Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Could Hurt Mary

Harry Frankfurt on the inflationary effect that is likely caused by the government taking money from the rich and redistributing it (only) to the poor:

     The supply of goods available for consumption does not increase, after all, when money is redistributed.  On the other hand, the demand for certain goods by people who were formerly too poor to afford them is very likely to increase.  Thus prices of those goods will probably rise.
     This inflationary pressure will entail a corresponding reduction of consumption, perhaps not by the very rich--who will still have plenty of money with which to cope with the price increases--but by members of an intermediate class, who will be unable to maintain their accustomed level of consumption in the face of higher prices.  The reduction of their standard of living will tend to offset the gain made by the formerly poor.  This trade-off will mean that aggregate utility does not increase.  The aggregate of utility cannot reliably be increased, then, by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.  On Inequality, (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 19-20.

"Make America Great Again!"

Say what you will about Donald Trump (I've said a bit, mostly not in his favor) but his slogan taps into one American sentiment diametrically opposed to another.

The Inegalitarian Sentiment: One should do what one can to make one's country as best as it can be, even if this means that it is better than others.

The Egalitarian Sentiment: Equality is the highest value, so if that means making one's country as mediocre as every other that is fine as long as equality is achieved.

Egalitarianism Ruins Everything

Malcolm Pollack:

Some time ago I commented on a tiny, emaciated female police officer I had seen in Prospect Park. Now we learn that a 33-year-old woman, Rebecca Wax, is to be made a New York City firefighter despite having failed the physical exam.

Fighting fires is not a political or ideological abstraction. Actual fires take place in actual physical buildings, and threaten actual physical property and actual human bodies. Extinguishing them, therefore, and rescuing the lives of those human bodies, requires the movement and control of actual physical resources and equipment, in great haste, under demanding and extremely adverse physical conditions. Many, if not most, of these physical resources are necessarily bulky and heavy. Moreover, firefighters must work as a team, in which every member’s life may depend, at any moment, on the physical ability of any other member. Therefore, as we read in the article linked above:

In the FST exam, probies must breathe through a mask attached to an air tank while carrying up to 50 pounds of gear.

They must climb six flights of stairs, stretch hose lines, raise ladders, perform tasks that simulate breaking doors and pulling down ceilings, and drag dummies through tunnels with no visibility.

They must complete the course in 17 minutes, 50 seconds or less.

However:

Despite many attempts over the Fire Academy’s 18-week training course, Wax completed the test just once — but it took her more than 22 minutes, the source said.

In numerous tries, Wax struggled and was too slow. While fit probies finish with air left in their tanks, she had to stop when hers ran out, the source added.

“She’s in the best shape of her life, and it’s still not good enough,” he said.

But in she goes anyway. Forward!

This pattern of subordinating vitally important standards to the doctrinal absurdities of a secular religion that prohibits all discriminations — even those that are obviously necessary to our own survival — does not confine itself to the merely physical. Earlier this year our Sandinista mayor, Bill deBlasio, agreed to pay a settlement of $98,000,000 for having required aspiring firefighters to pass a test that proved too difficult for many black applicants. Nobody alleged that the test itself contained any race-specific content; it was simply that black applicants couldn’t pass it at the same rate that white applicants did. That this might represent an actually existing statistical disparity between blacks and whites in the cognitive abilities the test sought to measure is, of course, an unspeakable hypothesis, and so the “disparate impact” of the exam can only be proof of — you guessed it — racism. And so the standards will be lowered, and we New Yorkers will be $98m poorer, while our lives and property are put at greater risk.

Thank you, Mayor deBlasio. Thank you, idiotic secular Puritans.

Here is an article about all of this by Cornell statistician William Briggs. (As you read it, be sure to follow the link to this item by Fred Reed.)

The Graduation Day Degree Gap

Unsocial injustice!  Discrimination!

Having a Family/Private Education Are Unfair Advantages

Philosopher Adam Swift knows that having a family gives children an advantage.  But lockstep with progressive ideology hellbent on upsetting traditional values, he follows it to its (il)logical conclusion: for the sake of the egalitarian utopia, we should be concerned about reading bedtime stories to our children because it gives them an unfair advantage; furthermore, private education should be abolished.  This is not the Onion, folks.  This is reality.

Read the entire excerpt::

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’   

‘It’s the children’s interest in family life that is the most important,’ says Swift. ‘From all we now know, it is in the child’s interest to be parented, and to be parented well. Meanwhile, from the adult point of view it looks as if there is something very valuable in being a parent.’ [So instead of abolishing the family...]

‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. [TB: Care to give an argument for that?] So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’

‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.

‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’  [TB: Oh, good, seems we're in excellent hands.  Thanks for pulling us back from the ledge of lunacy.  The rational cutoff, according to our family expert, isn't two but nine.]

As I have noted numerous times on this blog, progressives like Swift conflate ("social") justice with fairness as well as equality.  But justice, fairness, and equality are not the same.  Judgments about fairness and equality necessarily involve making comparisons, whereas judgments about justice need not.  I can judge that I have unjustly given you too little money simply by noting that I have given you less than what I promised for the work that you did irrespective of what anyone else has made. You can judge whether I gave you an unjust grade simply by looking at your work and my rubric in the course syllabus irrespective of whether I gave a fair/equal distribution of grades to the entire class (e.g. everyone including you got a "C").  

Instead of fretting about reading bedtime stories to his children, perhaps Swift should consider reading them this Bible story.

Did Ray Rice's Girlfriend Deserve to be Punched in the Face?

That was the first question that I asked aloud in the room of people watching PC_SPN this summer when I first heard the story.  Does that question shock you?  It shouldn't.  Allow me to explain.

A Reader's Question about Transgender "News"

In response to the previous post Janet Mackiewrites:

I think the reason that Patriarchies world wide oppose gender equality (or what ever they would term "it") is because they need to preserve a  bifurcated world world of distinct opposites in which they define  themselves as the most valuable and therefor the most entitled to power, prestige and preservation.
A world of winners and losers, correct and incorrect, in which they "define" themselves as perfect and the "losers" are defined as throw aways to be taken advantage of by the winners.
If the world is seen as made up multiple continuum, if all humans all DNA are of value equally, then it can't be saint v sinner, male v female, winner v loser, correct v reject etc. can it? 

And ESPN Suspends ANOTHER One....

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/espn-suspends-max-kellerman-inappropriate-conversation-domestic-violence-article-1.1897365

Max Kellerman apparently violated PCSPN's rule that one can talk about Ray Rice only if one throws the book at him, raises no questions about any possible mitigating circumstances ("what are those"?), or mentions slapping one's girlfriend (now wife) 20 years ago in reaction to her slapping him.

Don't liberals think that men and women should be treated exactly the same?  Don't feminists think chivalry an outdated relic of the "Dark (sic) Ages?"

Oh. Wait. I misspoke.

Liberals don't think.  They feel.