by the Left Coast Rebel
On the heels of the previous post regarding California subsidization of booze and cigarettes for welfare recipients, I caught the following story via. Memeorandum from The Telegraph, “Welfare handouts aren’t fair and the public knows it.”
Excerpt:
What is deserved, refers to that which is achieved by effort…As we report today, Policy Exchange – supposedly the Prime Minister’s favourite ideas outlet – has done a brave and unusual thing. Rather than polling the public just on policy and voting intention, it has put a far more abstract moral issue before them. It instructed the pollsters at YouGov to find out precisely what the public thought the most powerful term of approbation in the political lexicon – “fair” – actually amounted to.
The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report’s title – “Just Deserts” – implies, that people get what they deserve.
And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is
achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.
Hmm, I love the sound of that and it sure sounds awfully libertarian, don’t it?
Britons are waking up and get it, will we before it’s too late?
Read the rest at UK’s Telegraph.
Updated: More on this subject at Legal Insurrection.
Updated x2: Linked at Legal Insurrection. Thanks, Professor Jacobson!
4 comments:
I think most Americans get it but the government is "buying" the votes of the poor at such an ever increasing rate, it will be hard to overcome their numbers.
I thought this was the money-shot.
"After all these years of being morally blackmailed by the poverty lobby, harried by socialist ideologues and shouted at by self-serving public sector axe-grinders, the people are not cowed. Even after being bludgeoned by the BBC thought monitors and browbeaten by Left-liberal media academics with the soft Marxist view of a "fair" society – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – they have not bought it. They do not believe that if people are poor, it is necessarily society's fault, and therefore society's duty to deal with the consequences."
'Fairness' is just dumbed down 'Justice'. Fairness is a 1st graders understanding that should have grown into an adult definition. Look forward to 20 years from know when the same poll is done wrt 'selfishness' and people understand that its about living your life for yourself, not destroying your neighbors, which is not selfish.
Good post.
Chris: I agree, you see it here in CA where the government has bought the votes of illegal aliens and other redress groups that now outnumber hardworking people that want to be left alone! Great excerpt here, too, imagine reading that in the NYT.
Shane: Great points…the collectivists today are actually the "selfish" among us as they believe that bankrupting future generations for the sake of socialism now is a-ok.
If there's hope for Britain and Europe, there's hope for the USA. Other than in the 20% that comprise the hard left, liberty is in our DNA.
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