I’m getting more and more agitated. There are two words that are absolutely murdered by propagandists today. Those words are fairness and justice. Now I believe in justice and I believe in equal opportunity. While I don’t believe life is fair or we should expect it to be I know that any time any word is compounded with fairness or justice than it means the opposite. Hey, if you haven’t noticed the most common naming scheme in the world for a bad idea is to name it the opposite. Look at the stimulus bill. We were told unemployment would not go above 8% if we did it and would go close to 10% if we didn’t. It went to 10% and now those same people (Christina Romer) are saying it will hover in the 9s. Excuse the aside, she just said she was totally wrong last time, big surprise for someone who never left the halls of academia to really understand economic factors like why companies do or don’t hire. Just an aside, $1T out of the private sector did more harm that good and I can document and debate easily.
Getting back to fairness and justice. Here’s the simple concept. Let’s start with what is fair. Is it fair that you start out clueless, get acne, get dumped and made a fool of, struggle to get by and just about the time you figure life out your aches and pains signal that your probably most of the way to the grave? In case you’re in your 20s or 30s and your eyes are glazing over I’ll just tell you the answer. No! Life is not fair. If any two people could get everything they wanted out of a deal then half the marriages today wouldn’t end in divorce. Rule one of fairness, life isn’t fair. So that leaves two choices. One choice is to figure out how life works. Let’s say we were to talk gambling. Casinos have a several percent advantage. What does that mean? It means over time you are going to bleed cash until it’s all gone. It’s statistics. Now let’s look at a fair way to deal with this. First the rational way. Don’t gamble… unless you can buy a casino. Now we have adapted to an unfair world with no lose propositions. Now for the irrational way. Complain incessantly as you lose all your money, get drunk and ruin your life. It’s not fair, is it?
Now let’s take our unfair casino model a little further. Let’s say you instead legislate that casinos have to flip their margins and pay a small percentage. That means the longer you play the more you make. There is a problem though. Casinos didn’t get rich being stupid, so now they are doomed to go out of business. So let’s take the richest gamblers and give them different odds in the casino so they pay a lot more and keep the casinos afloat. Sound fair? Well, not really, but let’s call it casino-fairness anyway. It’s fair because we should be able to go to a casino just like rich people, but while they can afford to go to lose money we can’t. That’s not fair. Now it’s fair, but it’s also gotten more popular and the casino could go broke so we need to up the percentage that the rich guys pay. Now all we need is someone, say a high government mucky muck to say that it’s the patriotic duty of those rich people to step of and pay their share. Fair enough?
I’m going out on a limb here and saying that you think my rich person funded casino is not only stupid but really not very fair. The question is whether you are okay with getting the Mafia to hold a gun to some rich guys head and make him spend the money so you can win yours. Well, are you OK with that? The funny thing is my casino example is a lot like the US tax system. Almost all federal taxes are paid by the upper 10% and the bottom 50% not only don’t pay but get money back. in fact it’s approaching 60%. However that merry go round is about to spin out of control because the vast majority of money in this country is in the hands of the middle class. Oh yeah. We’re getting just about all we can out of high earners and businesses and if we took 100% of everything the top 10% earners make we could only run the country a few months. Oops!
So getting back to fairness, how about tax-fairness? What does that mean? We have a progressive tax, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with progress other than stifling it. Progressives are economically descended from Marxists. Try this on. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. Great president? No, the same guy who said the duty of the lessor races was to die. No, not Hitler, Karl Marx. It really comes down to what you want to equalize. I choose opportunity, Marx chose outcomes. If nobody can have a better outcome than anybody else then you have to ask yourself a question about the person living on the street… Is it possible they might actually be there by choice for reasons we can’t understand? It may seem an absurd question but it is only pertinent because the only way to have equal outcomes for all is to put everyone at the lowest level. I’ll simplify here. If people got rich by accident poverty would require a concerted effort.
