{"id":7282,"date":"2012-02-23T09:15:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T17:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=7282"},"modified":"2012-02-25T09:18:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T17:18:39","slug":"the-fairness-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/the-fairness-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018Fairness\u2019 Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thomas
Thomas Sowell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Thomas Sowell –
\nDuring a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration\u2019s tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of \u201cfairness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.<\/p>\n

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more \u201cfair\u201d for others? <\/p>\n

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers \u2014 which it will not \u2014 the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.<\/p>\n

Children born and raised without fathers are a major problem to society and to themselves. There is nothing \u201cfair\u201d about increasing the number of such children.<\/p>\n

A more fundamental problem with the \u201cfairness\u201d issue raised by Beckel and many others is the slippery vagueness of the word \u201cfair.\u201d<\/p>\n

To ask whether life is fair \u2014 either here and now, or at any time or place around the world, over the past several thousand years \u2014 is to ask a question whose answer is obvious. Life has seldom been within shouting distance of fair, in the sense of even approximately equal prospects of success.<\/p>\n

Countries whose politicians have been able to squander ever-larger amounts of a nation\u2019s resources have not only failed to make the world more fair, the concentration of more resources and power in these politicians\u2019 hands has led to results that were often counterproductive at best, and bloodily catastrophic at worst.<\/p>\n

More fundamentally, the question whether life is fair is very different from the question whether a given society\u2019s rules are fair. Society\u2019s rules can be fair in the sense of using the same standards of rewards and punishments for everyone. But that barely scratches the surface of making prospects or outcomes the same.<\/p>\n

People raised in different homes, neighborhoods, and cultures are going to behave differently \u2014 and those differences have consequences. The multiculturalist dogma may say that all cultures are equal, or equally deserving of respect, but treating cultures as sacrosanct freezes people into the circumstances into which they happened to be born, much like a caste system.<\/p>\n

While talk about \u201cfairness\u201d may provide a fig leaf to cover politicians\u2019 naked attempts to grab more and more of the nation\u2019s resources to spend, there is no assurance that raising tax rates on \u201cthe rich\u201d will result in any more tax revenue for the government. High tax rates have too often simply caused wealthy people to put their money into tax-free securities or to send it overseas.<\/p>\n

Four years ago, TV interviewer Charles Gibson pointed out to candidate Barack Obama that raising capital-gains tax rates had on a number of occasions led to less capital-gains tax revenue being collected \u2014 and, conversely, lowering the capital-gains tax rates had on other occasions increased the amount of capital gains revenue collected by the government.<\/p>\n

Obama readily admitted that. But he said that \u201cfairness\u201d justified a higher tax rate on \u201cthe rich.\u201d Yet how does a higher tax rate on paper, without a real increase in the amount of taxes actually collected, promote fairness?<\/p>\n

However, raising tax rates on \u201cthe rich\u201d pays off politically, even if the government loses revenues when the rich put their money into tax shelters.<\/p>\n

High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class-warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates \u2014 or perhaps any taxes at all.<\/p>\n

What is worse than class warfare is phony class warfare. Slippery talk about \u201cfairness\u201d is at the heart of this fraud by politicians seeking to squander more of the nation\u2019s resources.<\/p>\n

HT: NRO<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Thomas Sowell – During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration\u2019s tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of \u201cfairness.\u201d He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[133,15,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftist-hypocrisy","category-moral-issues","category-totalitarian-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}