What About Fairness?
"Fair" and "fairness" are likely the two of the most abused words in the English language.
The Democrat Party of today excuses crime because they have come to believe that crime and punishment was invented by white elites as a mechanism to keep blacks, other minorities and the poor oppressed. It is a wealth transfer that government in which the government is not involved, so there is nothing to stop or limit it.
Something to keep in mind - the primary reason that the left is pro-crime these days is that crime is essentially a non-governmental street tax on non-criminals.
It is yet another constitutional workaround, something the left is obsessed with doing. Corporations pay in lost revenue and profits, insurance companies pay (sometimes, they are not paying now because theft is now a cost of doing business), and ultimately the consumers pay. It is the people who respect the law and pay for what they get, or they don't get it, who wind up paying through increased prices.
It also meets another political goal, any effort to stop it will be met with cries of racism.
Is that fair?
Of course not.
All of this is keyed to the left’s idea of “fairness” and their belief in redistribution of income and wealth.
Redistribution is the solution, but the method used is the question. Either the free enterprise system can apportion income based on value created or a government can confiscate the national output and then some committee or department will make an arbitrary rationing of that income, seemingly always keeping a slice off the tot for themselves.
Where the free market has proven to be the greatest way to increase incomes for all economic classes, government confiscation and redistribution never works in the long term. No entity can divide an economy fairly because there are as many definitions of "fairness" as hairs on a head.
What works is when a populace has the tools to earn greater shares of the economy and economic mobility through direct work, innovation, and investment. What works is when the free market distributes wealth based on the creation of value, whether that is performing an hourly job or inventing a product that is wanted, desired, or needed.
When the government actively works to dumb down the populace and inculcate them with impossible cultural and scientific myths, they destroy the will to work, the dignity of work, and the virtue of doing something of value. People then sit back and lament what they should be given rather than focus on ways to get it.
You will no doubt hear a lot about how populism is bad as we go into the 2024 election cycle. What you won’t hear about is the role of the people crying about populism in creating it. Populism rises due to unpopular leaders and governments that are disconnected from the will of the people when the methods of redress the people employ fail.
How does America get back on the path to prosperity?
We repair public schools by implementing vouchers. We implement the British system of higher education where you only advance to university if you have the proven aptitude. We should ramp up education in the trades and increase apprenticeship programs. We should get rid of useless degree programs – no more “gender studies” or “queer studies” degrees, stopping the abuse of the soft sciences. We implement means testing for student loans. We award loans on sliding scales based on the expected return from that degree (no way should a student go $100K in debt for a degree that leads to a minimum wage job pouring coffee). Ending H1-B visa programs (or stopping the replacement of qualified American workers with cheaper immigrant labor). We should shut down rampant illegal immigration and staunch the flow of low skill people only capable of driving down wages. We should seriously consider cutting welfare for those able to work.
That’s just the start, right off the top of my head.
All these ideas cut across the grain of people who are slaves to the idea that more government is the answer to all these problems. More money, more programs, more government control is always their answer; however, the proponents of bigger government can't seem to reason to a logical endpoint - or rather, they can, it is just the point at which they stop reasoning is not the endpoint. Over the years, I have noted how it seems that the American left can only reason themselves to a point of emotional satisfaction, never to a conclusive endpoint.
One of our greatest impediments to change is the people who believe the problem is solved when they throw buckets of money at it and can't comprehend when anyone who does reason to a logical endpoint happens to notice that even after the money's all spent, when the dust of politicization and the storm of insults subsides, the effort may have succeeded in changing the shape or form of the problem, but it remains, often in an even more virulent form.
Government has nothing of its own. That which it has was first taken from someone (or borrowed in their names); therefore, what it gives to one must be taken from someone else.
Any increase in government results in less objective fairness, not more.
One prerequisite, fix the elections.
Less government is always better for the individual.