Myths Of Socialism #5

The Myth of Fairness

The words “Fair” and “Fairness” are among the commonest words used by the Left to control debate. They are very powerful. Most people would like to believe that they are fair-minded and have a sense of justice and fair-play. Certainly unfair treatment gets a person’s hackles up and provokes an indignant response. This is particularly so in New Zealand, where we value a certain equality amongst our citizens and are easily riled when favoritism or racism produces an unfair result. Unfortunately, when the word is used in the political context, particularly by the Left, it is mostly used to obscure the debate and produce (ironically) an unfair result.

Take, for instance, the age-old “Fair pay for <insert unionised workforce here>”. Immediately, the employer is at a disadvantage as s/he is unable to use words like “profitability”, “affordability” or “viability” without risking the appearance of greed and veniality. It is not possible to discuss whether a company can truly afford such a pay rise because all argument will revolve around the “fairness” of the wage packet rather than the financial state of the company. Attempting to express the viability of an offer in terms of it being unfair to the business is, of course, doomed to ridicule. After all, the employer is the one making money out of the business. It is practically impossible to portray a profit margin as something that is “fair”, despite the business owner taking the majority of the original risk of start up and despite the fact that his/her investment could generate interest.

This rather strange situation has developed from the fact that there are two definitions to the word “fair” operating here. The commonest definition may be expressed as “equality of achievement should produce equality of result“. Should two students produce a similar result at NCEA, one would expect them both to be accepted into university, assuming the university uses no other criteria (such as an entrance interview, as in medicine). Should one student be rejected because they were poor, this would be considered (quite rightly) manifestly unfair. This is what the majority of people consider the word “fair” means. However, the left redefines the word “fair” to mean “accords with my sense of social justice“, thereby making the term a far more relative one. Note the that definition overlaps, to a small extent, with the first definition I gave.

You can see how the term “fair pay” actually matches the second definition but ambiguously includes the first. After all, if I produce 1000 widgets and my friend produces 1000 widgets, fair pay would see us being paid equally. But this is not what the term means when used during wages “negotiations”. “Fair pay” in the union sense of the word means “whatever our wage demand is” – which has far more to do with social justice than productivity.

One of the most obvious twists of the word “fair” occurs during the tax debate. Here, we would probably use the term to be the equivalent of “equal”. Unfortunately, the tax system is not equitable at all but heavily slanted (the term used being “progressive”) against the wealthier taxpayer. Here the word “fair” actually means “heavily weighted”. The top 11% of wage earners pay 47% of the tax bill. A truly “fair” scheme in the original sense of the word would be a flat tax starting at something reasonable (say $36,000pa) and a consumption tax – such as GST or a transaction tax. This would almost certainly be labelled “unfair ” by the Left using the user-definable social justice definition of the word.

But it does not end with the redefinition of the word “fair”; other terms developed out of these concepts have a similar twist to their meaning. Take the term a level playing-field. Conservatives will use that term to mean that equal achievement will bring equal opportunity as in our university example. Socialists, however, will point out that a wealthy student is more likely to do well and will therefore have better opportunities. This, they will say, is “unfair” (in a social justice sense). Unfortunately, their answer to this is to slant that playing field to the advantage of the poorer student using quotas, additional funding and the like. I say unfortunately because this has numerous consequences. For example, a quota system actually means that less prepared students are admitted to university. Additional funding produces distortions at the cut-off margin. A student whose father earns $69,000 receives an allowance and a student whose father makes $71,000 does not. This is manifestly unfair but is deemed acceptable because it accords with the socialist sense of social justice (which is, of course, concerned only with groups, not disadvantaged individuals).

It should be obvious by now that “fairness” in the social justice sense does not exist at all. It is not possible to produce complete equality by advantaging one group over another. All that is produced is gross unfairness. Fairness is not a group concept, but an individual one.

Many groups have been treated in a grossly unfair fashion at one time or another. The correct way to address this is to encourage people in those groups to achieve, rather than encourage them to expect their way to be smoothed. Yes, achievement will be a bit harder for some than for others, but “hard” is not the same as “impossible” And, in many ways, hard is often better than easy.

Disclaimer: The MacDoctor did not come from a wealthy family, and most certainly did not have access to interest free student loans. University was hard work to get into and took a long while to pay off. I still think I am the better for it.

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