Posted on 08/02/2011 5:44:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
If one child complains that he didn't get as much food as his brother because his frankfurter was cut into four pieces, while his brother's hot dog was cut into five pieces, we laugh. What we often don't realize is that the definitions of "fairness" that adults use are often every bit as arbitrary as those of children. This is why politicians are so in love with the word "fairness." Using that word justifies their attempt to swoop in, ignore merit, overrule the market, and take something from one group of people to give it to another group of people who are more likely to vote for them. So next time someone starts talking about "fairness," put your hand over your wallet, put on your thinking cap, and consider that what liberals define as "fairness" could look extremely "unfair" if you're open minded enough to take a look at it from another perspective.
1) Affirmative Action's only "fair?" The idea here is that we're going to discriminate against white Americans who have not done anything wrong in order to help black Americans who may not have been discriminated against so that we can make up for past discrimination against black Americans. That begs the question: Do we flip this around at some point and start deliberately discriminating against black Americans again to make up for the government's discrimination against white Americans? It may sound outrageous, but that ridiculous idea would be every bit as "fair" as Affirmative Action.
2) Making losers pay for legal costs would be "unfair" to the little guy! Because liberals get a lot of money from trial lawyers, they oppose a "loser pays" rule for lawsuits. They justify this by saying that system would be "unfair" to the people suing. Why, what if they couldn't afford to sue because their opponents’ legal fees would be too high? Of course, that's a really backward way to look at it. After all, how fair is it for someone to have to spend countless hours of their time and tens of thousands of dollars defending themselves from a meritless lawsuit without compensation? Surely, if it's "fair" for the plaintiffs to get money if they win, then it should be "fair" for the defendants to at least have their expenses covered if they triumph.
3) The rich aren't paying their "fair" share. It's easy to take shots at rich people. There usually aren't enough of them to swing an election with their votes, nobody really feels sorry for people who have a lot of money, and as often as not, they give contributions to both parties as "protection money." But here's a thought: How can the rich not be paying their "fair share" when the top 10% of Americans pay 69.9% of the money we take in from the income tax while 47 percent of Americans don't even pay a single dollar a year? Arguing that people -- who probably pay for all the services they'll get from the government in an entire lifetime over any given month -- aren't paying their "fair share" while so many people pay nothing at all, seems more than a bit....."unfair."
4) Cutting spending would be "unfair!" Any time you try to cut something from the budget, there are aliens in other galaxies who can undoubtedly hear the screams from space. We get rants about cruelty, Tea Party "terrorists," pushing old people off cliffs, balancing the budget on the backs of the less fortunate -- it goes on and on. However, there's no such thing as "free" government money. So, what we're actually doing is selling our children into debt slavery so that liberal politicians can borrow more money to buy votes today. What could be crueler or more "unfair" than a child who's born starting his life more than $176,000 in debt before he's ever opened his eyes for the first time?
5) Minimum wage laws make sure people get a "fair" wage. If you're making the minimum wage right now, it's entirely possible that the law benefits you by insuring that you get paid a higher wage than you otherwise would. Liberals would call this "fairness." But, how about all the people with low skills who either aren't worth the minimum wage or who could be hired for jobs that don't merit the minimum wage? It's all well and good to say that a job's not worth someone's time if it doesn't pay the minimum wage, but there are probably a lot of unemployed Americans who'd be grateful to make $7 an hour while they look for a better job. What's "fair" to those people about putting a law in place that prevents willing businesses from hiring willing workers who desperately need the money?
6) Not allowing illegal aliens to become American citizens is "unfair!" If we allow people who sneak across the border or overstay their VISA to become American citizens, then doesn't that make legal immigrants look like complete idiots? There are people who spent years in their home countries, paying thousands of dollars, and filling out endless paperwork while liberals want to give people who broke the law the gift of American citizenship? What's the message to people who became citizens the right way supposed to be other than, "You are a moron for following the rules?" How can it be anything other than grossly "unfair" to legal immigrants to give illegals a break? Additionally, how about all the American workers, including legal immigrants, who have less money to bring home in their paychecks each week or no jobs at all because illegal aliens who pay no car insurance, health insurance, or taxes can afford to do the job at a cheaper price and drive down wages? How "fair" is it to hurt American citizens to help people who didn't even come to this country legally?
