Welcome to Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. This is a Thanksgiving message from Thomas Sowell. Thanksgiving and Fairness. There was a time when Thanksgiving meant an occasion
for counting our blessings. But now that we have so many blessings that previous generations could hardly have dreamed about, we take them all for granted and are much more likely to count our grievances and the ways in which others have been unfair to us. Everybody is for fairness because we all use the same word to mean very different things.
Most of us think you have been treated fairly when you have been treated the same as everyone else, subjected to the same rules, and judged by the same standards. But some think that you have been treated fairly only if you have had the same chances as everyone else. These are very different and completely incompatible notions. When the rules of basketball treat me the same as they treat Michael Jordan, that does not mean that we have equal chances
of success. In fact, that virtually guarantees that I have no chance. People on opposite sides of political and legal issues often talk right past each other because they are using the same word to mean totally different and mutually contradictory things. When statistics are flung around on the disparities, often called inequities, between groups, the implication is that such statistical differences could not exist without unfair treatment.
It's always selective. When they do this, they seldom, if ever discuss the fact that 95.5% of people killed by the police are men. They never mentioned that men are more likely to be in prison. Men are much more likely to get the death penalty than women are. This is because men have higher levels of testosterone and men are more violent. Younger people are more likely to get killed by the police than older people because the cops are so ageist. No, because younger men tend to
be the more violent demographic. They also never mentioned the fact that Asians tend to outer and whites along with Indian Americans, Taiwanese Americans, Japanese Americans. You can always go down the list and look at the disparities that they're not mentioning. When it comes to disparities, how about the fact that one organization, the federal government, gets $6.27 trillion a year to spend and they still
managed to run a deficit? What other company even comes close to spending that much money? Even in situations where there is a total absence of evidence for this unfair treatment, that scarcely causes a pause. If there is no evidence, then there must be covert discrimination, a glass ceiling, or some other elusive and sinister influence that you cannot substantiate. This kind of circular reasoning says, in effect, heads I win,
tails you lose. Politically, there are few ideas more potent than the notion that all your problems are caused by other people and their unfairness to you. That notion was the royal Rd. to unbridled power for Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Which is to say, millions of human beings paid with their lives for believing it. The unfairness that these demagogues talked about was not a myth. Nothing is easier than finding examples of unfair treatment among human beings.
The fatal misstep is in assuming that such unfairness can be presumed wherever results are unequal. For the truly clever, unfairness is simply defined as anything producing unequal results or unequal prospects. So the fact that government politicians have an unequal amount of power with regard to the rest of the citizenry, you'd think this inequality would get a little more attention when it comes to the social justice advocates to those with this mindset. If individual's life chances are
unequal, then that is unfair. This might be an interesting argument if you are filing a class action lawsuit against God, but it is idiocy when trying to hold any given human being responsible for a whole Galaxy of complex interactions beyond the control of anyone made of flesh and blood.
When we confuse the vagaries of fate with the sins of man and look for leaders to redress this unfairness, we are setting ourselves up to become dupes of those who know how to arouse emotions and promise the impossible. The lesson is written in blood across the history of the 20th
century. Any serious study of geography alone would show that utter unrealism of expecting people whose histories and cultures evolved in very different physical settings to have the same skills and experiences. How could the peoples living in the Himalayas have developed the same sea farming skills as people living in in the Greek islands? How could the Eskimos have learned to grow pineapples? These are just some of the more obvious geographic sources of unequal results.
And geography is just one of many influences on our ability to create wealth or do the thousands of things which influence our life chances. This is why Thomas Soul's work is so empowering. He really takes it away. He takes you from the mindset of, well, I'm a subject of the system. There's no power that I have except maybe I can vote once every four years and maybe I could start a revolution and change the entire system. Seoul focuses on the individual. Look at people who show up to
work on time. Are they more likely or less likely to get promoted than people who don't show up at all? Well, that's something you can actually control. When you ask for on the job training, does that increase the amount of skills? Does that increase the amount of value you're providing to your employer? Seoul is so empowering with this message. First born children have higher Iqs than later children. Technology makes some people's jobs obsolete and opens up great
opportunities for others. The unfairness of other people is just one more item on this very long list. How many are interested in the unfairness that has made us so much more fortunate than people in previous centuries? If the average American of today could be transported back over the centuries and become a nobleman in the Middle Ages, that would produce a reduced standard of living and shorter lifespan. Maybe that is the reason to count our blessings instead of our grievances.
This is from Thomas Soul controversial essays. Thank you for watching Keith Knight. Don't try it on anyone and the Libertarian Institute. Happy Thanksgiving.