Equity Iniquity
Our renowned Vice President - who has become the cornerstone of Joe Biden's job security package - may one day earn a Michelin star for her stupendous word salads.
Ponder this bit of blather.
I'd give her a "Huh?" here,
but I actually see a point nestled among the mesclun.
Harris is hairballing up one of the Left's favorite new cons: the substitution of "equity" for "equality."
They used to try and snooker us into conflating equality of outcome with equality of opportunity, but people started to see through that equivocation, so they changed the lexicon. Note, by the way, that this is a very common tactic used by those whose concepts cannot stand up to sustained logical scrutiny. They play language games in order to stay a step ahead of mass realization that they're peddling lies and bullshit.
I've shared Kurt Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron on both this page and its pre-Substack iteration. Sixty-one years ago, Vonnegut took the concept of coerced equality of outcome to its natural, crushing conclusion, thus exposing that the only way government can make everyone equal is by oppression and destruction.
In politics, unfortunately, there is no idea too awful to resurrect, especially when it can be sold superficially, like snake oil, to an audience eager for easy fixes and miracle remedies. Thus, equality of outcome is reimagined as "equity," and infused with the insinuation that inequality of starting point is presumptively due to sinister forces. This is why we hear about "systemic" racism and sexism and transphobia - it keeps individuals from rebutting accusations of bigotry, and suggests that the State should have the power to coerce equal outcomes, since society as a whole is permanently stacked against the oppressed.
Harris adds to this garbage by asserting that "everyone has the same capacity."
No, they don't.
Some are taller, some are shorter, some are smarter, some are dimmer. Some have physical talents that others do not. Some have perfect pitch, others have tin ears. Some sing like angels, others bray like donkeys. Some dance with the grace of Fred Astaire, others thud like hippos. Some are built like powerlifters, others like marathon runners.
Beyond the personal, there is the circumstantial. Some are born to wealth, some to poverty. Some to motivated and involved parents, some to the indifferent. Some with half a dozen siblings, others only children. Some in big cities, some in small towns. Some in the North, some in the South, some in the Rust Belt, some in farm country, some in the mountains, some in lobster towns, some on ranches.
On top of both is the spectrum of personal motivation, the broad range of desires, the incredible variety in personal goals, personal drive, personal laziness, focus, and apathy.
Can it be argued that normalizing circumstance might improve equality? Possibly, though we know the practical outcome of all such efforts: poverty for all but those running the show, and a worse-off society in general. Even if it were theoretically possible, though, there's no correcting for disparate personal/physical/intellectual capabilities other than a lowest-common-denominator impairment, and a society that does that is a society that will oppress just about everyone.
The moral hazard of all this speaks to the notion of motivation. Why would anyone strive to excellence if its achievement is treated as proof of inequity and cause for taking from that excellence?
The final and most fatal flaw in the Left's 'equity' gambit lies in the criteria they set forth. It's always about certain identity markers - some obvious and immutable like skin color, ethnicity, and gender, others declared like sexual orientation and, ironically, gender. You won't see sorting based on intelligence or physical abilities, by the way. Nor will you see sorting by circumstances when those circumstances don't align with identity politics.
When understood for what it is, "equity" is not only incompatible with the bedrock principles of a free society, it's fundamentally immoral. It's a con job peddled by people who make money and build careers by dividing us, by subordinating the individual to their carefully curated groups, and by sowing discontent and envy in order to keep us from noticing just how bad they are at running the nation.
Soon, we will be offered a substitute for "equity." It'll be the same Trojan Horse for justification of coercion, redistributive taxation, and other forms of success-hatred, peddled by the same people, and swapped in because we figured out the lies behind the current word. It'll be tossed into the same word salad from the same vacuous regurgitators. Meanwhile, nothing good gets accomplished, and our liberties get eroded some more.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.
The Supreme Court has barely yet steadfastly maintained some rationale in some circumstances (like higher ed) for "affirmative action" - not that I agree with it, but there is court precedence. And even in those exceptional, narrowly-defined circumstances, the Court has insisted on there being some proven "social benefit" to what is in fact, discrimination against the abled, the above average applicant. The Court has, however, taken a hard pass on "equity" (when defined precisely as the VP uses the term), but most especially when applied against immutable characteristics like race and gender. For this then becomes not just "equality of opportunity" but blatant reverse discrimination. "Equity" is not even a fig-leaf for a "level playing field", but a hard "taking" and in direct violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Democrats can keep putting new terms on the euphemism treadmill all they want, but the fundamental concept is illegal and has been deemed so by the Courts (see McDonald, 1976).
“The final and most fatal flaw in the Left's 'equity' gambit lies in the criteria they set forth. It's always about certain identity markers - some obvious and immutable like skin color, ethnicity, and gender, others declared like sexual orientation and, ironically, gender. You won't see sorting based on intelligence or physical abilities, by the way. Nor will you see sorting by circumstances when those circumstances don't align with identity politics.
When understood for what it is, "equity" is not only incompatible with the bedrock principles of a free society, it's fundamentally immoral. It's a con job peddled by people who make money and build careers by dividing us, by subordinating the individual to their carefully curated groups, and by sowing discontent and envy in order to keep us from noticing just how bad they are at running the nation.“