Equity or the Hundred Thousand Dollar Egg

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

This administration, like decrepit, idiotic inheritors of the philosophy of the French revolution has declared “Equity” its top goal.

That’s because “equality of results” is both harder to type and because they hope whole word readers will read that as “equality”. They might also think of equity as something they have in their houses, and therefore, something vaguely nice.

In practical fact, it’s the left’s insane idea that it’s the government’s job to make up for not just your personal failures and foibles, but for those of all your ancestors, going back presumably where the descendants of Abel get a big payout from Cain due to their ur-ancestor’s death, in the mists of myth and history.

Only of course, it’s not that way. Because they have no actual way of telling if anyone’s ancestors were discriminated against or hobbled, what they’re trying to do is compensate for PRESUMED discrimination against your ancestors.

Which is there they come up with beauties like San Francisco —a city that never authorized slavery —giving reparations to people who were never slaves paid for by people who never owned slaves.

Actually it’s almost impossible to say none of your ancestors ever owned slaves. And I don’t care what color your skin is. Contrary to the popular historical fiction peddled in our schools that white people enslaved black people because they were that racist and this was the first occurrence of slavery, people have been enslaving each other since …well, since they were people. Some zoologists have identified slavery-like arrangements in chimpanzees, so honestly, it might go further than that.

And if you’re there on the other side of this screen, breathing, have four fingers and a thumb or belong to a species that normally has those, you’re descended from slavers. You’re descended from slavers, murderers, rapists, warlords, pirates, con men (and women) and you’re descended from their victims. You’re descended from saints, too, and heroes, and kings, and judges, and upright people, and a lot of men and women who were neither, but, in the common run of humanity were decent enough and honest enough and meant no one harm.

So …. what is this equity, and why are there groups that get priority under it to correct “past injustices.” And do note please that one of the groups is recent immigrants because you know, being oppressed in another country gets you rewards here.

Well, the first thing you have to understand is that the left has issues processing the fact individuals exist. Not just that individuals are different, but that they exist at all.

The fact that my elementary school class: all girls, born and raised in the village, and frankly in the way of Portuguese looking much alike, has had radically different outcomes (at least two died young, to my certain knowledge. The vast majority of them are mothers and housewives and two of us work in intellectual professions, very different ones, in different countries and on opposing sides of the culture war) is not in fact something they can process. It doesn’t compute. An homogeneous group must have the same outcomes, right?

If they were forced to confront it, they’d go looking for oppression. (More the fool them. One of the few that were seriously disadvantaged —being barely smart enough to learn to read (no, not me. Giggle) —has had the most successful kids. So, you know …) For “group stuff” that is, to justify the disparity.

The truth is that a lot of people who were once my peers are massive failures compared to me, and others massive successes. It doesn’t even correlate to IQ or anything you can see. If you really dig into that person’s life, you might find it was the ability to buckle down and do something difficult at a time I couldn’t, and that made them very successful. Others had a run of luck (as far as it exists, defined as being in the right place at the right time.) But for that you need to study the individual. And honestly? You can’t equalize that. The fact that I’m ADD AF has cost me tons of opportunities not to mention creating health hazards through irregular eating habits and medicine taking. OTOH being ADD seems to be a characteristic of a certain type of creative and they might be linked. Fix that, and maybe I’m massively successful. Or maybe I’m just not me.

It’s even harder to attribute success of failure to the fact I tan, or that I have an accent in speech, or happen to be female, or any of the other things the left would think gives me protected minority status.

The truth? People are people. And every group has …people. Some successful, some not.

If looking at the fact some groups are more successful than others in the US, it might be better to look at group culture, and what the overculture tells them. When you are convinced, through public school, that the only reason you don’t have As is because your teacher is racist or sexist, you’re not going to do the best you can. Instead, you’re going to recline in victimhood and helplessness. Which is another way to fail.

But anyway, the mondo Marxist brains of the Biden Junta —he might be the brightest of them. I mean have you heard Commie La Whorish? Or the others? —think they can solve everything by discriminating against the people they think are succeeding because they have it easy, and are promoted on characteristics that have nothing to do with ability.

While I’m the first to agree we shouldn’t throw jobs and honors at people who mouth Marxism most fervently, that’s not what the idiots mean.

No, they think white males have it easy and have always had it easy —failing to explain why my sons who are arguably white-ish have it easier than Barrack Obama’s pampered spawn —so they should be discriminated against. And then white women, and then black men, and then –the hierarchy. The most oppression points, based on nothing but what is in the head of the Gramscian-indoctrinated komissar administering these various boondoggles and having no point of contact with reality, the more you’ll be advanced, lauded, and given jobs.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, accounts for the fact that the Biden administration doesn’t have a single competent appointee. Not.A.Single.One. Which should be hard, but is what you get when you hire for any reason other than merit, but particularly when you hire to make people who haven’t been very successful successful.

By this merry path to hell, we’ve corrupted —already —our arts, our sciences, our literature. (No, dear idiots, I don’t want to hear that so and so is a writer of color. I don’t read writers, I read the books. The books are either good or bad. And if they’re long whines about what I can only call aspirational victimhood —the victimhood the author wishes she had experienced, so she’d be fully virtuous —they’re bad books. And that’s all there is to it.)

Now it’s corrupting our government.

The price of eggs has eased a little. A little.

But at their continued rate of hiring to promote supposed past discrimination, the truth is that eggs will get expensive again.

Everything will.

If they continue under the illusion that they can make outcomes equal they will.

When eggs are 100 thousand dollars apiece, we all starve equally.

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for March 20, 2023