7) Wal-Mart isn't "fair" to its employees. Liberals generally don't like big corporations and they especially don't like Wal-Mart because it's an enormous company that has successfully fought off unionization. This leads to cries that Wal-Mart's "unfair" because it doesn’t pay its employees enough or allow its employees to buy fancy health care plans. Of course, if Wal-Mart could be perfectly honest, its response would probably be, “We don't force our employees to work for us and if they decide they’re unhappy, they can always go somewhere else.” That being said, there's another group of people who aren't being "fairly" treated by the liberal push to unionize Wal-Mart – Wal-Mart customers. Wal-Mart employs more than 2.1 million people in America, but roughly 82% of American households shop at Wal-Mart each year. If Wal-Mart is forced to pay its employees more, then you're taking money out of the pockets of everyone who shops there to pay for it. Why should a dirt-poor widow with four kids who buys her groceries at Wal-Mart be forced to pay more money than she would otherwise to subsidize union salaries? That seems more than a little "unfair."
Great piece!
The word "fair" has been sticking in my craw more than ever lately. Who understands fairness? Who can guaranteee it? The world doesn't work that way.
Establish stable rules.
Enforce the rules consistently.
Enforce the rules equally to all.
The outcome won't be perfect, but it will not be arbitrary -- and "fairness" in the modern sense is nothing but arbitrary.
What our society needs, what our economy needs, is stability and predictability. Concepts of "social justice" and "fairness" work against what we need. Who knows what "fairness" will demand next week?
It’s sheer arrogance to think that you (”you” being the liberal) can know enough to know what IS “fair” or what IS “justice”.
Only God knows what is “fair”, and at Judgement, there will be no one that can say “that’s not fair”.
Besides, all the policies above are simply ways to get the fellow travelers and useful idiots to further the cause of communism.
This is not quite accurate. The left sees union control of Wal-Mart as a huge opportunity to put its fingers around the throats of the American middle class, being able to cut off critical supplies to vast numbers of people at a stroke. That is power, and it is what the left is all about.
THOSE jobs are for people just starting out, people who are students or who have full time work and supplement their income with another job, etc.
People who go into min. wage work and stay there while demanding more and more for their unskilled work (WITHOUT ever going back to school or evolving out of their entry level status) are as much a problem with this economy as people who do not work.
The consumer is picking up the tab for all the increases in the min wage.
What is more, if the min. wage is perpetually increased, where is the incentive for that min. wage employee to get themselves into some night school training, to work harder and get themselves promoted out of the min. wage status, etc. ???
What the liberals won’t say about Wal-Mart is that all employees can purchase shares of stock in the company, they used to match 50% on the dollar so for every share of stock you paid for you actually got 1 and a half shares. I made $10.25 per hour when minimum wage was $5.50 right when I started working part time for Wal Mart.
From the article: ‘’Why should a dirt-poor widow with four kids who buys her groceries at Wal-Mart be forced to pay more money than she would otherwise to subsidize union salaries?’’
Disagree. People would “pay more money” that goes into (1) democRAT campaigns and (2) into greasy, fat-cat union officials’ pockets.
Another excellent find! Thanks again!
“Fairness” is a word used by those who not only lack any rational argument, but are underhanded enough to try and play on the emotions of the ignorant.
Liberalism in a nutshell.
“Establish stable rules.
Enforce the rules consistently.
Enforce the rules equally to all.”
