Saturday, February 13, 2010

On Fairness, Compassion and Work

Thomas Sowell has an opinion piece today discussing the concept of fairness. Rather than excerpt it, I'll just post a thought that popped into my head while reading it.

Fairness is always applied after you work and not before.

That is, fairness and compassion in our culture of wealth redistribution have no meaning until someone actually produces something that the rest of us can sieze. You can't grab what hasn't been produced yet, so fairness isn't applied until the businessman has put in the 3 years of 80 hour weeks building up his company to the point where it brings in a few million dollars. At that point, we apply fairness and compassion. Until then, fairness and compassion do not apply. If they did, wastrels that accomplish nothing would have been pressed into the service of that company.

That would be fair, right?

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