Equality of opportunity is different. It is the level playing field. Being a musician I like to think of Django Reinhardt. I used to read every guitarist I liked credit him as an inspiration. So I dug up some of his music from the 1930s in the Hot Quintet du France. This Gypsy was amazing, but even more so because his left hand was burned in a fire and permanently deformed. Many people said he would never play, and yet he became one of the most influential guitarists ever. Nobody ever talked about giving him some special musical fairness, best deformed guitarist or anything. I have always liked the saying that we are born with an equal opportunity to produce an unequal result.
So getting back to fairness and justice it is any kind of fairness or justice that bring a discoloration of the pure essence of what is just and equitable. What is fair and equitable is that we all pay the same tax rate so that if we make more money we keep the same proportional amount. It’s possible to lose money if you make just enough to hit the top bracket today. I’m willing to make the concession to give those less fortunate a break, but the worst part of fairness is that it never ends. People are finding more and more things that aren’t fair and the government is making more and more laws and regulations to make it fair. In the end we have so many rules and regulations it becomes nearly impossible to comply and more and more expensive. Our tax code and regulation is all about a nanny state nudging or bludgeoning us in the direction they want.
The problem with seeking fairness is it is rooted in a utopian belief and the problem with government and utopia is that you have greedy powerful unaccountable idiots running it. The United States is a truly amazing creation of government and free enterprise. Our failing has been when our libertarian government and free enterprise system have gotten in bed together. It’s a marriage made in hell, crony capitalism where money and power is given to people drunk on the rewards and ready to prod the masses with a class warfare message branded in fairness and reeking of social justice that soaks those evil rich… You know, the bankers and business people who actually have been honest that the bankers and politicians who are lying to you want to distract you with.
It couldn’t be much simpler to cut off this fat cat wealthy Washington DC money grubbing politician and their big money friends. Simply turn on them with pitchforks and torches whenever they combine any word with fairness or justice. You can be sure when they say that they are trying to divide us to be led off to support their grab for more power and more of our money.
Just say no to fairness.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 1:07 AM and is filed under social commentary.
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Both comments and pings are currently closed.
End Fairness Now
I’m getting more and more agitated. There are two words that are absolutely murdered by propagandists today. Those words are fairness and justice. Now I believe in justice and I believe in equal opportunity. While I don’t believe life is fair or we should expect it to be I know that any time any word is compounded with fairness or justice than it means the opposite. Hey, if you haven’t noticed the most common naming scheme in the world for a bad idea is to name it the opposite. Look at the stimulus bill. We were told unemployment would not go above 8% if we did it and would go close to 10% if we didn’t. It went to 10% and now those same people (Christina Romer) are saying it will hover in the 9s. Excuse the aside, she just said she was totally wrong last time, big surprise for someone who never left the halls of academia to really understand economic factors like why companies do or don’t hire. Just an aside, $1T out of the private sector did more harm that good and I can document and debate easily.
Getting back to fairness and justice. Here’s the simple concept. Let’s start with what is fair. Is it fair that you start out clueless, get acne, get dumped and made a fool of, struggle to get by and just about the time you figure life out your aches and pains signal that your probably most of the way to the grave? In case you’re in your 20s or 30s and your eyes are glazing over I’ll just tell you the answer. No! Life is not fair. If any two people could get everything they wanted out of a deal then half the marriages today wouldn’t end in divorce. Rule one of fairness, life isn’t fair. So that leaves two choices. One choice is to figure out how life works. Let’s say we were to talk gambling. Casinos have a several percent advantage. What does that mean? It means over time you are going to bleed cash until it’s all gone. It’s statistics. Now let’s look at a fair way to deal with this. First the rational way. Don’t gamble… unless you can buy a casino. Now we have adapted to an unfair world with no lose propositions. Now for the irrational way. Complain incessantly as you lose all your money, get drunk and ruin your life. It’s not fair, is it?
