Politics

The Cult of Fairness

Jun. 4, 2012 1:59pm

Don Rasmussen is a writer and a political consultant providing campaign technology and strategic analysis to Constitutional Republican candidates. He earned his BA in Political Economy and Latin America Studies from the University of Washington before moving on to a Masters in Political Management from George Washington University. He has staffed or advised on two presidential campaigns and over a dozen congressional races as well as organizing The Rally for the Republic, the conservative counter-convention to the 2008 Republican National Convention, which helped launch the TEA Party movement. Today he lives in Austin where he is working on his first book, Diaspora: Why We Leave, a study of the economic and political motivations of Americans living abroad.

I want to kill you.  You want to live.  Let’s compromise; I’ll cut off your arms and you play dead. Ah, compromise. Fairness has been achieved, right? Wait, you say you don’t want your arms cut off?  Well now you’re just being an obstructionist. Doesn’t America deserve better than that kind of blind partisanship. I’m trying to be fair, so I’m good. You’re selfishly trying to stop progress to protect your personal interests, which makes you evil.

Obviously I am making an extreme analogy, but I follow the same logical process to arrive at my conclusion that our politicians and media use persistently.  Unfortunately, you can see that this logic is undermined by a fatal flaw; it’s at war with reality.

The premise at its heart is fundamentally wrong; fairness is not an inherent good.  In fact, it doesn’t even exist except as a conception of a presumed ideal for human nature, a higher value that we should seek in order to achieve some aspect of our journey to personal progress and societal evolution.

Grand designs and evolutionary platitudes aside, life in nature was described by Thomas Hobbes as “nasty, brutish, and short.” In his mind, even the most oppressive and vile government was preferable to an existence in nature which is capricious, merciless, and indifferent to suffering. Men therefore form governments to preserve themselves from that miserable existence, not out of a desire to “even the playing field”.  In fact, the modern conception of fairness is little more than one of the many bad ideas to come out of the Romantic era which saw nature as benign, genteel, and poetic.

It is important to distinguish between fairness and equity; the important distinctions being measurability and consent. Equity is achieved by consent. If I negotiate a contract with a vendor, we both seek advantage, but we achieve consensus when we agree on terms that are beneficial to each of us and acceptable to the other.  Moreover, the terms have metrics, totals, and quantities of some measurable value to assure that the contract is followed and the parties are satisfied that equity is maintained. We would each say that the deal is fair, but if it is a contract to slaughter livestock, an outside animal rights group would claim it is profoundly unfair.

That’s because fairness is qualitative. It is not measured with a calculator, but with feelings. The danger of using it as a measure of objective things in the real world is that it is different to each person who is applying it so no consensus can form around any objective standard. The goal post can and will be constantly moving. That same quality does, however, make fairness a great rhetorical weapon for demagogues and charlatans.

This is why every time a journalist or commentator tries to pin a liberal down on what constitutes “paying your fair share,” they respond with, well, demagoguery and charlatanism. If fairness were objectively defined, they could never again use it as a weapon to smear their opponents and claim moral high ground while conceding nothing in the debate.  In other words it’s a cheap way to look moral and reasonable without actually possessing morality or reasonableness.

Fairness is an empty vessel.  Merely deferring to “what is fair” allows the listener to fill that space with their own perception of what is fair to them.  Since the person making the argument obviously “gets” the listener, they (or their policy) deserve support.  In this, fairness becomes a mechanism to short cut critical thinking and analysis, and head straight to the ego; the surest route to a voter’s heart

Injecting fairness into debates about budgets, allocations of public goods, or federal regulations is completely inappropriate and mischievous. It is done to distract from measurable, knowable and objective quantities, replacing them in the public debate with feelings of petty bitterness and self-righteous indignation.

The next time a politician or talking head starts spouting off about fair shares and everyone carrying their load, question the premise. Ask yourself what that means, what are the implications, and then carry the argument to its natural conclusion.

What is the logical end of fairness in a progressive tax code?  Taking 100 percent from everyone that those in power deem to have enjoyed an “unfair” benefit. You know, like what they did in places like Cambodia and Russia. In fact in Cambodia, it became “unfair” to have a higher than average IQ or to live in a city or to have a college education.  So in the interest of fairness, they were murdered to the last child. Rousseau would be so proud.

When you build your public life on subjective standards, it is the standards of the powerful that you will find yourself living or dying by.  This is the rule of man and the cult of fairness is the mechanism by which those that lack the merit to achieve their own ends act instead to deprive the industrious and responsible of theirs.

Comments (4)

  • WASGAD
    Jun. 16, 2012 at 1:23am

    Don, very good analysis, and very prescient in light of Obama’s self-righteous attempt on June 15 to justify his unilateral immigration amnesty decision. He explained how he could do such an unconstitutional thing with the reason, “It’s the right thing to do.” Why does he get to decide for us all what the right thing to do is? Our form of government was set up to guard against such mischief, putting checks and balances and three branches of government in place, for the very reason that in many cases, we Americans do not agree about what the right thing to do is. The founders knew that giving one leader the power to steer us in a certain direction by his sole notion of what is the right thing to do is nothing less than despotism. Life is just not that simple when trying to figure out the best path (the “right thing”) for a nation of millions of people to take. This is certainly the case with something as complex as immigration. In this instance, Obama was effectively doing what you decry in your article – telling us – not discussing with us, not submitting something for debate and discussion – but TELLING US what was fair and not fair, then unilaterally trying to force on us a policy that will affect millions, and then leaving without taking any questions. This is tyranny. Our form of government, our form of society simply does not work that way. THAT is not the right thing to do!

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    WASGAD  
  • patmcel
    Jun. 6, 2012 at 12:46pm

    Fair is Pres. Obama’s imaginary friend. Only he can see it and when he talks about it, the public sees what is close by and assumes that is the fair he keeps taking about.

    Report this comment

    patmcel  
  • The Third Archon
    Jun. 5, 2012 at 12:11am

    “Obviously I am making an extreme analogy”
    No, actually, you are not making any analogy at all.

    But good try.

    Report this comment

    The Third Archon  
  • Gwendolynn
    Jun. 4, 2012 at 11:40pm

    Well said. Thank you.

    Report this comment

    Gwendolynn  

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