The Equality Stupidity.

Vic Biorseth, Tuesday, June 28, 2011
http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

The Equality Stupidity is born of the fact that the world, and life itself, is just unfair. The natural elements do not automatically arrange themselves into the things that we need for our survival or for our pleasure and enjoyment. People come in all varieties and all abilities, and in all disabilities, mental and physical conditions, and none of them are the same. That’s just the way it is.

This seeming “unfairness” of everything and everyone has been capitalized on repeatedly through history by various Revolutionaries, who primarily came in two varieties: those dreamers who actually sought to make the world more fair, and those sly ones who sought to capitalize on the unfairness problem to personally become more powerful.

The sly equality schemers easily recruit the idealistic dreamers of equality, and together they convince people who should know better that equality is not only possible, but necessary for society to achieve, at some cost. Tender-hearted sympathetic people are easily swayed away from common sense and practicality into a negotiated or compromised position of working for the cause of the Equality Stupidity in some small area of life, such as wealth, or food, or shelter, or education, etc.

Does the word Redistribution come to mind?

Wealth Redistribution may be the single most stupid item within the entire greater Equality Stupidity. This Marx-inspired and Marxist-reinforced incredibly stupid view of wealth insists that wealth is fixed forever, represented by the image of a fixed, permanent ”Pie of Wealth,” almost all of which is owned by a very few people, with only a small portion, or mere crumbs, owned by the vast majority of people.

Of course, wealth is not fixed. It is not static, but dynamic. It is created, and it is destroyed; it goes up and down, radically. Wealth changes hands. Wealth is amassed, and wealth is squandered. People produce wealth; governments only consume it. When you take wealth from the people who create it or earn it, they generally stop creating it or earning it, because at some point it stops being worth the effort. So, when you start redistributing it, sooner or later you will run out of it. The vision of wealth as a fixed pie is just plain stupid.

Once upon a time a man had to do everything necessary to survive and prosper. Shortly thereafter some men began to specialize at doing certain tasks, in exchange for other people doing or providing whatever had to be neglected. One man made arrows, another stopped making arrows and paid for his arrows with meat. Once specialization began, a man produced more of whatever he produced than he or his family needed, and the excess over what was needed was recognized by everyone as “wealth.” Essentially, that is the same thing we all do today, although specialization has advanced to the nth degree, and for the most part we use currency rather than barter. There is nothing new under the sun.

Where he is free to do so, a man finds a way to make money and support himself and his family, or, he hires himself out for wages, in the manner of the Prodigal Son after he had squandered his inherited fortune. Today the Equality Stupidity has modified our thinking to such a degree that when a man hires himself out for wages (takes a job) his employer automatically becomes his Mommy. The employer has to pay for worker’s compensation in case the empoyee gets a booboo on the job, unemployment compensation in case he gets laid off, his Social Security, his health care insurance, and in some cases his employer has to negotiate with his union regarding his hours, his quality of work, his pay, his benefits, etc., etc., etc.

Who’s driving the bus here? How did the employee get to be such a helpless dependent? How did the employer get to be so rigorously controlled? The employee has to be molly-coddled, nursed, spoon-fed and led around by the nose, and the employer is seen to be absolutely responsible for nearly every aspect of the employee’s life.

Nevertheless, the Equality Stupidity persists. And it insists that, if we took all the fixed wealth of the Catholic Church, and/or the Mormon Church, and/or the Hindu religion, etc., we could feed the whole world with the proceeds. And, for the sake of argument, let’s say that that might be true, even disregarding the obvious logistics problems involved. The very next day, what you would have is a world in need of being fed again, and you would have an impoverished Catholic Church, and/or Mormon Church, and/or Hindu religion, etc. So where would the world’s next meal come from?

Big shot Democrat politicians claim that we have no real economic problem today in America, because there is plenty of money available – it’s just held by the wrong people. If we took it from all those rich people (none of whom are ever identified as Democrats, of course) we would have enough money to take care of our national debt this year. Note that they don’t want to talk about next year’s payment.

This is about as smart as the Democrat idea that we need to raise the debt ceiling so that we can borrow enough to make another payment on what we previously borrowed. See? The answer to our debt problem is to continuously increase our debt. Problem solved. They also insist that we need to increase our national revenue (i.e., our taxes) when our national revenue has never been higher. It always goes up, never down. We don’t have a revenue problem, and we never had a revenue problem in our entire history.

It’s the spending, stupid.

