I upset a student the other day; she accused me of being unfair. I agreed with her. I tried to make it one of those teachable moments by pointing out that quite often life is not fair, so she should learn to deal with it. She was not impressed with my pedagogical technique. As she left the room angrily, I asked her to please make an appointment with my dean so we three could work something out.
I do not commonly have students leave my presence in such a disturbed state, but I am very familiar with the attitude that life owes everyone a fair shake. When someone complains about the lack of fairness in a situation I usually respond that life is not fair. It is not fair that a family is expecting a fatally deformed child which will die almost as soon as it is born. It is not fair that six people were shot dead in Tucson recently. It is not fair that thousands of children are missing a parent who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq or Afghanistan. It is not fair that millions of Americans are out of work because of an economic bubble that burst. (Was that Chinese eco-terrorism?)
There are countless examples of life’s unfairness. What irks me is the people who want to gain some benefit from achieving what they call fairness. Megan Kelly had a guest on her Fox News program this afternoon who decried the unfairness of our current income tax system. She said, naively, that if only the top one percent of people – the really rich people – would pay their fair share our economic woes would be over. First of all, she is just misinformed (or she is misrepresenting.) The last time I saw the figures, the richest five percent of taxpayers pay over fifty percent of all taxes. The poorest forty percent pay almost no taxes at all. If there is unfairness here, it is that the rich pay such a disproportionately large amount.
Regardless of her complete misrepresentation of the facts, it remains a fact that she believes rich people owe the rest of us something; she believes in the redistribution of wealth. She is not alone; most of the progressive Democrat politicians in the US believe in redistribution. President Obama said during his campaign for office that he does. What is national health care but a plan to make people who have money pay for the medical costs of those who cannot afford it. The thinking is that it is not fair that some people can afford insurance and some cannot, or that some can afford medical care and some cannot.
Either way, the underlying assumption is that everyone is owed medical care as a right. I have argued against that in this space before. All I will say about it now is that I cannot find health care anywhere in the US Constitution. Nor can I find unemployment benefits, or low cost housing, or food stamps or farm subsidies or corporate welfare or any of the hundreds of other government redistribution programs with which we are saddled. The fact is our founding fathers would be aghast at what the federal government is undertaking, this vast wealth redistribution scheme.
Read William Bradford if you dare. He describes an attempt by the early settlers in Plymouth to function as a wealth equalized system, otherwise known as socialism or communism. The community almost starved to death before they converted to a capitalistic system where individual effort was rewarded proportionately. “If a man will not work, let him not eat,” sounds cruel, but those words were spoken by the Apostle Paul to believers.
From the Genesis creation mandate to “dress, till and keep the earth,” down through the so-called Protestant work ethic, Christianity preaches one message. It also tells us that there will always be poor among us. Poor is a relative term implying that others will be rich. It is a fact of life – an unfair fact to be sure. But where is it written that life will be fair? Our founders declared that all men had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are not being true to either the Scripture or the Constitution when we try to say all men have the right to equal outcomes – equal opportunities yes – equal outcomes no.
Well put, I completely agree. I grew up with the Canadian health care system. I watched my father come home from a very sressful, difficult job (crane operator in an oil manufacturing plant) every day to only then watch his face drop as he opened his pay cheque and half of it was gone to taxes. His money was not only used to pay health care costs for those that cannot afford it, but for those that mainly take advantage of it.
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