So, there’s this guy who is walking the aisles of the grocery store. He’s clearly mentally retarded and is greeting everybody loudly and socially inappropriately. The store workers who pass by say hello to him by name. He’s clearly well known to them. I’m probably paying for his groceries, indirectly. I have no problem with that.
Other people, on the other hand, do.
“If he can’t work for enough money to make a living,” they say, “he should just die.”
“But he didn’t ask to be born intellectually challenged. It’s not fair to give someone the death penalty for something they had no control over!”
“Life’s not fair,” they say snidely, and move on.
But why not? I mean, it isn’t as if we don’t have the resources to do so. Other less wealthy countries do it, after all — they try to make life as fair as possible, so regardless of where you start intellectually or economically, you can achieve some level of success. You go to someplace like, say, Norway, which has more millionaires per capita than the United States, you still find that they’re very committed to egalitarianism. Everybody gets an equal chance at a quality education. Everybody gets an equal chance at quality healthcare. Everybody gets an equal chance at working for a living wage, regardless of where they started or the limits of their ability. Life isn’t perfectly fair, of course. Robbie (the mentally challenged guy above) will still never be a CEO, he just doesn’t have the mental make-up for that, and thus he’ll never earn the 10x of base salary that a CEO might earn in Norway. But he will be well paid in his janitorial job, and will retire at age 67, or upon being unable to continue his duties due to disability, with a full pension for the rest of his life, just like the guy who is an executive. If life isn’t fair, it’s at least fairer than it would be under the “he should just die” system.
Life’s not fair. It never will be. But it could be made fairer. If we cared. So saying “Life’s not fair” isn’t an answer. It’s a cop-out, an excuse for childishness and selfishness along the lines of the child who monopolizes the sandbox and hits the other children with the toy dump truck if they try to play in the sandbox too, and deserves to be called exactly that.
– Badtux the Fairness Penguin
I don’t want what you said to be taken wrongly. I totally agree with you.
Can you explain what is wrong with the idea of Socialism, from what I read it seems to be a better system at least in that ‘all’ are taken care of.
w3ski
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It depends upon what you mean by socialism. It seems that there’s a lot of types who think that “socialism” means “the government redistributes income!”, which isn’t what socialism means at all. Redistributing of income from the less competitive to the more competitive is what capitalism does by its nature (remember my little mind experiment a few weeks back?). Redistributing of income back to the less competitive from the more competitive is what functioning democracies do, because it’s really the only way to keep life bearable i.e. “fair” for the less competitive once the capitalist redistribution of income makes life difficult for more than 50% of the population. But none of this is socialism, this is capitalism and democracy.
Socialism means that the government owns part of the economy, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the part of the economy is one where choice doesn’t really matter. For example, health insurance. I don’t give a fuck what health insurance pays my medical bills, whether it’s publicly or privately owned, I just care that it pays my medical bills. Beyond that there’s a whole spectrum of things where sometimes choice matters but to lesser or greater extent. For example, choice matters greatly for cars. A government owned car industry gives you a choice of buying a Trabant or a Trabant, which sucks if what I want is a Jeep Wrangler. But does choice of school matter? If so, why do all of the nations that outperform the US on global comparisons of schools do so with a higher number of children attending public schools than in the US, and with a single national curriculum rather than a multitude of choice of curriculums? I think we could debate that one for a long time.
But anyhow, back to the story. Norway does have a socialized health care system (all doctors are employees of the State, etc.), and a socialized educational system. But what makes it a “fair” place for most people is a) a society committed to fairness, b) government regulations regarding hiring, benefits, wages, etc. that are calculated towards that goal rather than towards providing benefit to the rich, c) a society-wide commitment towards equality of funding and equality of access for healthcare and education, and d) income redistribution programs that help cushion times between jobs and handle retirement. None of which is socialism (you can do the equality of funding/access for health care and education without socialism, doing it via socialism was a choice Norway made), it’s just what a functioning democracy does in a capitalist economy if it wants to make things as fair as possible for everybody so that whether you start off poor or start off rich, you have as equal a chance as possible (within the limits of your intellectual potential) to get ahead.
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Back before the Age of Reagan, Jimmy Carter mused that life was not fair.
He had the fecal matter hit the rotating blades on that one, with lots of R’s making fun of him, like they didn’t know what he was talking about.
Carter was trying his best to make things better for all, but he was meeting plenty of resistance of the R’s-but at least in his day, some of them were sane and got it. No telling what the R’s would do to Obama for stealing their current favorite cruel phrase. Some Congress critters need wolves in their districts who have a taste for pork.
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It bothers me that so many of the most heartless politicians proclaim to be “Christians”. They seem to have No Concept of ‘help your brother’. It’s like they never really read all of that book they hide behind.
w3ski
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Way back when Ike was still vertical, most republicans gave a shit about their fellow man.Then came Nixon, Goldwater, and St Ron who pushed the empathy meter to the “screw the poors” default position the Rs now hold (with a lot of co-operation from their media allies and corporate dems). They want to forget that 99.9% of their lot was luck. Luck to be born here in the US in this era with all its advantages, especially if you’re white. I’m sure it will get a lot worse for the worst off before it gets better. I just hope I live to see it before I get cooked to a crackly crunch…..
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