Equal Primary Education is another branch of the Equality Stupidity. Once upon a time I thought that a major part of our primary education problem began with the first truancy laws; but then I discovered that the whole notion of “public education” came out of the Communist Manifesto. It is, or should be, crystal clear to any objective observer that public education is designed and intended to prepare the student to “get a job” rather than find to a way to make money to support himself on his own. Public school is designed to train up obedient, dependent little workers, to become part of a vast bureaucratic system.

You can look around just about any public school classroom and see the ones who would rather not be there, the ones who should not be there, and who would probably not be there if the setting were a private school classroom. I don’t even want to talk about the teachers who should not be there, and who would not be there if the setting were a private school classroom. The giant sums of tax dollars that are wasted on public schools are touted by Democrats to be “investment” dollars, because education is an “investment in the future.” See?

The more dollars “invested”, the lower the test scores get. You can track it. Of course there are the lottery scams in various states that claim to be paying for public education, although that just never seems to matter when it’s time for the Democrats to increase the tax revenues for the public school “investment” of the moment. Poorer grades are a reason to invest more, not less, in the failing system. The reason the little dears can’t seem to learn is that we haven’t invested enough in them. Throw money on it; that’s how to fix the situation.

Equal College Education is the next branch of the Equality Stupidity. In early America, the typical family could afford to send one, or none, of it’s children on to higher education. It would be the most scholastically gifted, upon whom the family would pin its hopes and make extra sacrifices to pay the way as best they could. Less than one percent of primary school graduates would go on to college or university, and they were the best of the best. There was no question that they were a cut above other students when they went off to advanced education, and there was a definite risk involved, because all who went to college were not going to make the grade.

There were always scholarships available from educational institutions for the student who was well qualified scholastically but of poor economic means. It was not easy to get into college, and it was not easy to stay in college, and it was not easy to graduate. College graduates were truly good scholars.

That was then; this is now.

Today, if you’ve got a kid, you are expected to find the way to get him through college. It’s like a social mandate. It doesn’t matter how smart or how dumb he is; he has to go to college. It has more or less become a social rite of passage. I recently heard a news commentator dramatically reporting on the horror of the fact that some 50% of American parents could not afford to send all their children to college. Oh, the horror of it! Not to worry, though, because we now have this wonderful student loan program, in which the would-be college student puts himself into horrendous debt in order to get through his four years of partying and get his rubber-stamp degree. You may have read about the student loan industry that our Dear Leader Comrade Obama recently took over.

Colleges and universities today have become paper-mills, processing sub-par students though sub-par classes for money. They don’t make any money if they don’t take in lots of students and crank out lots of graduates. It shows. I know, and I’ll bet you know, college graduates out of reputable schools who are incapable of putting together a proper English sentence.

College today has prepared the graduate to get a good job, with one of the good employers, for good pay. It doesn’t even cross the minds of most of them to simply “find a way to make money and support themselves.” The overwhelming majority goes out and tries to get a job. They just became a higher level of dependent-worker than the non-college graduate worker-dependent, but there is no real difference between them. For the most part, they don’t even see it; they’ve been told most of their lives that “you ain’t going anywhere worth going without that sheep-skin, fella.”

The sense of individual independence has been educated out of them.

We are not all equal; never were, never will be. Life is not fair, and the world is not fair. But here’s the rub: actually achieving total equality would be far, far more unfair, for it would mean the absolute end of all independence, and the end of all liberty of man. We cannot be both equal and free to act in our own self-interest. The notions of equality and liberty are mutually exclusive; either one increases only at the expense of the other.

The Russian Communists were convinced (or convinced their underlings) that all men were equal, and that any man could do anything any other man could do. Nonsense, of course, but it was believed by many. You could take a beggar and make him into a brain surgeon. A clerk could run a country. An engineer could dig a ditch, and a chemist could be made into a farmer.

With movements of whole populations for the purposes of the state, in accordance with the Communist Manifesto, people were moved about to achieve a population distribution of use to the leaders. Country folk were moved to the cities into labor camps for factory workers. Other populations were moved into farm communes to do farm work, although they had never farmed in their lives. Most of the farmers and landowners had be killed off in the “Revolution” that took over all land, property and capital.

The result, of course, was famine and economic disaster in which millions died. It turned out that anyone could not necessarily do anything; but the leaders stubbornly persisted through increasing death and catastrophe, until populations existed in factories and on farms who could survive; but Russia never prospered and neither did any of the people. Marxists still believe that any person can be trained to do anything. Marxists are just dumber than a box of doorknobs.

