I was impressed with Peggy Noonan’s column Saturday in the WSJ. She voiced the frustration of America at the stupidity of government quite clearly. Nothing illustrates the incompetence of government better than the fiasco we encounter every time we go to an airport. She segues half-way through the piece into a dialog of the inanity of American politics today and is equally perspicacious.
The Unfairness of Fairness
Notice the relationship of our position today to the emotional concept of “fairness.” We have abandoned the absolute truth that life isn’t “fair.” We feel, we don’t think, that life should be fair, but it can only be made fair if we ignore realities and the differences between people. Fairness is the underlying concept of Marx. It is the idea that everyone deserves everything that society can provide. It is the principle that all should be leveled if life is to be fair.
Now, watch this piece in which Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) portrays one of the drones of Atlas Shrugged, blithely explaining to us that free markets don’t work and only his interpretation of government can properly allocate the resources produced by individuals so that we insure fairness:
What he is doing there is telling us that he has the yoke to place over us and that we should be glad to accept it for the good of everyone. We won’t let entrepreneurship and hard-work operate freely to determine who gets what. That is unfair. He will, with his cohorts, determine the regulations that will control that. There will be no penalty for the greedy and no reward for the industrious, because that will be unfair.
His language is so much more nuanced than Lenin’s, but the elixir he is selling is not a bit different. Santayana told us about learning the lessons of history and the penalty for failure in that endeavor. Here we see a willful ignoring of the lessons of the 20th Century and the communist experience in nations around the world as he tells us what is economic “truth.”
This is going to get really interesting.
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