Fairness!
Nearly every one would agree that fairness is a virtue and that it is something we, personally and as a society, should strive for. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But, in a world of limited resources, it’s NOT quite that simple. A farmer celebrating rain for his crops in New England, may be unaware, but his happy situation in the North East may often be associated drought in the Midwest. The lucky winner of a lottery is accompanied by MILLIONS that have lost. This applies in the social and economic spheres as well.
Leftist, socialist and “progressives” use our sense of fair play against us. American society is irredeemably UNFAIR, or so they claim.
We are unfair to the poor, to illegal aliens, to the transgendered, to criminals, to women, to the handicapped and to the “marginalized,” (by which they mean just about EVERYONE who isn’t a white male heterosexual.) But, are we really? The answer lies in the “sticky wicket” question of just who’s being treated unfairly.
Advocates of transgender rights maintain that society treats transgenders unfairly, because we don’t fully accept the “womanhood” of the transgender male athlete that insists upon competing against physically smaller and weaker biological women simply because he “identifies as a woman.” This, of course, is nonsense. The women only sports leagues were created to allow female athletes to compete fairly with their contemporaries. Allowing any man to compete against them, no matter whom or what he identifies with, is, without question, patently unfair to biological females trying to play the sport on a “level playing field.” And this distinction is important not only for fairness, but for SAFETY. Would we ask a featherweight boxer to fight a heavyweight? Of course not. Nor should we ask the weaker and smaller female to compete against the stronger and bigger transgender. If the aggrieved transgenders want to compete in sports they need to form their own league limited, of course, only to transgenders. Their body image distortion is THEIR PROBLEM, NOT society’s.
Are we unfair to the illegal aliens that have entered our country through an open border, human trafficking or some other criminal conduit? The question here, again, is fairness. By magnanimously welcoming many illegals, in addition to the fact that a certain percentage will be criminals, we are being unfair to the many legal immigrants (AND regular Americans) as they find it harder to find work, housing, and even harder to be payed properly, having been under bid by illegals.
Are we unfair to the poor? Poverty rates in the United States hover around 2% (World Bank data as of 2023). Whereas communist nations fare MUCH worse. China’s poverty rate, for example, in 2022 was 21.5%! Nations like Cuba and North Korea, don’t even provide ANY data! (We can safely assume, therefore, that their poverty rates are VERY high).
Are we unfair to the handicapped? I don’t have statistics on this, but all one has to do is travel the world a bit, seeing that handicapped facilities elsewhere are either limited or non existent. My favorite example is a museum in Moscow that DID have an elevator for the handicapped, but you had to climb a flight of stairs to get to it! (Same, by the way, for the Arc De Triomphe in Paris!). In fact, nowhere I’ve traveled has nearly the handicapped provisions that we have.
And, what about women? Are we unfair to them? The statistics, from Pew Research:
Full-Time Workers: Women earn roughly 81%–83% of what men make on a median weekly or annual basis.
Younger Workers: The gap is smaller for younger adults (ages 25 to 34), where women earn about 95 cents per male dollar. Not exactly equal, but pretty darn close.
So, dear readers, when scrutinized, the leftist claims of great American unfairness don’t hold any water. In fact, those claims are quite… UNFAIR.