Here’s what Mises said about all this equality, and the difference between the slavery of bureaucracy and liberty:

The classical expression of the clerk’s conceit and their fanciful belief that their own subaltern jobs are a part of the entrepreneurial activities and congeneric with the work of their bosses is to be found in Lenin’s description of the “control of production and distribution” as provided by his most popular essay. Lenin himself and most of his fellow conspirators never learned anything about the operation of the market economy and never wanted to. All they knew about capitalism was that Marx had described it as the worst of all evils. They were professional revolutionaries. The only sources of their earnings were the party funds which were fed by voluntary and more often involuntary – extorted – contributions and subscriptions and by violent “expropriations.” But, before 1917, as exiles in Western and Central Europe, some of the comrades occasionally held subaltern routine jobs in business firms. It was their experience – the experience of clerks who had to fill out forms and blanks, to copy letters, to enter figures into books and to file papers – which provided Lenin with all the information he had acquired about entrepreneurial activities.

Lenin correctly distinguishes between the work of the entrepreneurs on the one hand, and that of “the scientifically educated staff of engineers, agronomists and so on” on the other hand. These experts and technologists are mainly executors of orders. They obey under capitalism the capitalists, they will obey under socialism “the armed workers.” The function of the capitalists and entrepreneurs is different; it is, according to Lenin, “control of production and distribution, of labor and products.” Now the tasks of the entrepreneurs and the capitalists are in fact the determination of the purposes for which the factors of production are to be employed in order to serve in the best possible way the wants of the consumers – i.e., to determine what should be produced, in what quantities and in what quality. However this is not the meaning that Lenin attached to the term “control.” As a Marxian he was unaware of the problems the conduct of production activities has to face under any imaginable system of social organization: the inevitable scarcity of the factors of production, the uncertainty of future conditions for which production has to provide, and the necessity of picking out from the bewildering multitude of technological methods suitable for the attainment of the ends already chosen those which obstruct as little as possible the attainment of the ends – i.e., those with which the cost of production is the lowest. No allusion to these matters can be found in the writing of Marx and Engels. All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally had sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording and ciphering. Thus, he declares, that “accounting and control” are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. But “accounting and control,” he goes on saying, have already been “simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.”

Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.
– The Anti-Capitalistic Mendality; Ludwig Von Mises; Libertarian Press; 1956; Pp 23-25.

And furthermore –

There have been in the course of history many movements asking with enthusiasm and fanaticism for a reform of social institutions. People fought for their religious convictions, for the preservation of their civilization, for freedom, for self-determination, for the abolition of serfdom and slavery, for fairness and justice in court procedure. Today millions are fascinated by the plan to transform the whole world into a bureau, to make everybody a bureaucrat, and to wipe out any private initiative. The paradise of the future is visualized as an all-embracing bureaucratic apparatus. The most powerful reform movement that history has ever known, the first ideological trend not limited to a section of mankind only but supported by people of all races, nations, religions, and civilization aims at all-round bureaucratization. The post office is the model for the construction of the New Jerusalem. The post-office clerk is the prototype of future man. Streams of blood have been shed for the realization of this ideal.

In this book we are discussion not persons but systems of social organization. We do not mean that the post-office clerk is inferior to anybody else. What must be realized is only that the strait jacket of bureaucratic organization paralyzes the individual’s initiative, while within the capitalist market society and innovator still has a chance to succeed. The former makes for stagnation and preservation of inveterate methods, the latter makes for progress and improvement. Capitalism is progressive, socialism is not. One does not invalidate this argument by pointing out that the Bolshevists have copied various American innovations. So did all oriental peoples. But it is a non sequitur to deduce from this fact that all civilized nations must copy the Russian methods of social organization.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

Against all this frenzy of agitation there is but one weapon available: reason. Just common sense is needed to prevent man from falling prey to illusory fantasies and empty catchwords.
– Bureaucracy; Ludwig Von Mises; Center for Futures Education; 1944; Pp 124-125.

Mises’ words from way back then ring just as true today. The Equality Stupidity still manages to gain ground everywhere.

The American ideal of equality means equality in rights and remedies before the law. Ideally, the lowest ranking floor sweeper stands in equality before the court with any President (unless that President is a Democrat who disregards the law.) The Marxist – anti-American ideal of equality means equality of everything – equality of stuff, equality of ability, equality of work, equality of pay, equality of housing – all of which is quite impossible, of course. But, the Marxists will say, it would be unfair for someone to have or be or achieve more than someone else. And the so-called “moderate” Republican will be willing to compromise and try to negotiate some point between someone having more than others and someone being less capable than others, at the expense of the liberty of man.

Such a form of equality can only be achieved by force, and the only entity legally authorized to use force is government. Thus government needs to grow in sized, scope and power, in the interest of “fairness.”

What can I say? There’s just no nice way to say it. Marxists and “moderates” are just too stupid for words.

And that’s the way it is …

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