“Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not. – Oscar Wilde
Charity has always been considered a virtue. The idea of sharing your blessings with those who are less fortunate is a sign of our higher nature. In recent years, though, the concept of charity has moved from the area of virtue, to that of a responsibility, and most recently to a compulsory mandate. Charity has been redefined as fairness, where it is actually considered unfair for some to have more than others. Charitable giving has become government mandated redistribution, and what were once considered gifts are now considered entitlements. There is no longer personal virtue in providing for those less fortunate, as it is mandatory. There is no longer really even any public virtue in creating the mandates, as redistribution is only what is considered fair, and to be expected. Charity could be looked at as the child who buys a candy bar and breaks off a piece of it for his longing sibling, though the sibling had not contributed to the purchase of it. Fairness would be if the father had purchased the candy and required the two siblings to share it. What we have is some hybrid of the two where the child who contributed nothing is considered entitled to a portion because we all deserve candy, so the father takes a piece from the child who purchased the candy and gives it to the child who had none.
Because charity is voluntary, it is practical and possible for a wealthy man to retain most of his wealth and only share at his discretion a portion with the less fortunate; but once we move to fairness, terms like “income inequality”, and “wealth disparity” arise, and the level of redistribution becomes far less subjective. After all, it is hardly fair if one child has 99% of the candy, while the other has but a taste. Ultimately, if the child is not entitled to all of the candy he has purchased, he is then not entitled to anything more than an equal portion of it, as anything more than that would be arbitrary, and not “fair”.
Having removed virtue from the equation, the equation becomes, simply, an equation. If one percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth, the equation is unbalanced, unfair. The question of how the wealth was obtained is outside the parameters of the equation. The man who has earned his wealth through hard work and wise investment is no more entitled to keep his wealth than those who have obtained it through luck or less than ethical means; and neither are more entitled to that money than the man who, whether by indigence or misfortune, it makes no difference, finds himself impoverished. Our fairness equation is more concerned with simple numbers than the difficult questions of justice. Only when absolute equality is achieved is the equation satisfied, and any who think I exaggerate need only to watch two children trying to split a candy bar “fairly”.
And so I envision the ultimate destination of our current orientation, the balancing of the equation, the culmination of fairness… the progressive paradise. No longer would the wealthiest one percent possess all the money; it would be forcibly re-distributed to the less fortunate. Hurrah, you say? Remember if you will, that the progressive vision is a global one. If you earn more than $34,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of wage earners globally, and it is your money we will be taking. Of course, for ultimate fairness we will need to reduce your annual income to the median annual global income of $1,125, so that we can bring others up to that level.
Of course that is just the beginning of fairness. Other benefits that you may accrue must be shared equally. If you win the lottery, you will be required to relinquish all but an equal share of it, to be fair to others. I suppose people would not be motivated to buy lottery tickets then, and we do need that money for education, so we will need an individual mandate to require people to participate weekly in the lottery… it can be enforced by the IRS. Also, you can hardly be allowed to keep your big house while others are languishing in shacks and shanties. We will need to sell those, along with your fine cars, big screen T.V.s, boats, camps, furniture, guns, snowmobiles, and whatever else your ill-begotten 1% wealth has afforded you. It’s unclear how to sell any of it when nobody is earning more than $1,225 a year, so it may be that the government will need to simply confiscate it and work out an elaborate time share system whereby everyone can enjoy what once was only yours. That will involve opening the borders, so that those in more impoverished countries can travel here to do their stint in your former home, and of course you will need to travel to their country to do your stint in their shack. You remember forced busing don’t you? All that traveling will need to be paid for somehow, so we may need to take a travel tax from your meager salary. Actually, if everything is equal, there really isn’t any need for money. The government will take everything you have and give back to you everything you need (less an administrative cut, of course… someone has to pay for all this bureaucracy). Oh, I know what you’ll say, that no one will have an incentive to work or be productive if everyone gets the same… but I think most people like to work hard, don’t you? And just in case, the government would be there to nudge them a bit, should that become necessary. In fact, children could be taken at an early age to determine their aptitudes and develop them to be productive, that would keep them from choosing an easy career path just because they had no ambition, and preselection would ensure that all society’s needs would be met without interference from personal choices.
Clearly, we’ve only scratched the surface. Why should you have smarter children than me, or a more beautiful wife, let’s share. If I can’t be made more healthy, then you need to be made less healthy, why should you be allowed to live longer than I? I am losing my hair, why should you be allowed to keep yours, that’s not fair! Why does only one team get to have LeBron James play for them? He should be rotated… Hey wait, if LeBron can play in the NBA, why can’t I… not fair.
IMHO: I apologize for getting a little silly there. Sometimes it helps to venture beyond emotions and extend an argument to its rational, if absurd, conclusions to elucidate the fallacy in the reasoning. Ultimately, life is seldom fair, and it is never equal. Diversity is the way of the Universe, and we fight a fool’s battle to try to level the landscape to where all are equal in all things. Human virtue is the most powerful tool for good that we have beneath heaven. To attempt to replace it with government action because sometimes virtue falls short, is like using the existence of rainy days to justify replacing the sun with fluorescent lights. Charity is legislated, it is renamed fairness, and the removal of free will from charity eliminates the satisfaction of giving from the giver, and the sense of personal gratitude from the recipient. Gone is the brotherhood of giving from an open and loving hand; replaced with grumbling at the crippling level of taxes exacted from us. Gone is the sense of knowing that in times of trouble others are sharing your burden, not just with their wallets, but with their hearts. What was once evidence that we are more than animals has been lost as we become dogs forced to share our scraps by the tip of our master’s whip.