I don’t think you understand how Democrat politics work. Stable rules consistently applied equally to all precludes rewarding favored interests (read: political donors/voters) such as unions, Blacks, trial lawyers etc. with goodies bankrolled from the U.S. Treasury. Who benefited from the auto industry bailouts? TARP funds? Obamacare waivers? Follow the money, and you’ll know the answers.
But Democrats are as adept at wielding sticks as carrots. Why do you think the auto industry caved on absurdly high new CAFE standards insisted upon by the administration? Why do you think the health insurance industry meekly towed the line when the Secretary of HHS brazenly insisted that they provide health insurance coverage to children by September of last year even though Obamacare didn’t require them to do so until 2014?
Because everyone knows the “Chicago Way” is now in play, which means NO stable rules, inconsistent enforcement and unequal enforcement (read: maximum bureaucratic discretion to reward friends and punish enemies). In short, we won’t return to the rule of law until January 20, 2013.
Of course, my response is always “Son, whoever promised you ‘fair?’”
Arbitrary enforcement and “discretionary authority” are the bread and butter of the totalitarian left.
They justify having this authority by their assumed moral and intellectual superiority.
For the most part, liberals as individuals know that they do not know how to produce anything. Even a union skills worker cannot make a thing without somebody else supplying a job, a facility, and material while a non-union competitor would do the work for less. Those in the "creative arts" know that their "goods" generate little of permanent use by themselves.
Because liberals cannot produce wealth, that means they must take it. Whether it is a union worker who can strike, a bureaucrat who can withhold a permit, a teacher who can withhold a credential, a welfare case who can riot and destroy, liberals, for the most part, acquire their means by their ability to stop the productive from doing so. They live for the power to take, else they destroy. It's like a child who wants a toy and will break it if the other doesn't share.
Knowing this, liberals will always resent the productive classes simply for who we are as a reminder of what they cannot be. You can see it in the desire for revenge expressed by the likes of Jeremiah Wright. The futility of their station means they feel no remorse in getting "their" cut of what we produce, nor is there anything that can sate such a mindset. The more we realize how unnecessary they are, the more gambits they produce to force us to support them, else they destroy.
Look at a university credential. Once can learn virtually everything it offers for free, yet here we are saving hundreds of thousands of post-tax dollars, just to pay them for that ticket, just to get permission to work, because theirs is the power to deny work. Without power, a liberal is nothing. This is why they claim such a death grip on power. For a liberal, power is life itself. Deny power and they have nothing. They will tell any lie, commit any vile act, for more. There is no end to it because they cannot produce.
To acquire power, they must have a majority comprised of those whom they control, either by dependence or by virtue of the power to destroy. The former are easier to manage, hence Cultural Marxism with which to destroy public capacity for production. The problem is, that in a competitive world, it is an unsustainable bubble. Without global control, liberalism is doomed.
Hence the Marxist international, and why a liberal considers a national socialist "right wing." It's because compared to them, it's true. Once they have that power, and we have automated for them the means to produce sufficient to meet their needs, they have no use for us and would exterminate us if they could, for revenge.
To pretend we are up against anything less is to fail to recognize our peril. Mona Charen hasn't a clue.
Libs just have a case of sore-arse for WalMart because they are the nation’s biggest generator of paychecks and their union buddies have not been able to get their fingers on one dime of it.
Sad to say though, with the rate at which WalMart has been capitulating to the Greenies in recent years, I can see them at some point voluntarily accepting a union in order to keep Big Brother of their backs.
Inflation, and a lower demand for unskilled labor.
Another addition are “deep pocket” laws. In California if you were deemed even 1% responsible for an accident/problem (your nice care distracted two idiots who then got into an accident) , you could be responsible for paying out all damages. Just to be fair.
Also, the “Fairness Doctrine”. In a liberal’s mind if Dan Rather does an interview of Bill Clinton and says that if Bill was only one hundreth as great we would all still be lucky , then a liberal/progressive should have an equal amount of time to offset the “corporately biased’ media and tell everyone that if Bill was only one millionth as great , we would all be lucky.
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