what about poor intelligent children? Aren't they shafted by this unequal system?
I say, yes, they are shafted. But aren't stupid people shafted in an intelligence meritocracy? And if we actually give each student an exactly equal education won't innate intelligence be the distinguishing characteristic in determining where they end up in life? And isn't innate intelligence randomly distributed by genetic lottery? And if so, then aren't you trading one genetic lottery, wealthy parents, for another, innately intelligent parents? And if so, then what makes the one superior to the other? And is that superiority worth the disincentives to people working hard by eliminating the economic incentives?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
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3 comments:
You make many salient points in this argument but we must factor in not only Darwinism in purely genetic terms but we must also factor in Social Darwinism. If I took a homeless person off the streets and gave them a million dollars, I’d bet better than even money that, within a given span of time, they’d end up right back on the streets. The reason for this assumption is sociological. The individual in question has obviously made choices in his/her life that caused them to be homeless in the first place.
And this is where most conservatives (both fiscal and social) have a problem with the redistribution of wealth or any overt arguments about “fairness.” When any attempt is made to create “equality,” it is a false ideal which is being imposed and negates the effects of social Darwinism. If a person makes poor choices or doesn’t work hard or relies on the System for support, then it’s their fault and their problem and most people who fend for themselves have a hard time wondering why they end up footing the bill for people who haven’t made the same effort to be successful in some degree.
The vilification of the wealthy in this country by the Left is absurd. This point can be made most simply with the following statement: A poor man will never give you a job.
But the Left is expert at cloaking their political goals in semantic disguises, after all, who would be opposed to fairness? You can’t reasonably argue against it and the target demographic of the Left is poor, uneducated ne’er do wells and liberal-minded college students. What do these two groups have in common? Well, they have the least to lose in a free market economy. It won’t cost them anything to vote with the Left.
The same is true for the relative myth of Global Warming (which has now been dubbed “Climate Crisis” because even liberals know how asinine it is to talk about global warming when the snow starts) because you can’t argue against clean air and clean water. In the mean time, the economy is hair-lipped by Government restriction and fines and we see developments like the Big Three Bail Out. (I won’t pretend that the Unions aren’t to blame as well.)
The point is simply that it is a free capitalist system that made America what it is and any attempt to “level the playing field” will only result in mediocrity the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
Another good statement that illustrates the retarded nature of the Left’s views (Spreading the Wealth, The Environmental Lobby, Political Correctness, Fairness) can be found in a cartoon film: “And then, when everybody’s Special; Nobody will be.”
But that goes back to the bourgeois virtues of hardwork and thrift that are learned from ones parents.
The value of hard work and thrift should be self-evident and, if they're not, then the problem lies with the observer.
The onus should be on the individual to acheive and not on "society" or the government to insure his success.
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