American Elephants

You surely understand by now that the Left has only your own best interests in mind. You can tell that to be the case because they are so valiantly trying to make everybody equal.  No one should be better off than you are, and if you just turn things over to them, they’ll make everything fair. The goal is equality.

That is not true. The goal is to make you concerned about income inequality. Economic disparities and gaps are automatically treated as inequities, and you are supposed to be resentful. If you are resentful enough, you will elect Democrats to fix the inequities that are so troublesome, and make things “fair.” Tom Sowell:

If one racial or ethnic group has a lower income than another, that is automatically called “discrimination” by many people in politics, the media and academia. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there is that some groups work harder in school, perform better and spend more postgraduate years studying to acquire valuable skills in medicine, science or engineering.

If the economic end results are unequal, that is treated as a grievance against those with better outcomes, and a sign of an “unfair” society.

The rhetoric of clever people often confuses the undeniable fact that life is unfair with the claim that a given institution or society is unfair.

Children born into families that raise them with love and with care to see that they acquire knowledge, values and discipline that will make them valuable members of society have far more chances of economic and other success in adulthood than children raised in families that lack these qualities.

When your mother told you that “Life is not fair,” she knew what she was talking about. People in their prime earning  years make more than those who are just starting out. People who work harder and acquire important skills earn more than those who don’t work hard and don’t study. Beautiful people get ahead on their beauty. Is it fair when someone else is prettier than you are?

A little known regulation in the Dodd-Frank Bill to be finalized later this year forces companies to disclose how many times more their Chief Executive Officers earn compared to rank and file employees.

This provision is backed by labor unions like the AFL-CIO, which aims to “shame companies into lowering CEO pay. The ” pay ratio disclosure rule” originally found in section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform of 2010, requires all publicly traded companies to disclose the ratio of the CEO’s salary compared to the median salary of all employees at the company in the company’s annual report. The aim of the requirement is clearly meant to arouse envy and demands for “fairness.”

A Chief Executive’s pay package is determined by the Board of Directors of a corporation subject to approval by the shareholders. And is not really the government’s business. Good CEOs can be invaluable to business, and those who can make significant difference for their company deserve good remuneration. The Leftists who increasingly inhabit the faculty lounges have long been deeply envious of CEO pay. In the firm belief (they have PhDs) that they are smarter than any businessman, they find this deeply unfair.

I have never understood the envy. I have always known people personally who are much poorer and less fortunate and people who are somewhere up in the One percent, as did both my parents. My life is mine to develop. What can I accomplish with my own skill and determination? Some thing won’t work out, some will be disasters and some will work very well indeed. As Frank Sinatra used to sing —”I did it my way.”

Other than that, you can get a good agent and/or a good lawyer. That seems to work for sports stars and movie stars.