Thomas Sowell : A Personal Inequity - Townhall.com
Very fun to read use of basketball as an analogy for inequality. With some excellent points, one of the first being that "equalize" means "everyone move toward the lowest".
Very fun to read use of basketball as an analogy for inequality. With some excellent points, one of the first being that "equalize" means "everyone move toward the lowest".
The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward. If the government were to spend some of its stimulus money trying to raise my basketball ability level to that of Michael Jordan, it would be an even bigger waste of money than most of the other things that Washington does.While it is certainly true that if there is any economic freedom at all, we can't all be at the top, it is also unfortunately true that the vast majority of us CAN end up at the BOTTOM in a failing totalitarian system. When we make the grossly unnatural condition of "equality" an objective, rather than the broad set of naturally selected objectives -- falling in love, raising a family, having a nice dinner with a good beverage, gaining knowledge, earning what we individually think is a "decent income" -- given each of our radically different ideas of what sorts of gratification delays, time/effort trade offs, etc go into that, it is highly likely that our "equality optimized system" ends up being radically less productive than the one that was "individually optimized".
Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes-- and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.