Now let’s take our unfair casino model a little further. Let’s say you instead legislate that casinos have to flip their margins and pay a small percentage. That means the longer you play the more you make. There is a problem though. Casinos didn’t get rich being stupid, so now they are doomed to go out of business. So let’s take the richest gamblers and give them different odds in the casino so they pay a lot more and keep the casinos afloat. Sound fair? Well, not really, but let’s call it casino-fairness anyway. It’s fair because we should be able to go to a casino just like rich people, but while they can afford to go to lose money we can’t. That’s not fair. Now it’s fair, but it’s also gotten more popular and the casino could go broke so we need to up the percentage that the rich guys pay. Now all we need is someone, say a high government mucky muck to say that it’s the patriotic duty of those rich people to step of and pay their share. Fair enough?
I’m going out on a limb here and saying that you think my rich person funded casino is not only stupid but really not very fair. The question is whether you are okay with getting the Mafia to hold a gun to some rich guys head and make him spend the money so you can win yours. Well, are you OK with that? The funny thing is my casino example is a lot like the US tax system. Almost all federal taxes are paid by the upper 10% and the bottom 50% not only don’t pay but get money back. in fact it’s approaching 60%. However that merry go round is about to spin out of control because the vast majority of money in this country is in the hands of the middle class. Oh yeah. We’re getting just about all we can out of high earners and businesses and if we took 100% of everything the top 10% earners make we could only run the country a few months. Oops!
So getting back to fairness, how about tax-fairness? What does that mean? We have a progressive tax, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with progress other than stifling it. Progressives are economically descended from Marxists. Try this on. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. Great president? No, the same guy who said the duty of the lessor races was to die. No, not Hitler, Karl Marx. It really comes down to what you want to equalize. I choose opportunity, Marx chose outcomes. If nobody can have a better outcome than anybody else then you have to ask yourself a question about the person living on the street… Is it possible they might actually be there by choice for reasons we can’t understand? It may seem an absurd question but it is only pertinent because the only way to have equal outcomes for all is to put everyone at the lowest level. I’ll simplify here. If people got rich by accident poverty would require a concerted effort.
Equality of opportunity is different. It is the level playing field. Being a musician I like to think of Django Reinhardt. I used to read every guitarist I liked credit him as an inspiration. So I dug up some of his music from the 1930s in the Hot Quintet du France. This Gypsy was amazing, but even more so because his left hand was burned in a fire and permanently deformed. Many people said he would never play, and yet he became one of the most influential guitarists ever. Nobody ever talked about giving him some special musical fairness, best deformed guitarist or anything. I have always liked the saying that we are born with an equal opportunity to produce an unequal result.
So getting back to fairness and justice it is any kind of fairness or justice that bring a discoloration of the pure essence of what is just and equitable. What is fair and equitable is that we all pay the same tax rate so that if we make more money we keep the same proportional amount. It’s possible to lose money if you make just enough to hit the top bracket today. I’m willing to make the concession to give those less fortunate a break, but the worst part of fairness is that it never ends. People are finding more and more things that aren’t fair and the government is making more and more laws and regulations to make it fair. In the end we have so many rules and regulations it becomes nearly impossible to comply and more and more expensive. Our tax code and regulation is all about a nanny state nudging or bludgeoning us in the direction they want.
The problem with seeking fairness is it is rooted in a utopian belief and the problem with government and utopia is that you have greedy powerful unaccountable idiots running it. The United States is a truly amazing creation of government and free enterprise. Our failing has been when our libertarian government and free enterprise system have gotten in bed together. It’s a marriage made in hell, crony capitalism where money and power is given to people drunk on the rewards and ready to prod the masses with a class warfare message branded in fairness and reeking of social justice that soaks those evil rich… You know, the bankers and business people who actually have been honest that the bankers and politicians who are lying to you want to distract you with.
It couldn’t be much simpler to cut off this fat cat wealthy Washington DC money grubbing politician and their big money friends. Simply turn on them with pitchforks and torches whenever they combine any word with fairness or justice. You can be sure when they say that they are trying to divide us to be led off to support their grab for more power and more of our money.
Just say no to fairness.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 1:07 AM and is filed under social commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.