why fairness is infantile...


moralist

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Obama’s Peter Pan Economics Other than the president, perfect fairness is an obsession mainly among children.
renocol_DanHenninger.gif

In the winter of his presidency, Barack Obama is touring the country—Idaho, Kansas—talking about something he calls “middle-class economics.” His Saturday radio address, a helpfully condensed version of his 59-minute, 57-second State of the Union speech, offered his definition of the idea:

“That’s what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

Let’s try to unbundle this sentence.

It sounds familiar, until one notices that Mr. Obama has added something—the word “fair.”

In the traditional version, everyone at least gets a shot and does their share. But what, exactly, does the President of the United States mean by a “fair” shot and “fair” share?

Other than the presidenr, the one other slice of and American population that obsess over fairness everywhere is children. Every parent know that about the age of four, kids in groups start saying, "That's not fair."

If you have a birthday party and cut pieces of the cake for all, one of them will say, “Her piece is bigger than mine. Why is she getting a bigger piece? That’s not fair.”

And parents, ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, have felt obliged to instruct their children on the reality. Life isn’t going to be “fair.” And the path into the future requires more than envy, tantrums and grabbing what belongs to others.

Cradle-to-grave fairness may be infantile, but the idea lives on, especially in politics and most of all in Mr. Obama’s mind.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

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This is paid wsj content. It doesn't belong on OL.

--Brant

Sorry, Brant. I removed all of the text hotlinks. But as far as being paid content, competent writers get paid for their writing because they work to earnarrow-10x10.png it. Being paid for what you produce is the foundation of American Capitalism.

Greg

edit: all the removed links returned, and I'm getting an absolute blizzard of popups.

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Greg has missed Brant's point.

A link to and an excerpt from any site anywhere is pretty much fine. Re-posting of an entire article first published off-site is clumsy at best, though not explicitly against the site rules here ...

Rule of thumb -- only include a portion of copyrighted material and provide a link to the full thing. Think of linking and excerpting as basic courtesies, which both give credit and observe legal niceties about which party (author or reader) enjoys rights of use in the product. In some cases these courtesies are unnecessary -- where rights are explicitly granted to copy an article in full and send it wide. In other cases, sites have explicit policies about copying full articles (hint: they don't like it). In some extreme cases (not shown here) copying slurs into plagiary.

In this particular case, note that the Wall Street Journal is generally behind a paywall. If you copy-paste one or more entire articles here, it means WSJ is dealt out of reads on their own site. It's not a 'fair comment' excerpting but a by-pass of their ability to get paid for their product.

Which Brant succinctly pointed out. And which God has pointed out, plaguing Greg with popups for his sins. Click image to find out more.

wsj.png

Edited by william.scherk
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Greg, Bill is a brilliant and thoughtful man and an absolute genius research fiend. If he is liberal I would say he is more of a classical liberal. You have been told COUNTLESS times NOT to paste entire articles here. He brings up VERY valid points and you go off and insult him. THAT is a very progressive leftist liberal trait ya know...

Just sayin...

Hrrm something about taking a big fat wooden splinter out of thyne own eye...rings a bell from my early christian indoctrination as a child..

Me? I'm hopeless when it comes to research and a lot of that comes from time restraints and not keeping my big mouth shut until I have done my own due diligence...but I'm learning.

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Obama’s Peter Pan Economics Other than the president, perfect fairness is an obsession mainly among children.
renocol_DanHenninger.gif

In the winter of his presidency, Barack Obama is touring the country—Idaho, Kansas—talking about something he calls “middle-class economics.” His Saturday radio address, a helpfully condensed version of his 59-minute, 57-second State of the Union speech, offered his definition of the idea:

“That’s what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

Let’s try to unbundle this sentence.

It sounds familiar, until one notices that Mr. Obama has added something—the word “fair.”

In the traditional version, everyone at least gets a shot and does their share. But what, exactly, does the President of the United States mean by a “fair” shot and “fair” share?

Other than the presidenr, the one other slice of and American population that obsess over fairness everywhere is children. Every parent know that about the age of four, kids in groups start saying, "That's not fair."

If you have a birthday party and cut pieces of the cake for all, one of them will say, “Her piece is bigger than mine. Why is she getting a bigger piece? That’s not fair.”

And parents, ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, have felt obliged to instruct their children on the reality. Life isn’t going to be “fair.” And the path into the future requires more than envy, tantrums and grabbing what belongs to others.

Cradle-to-grave fairness may be infantile, but the idea lives on, especially in politics and most of all in Mr. Obama’s mind.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Should we not all be bound by the laws equally?

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There's a big difference between being equal under the law and using the law to enforce equality of outcome, Bob. One is right and proper, while the other is a liberal perversion.

In a broader sense, everyone is accountable to the same moral law, and the consequences of that are as varied as the responses to that accountability.

Greg

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There's a big difference between being equal under the law and using the law to enforce equality of outcome, Bob. One is right and proper, while the other is a liberal perversion.

Your prior answer did not make that point. My question brought it out.

Is attributing blame one of your hobbies?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Should we not all be bound by the laws equally?

Too true, even-handed laws, objective law. That's the only place for equality. Funny, whenever some Statists begin pushing for fairness, by way and justification of the anti-concept, 'equality', someone's always going to get screwed over.

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Your prior answer did not make that point. My question brought it out.

Thanks for asking. :smile:

It reveals how the left abuses the law by elevating equality above freedom. I don't want equality. I want the freedom to be unequal, because I don't want to conform to the leftist equality of political correctness. I want the freedom of income inequality, because it means I'm free to work to create wealth.

Is attributing blame one of your hobbies?

Defining personal responsibility is different from blaming (unjustly accusing) others for the blamer's own failure to become personally responsible. Liberalism has already demonstrated where that leads.

Greg

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Your prior answer did not make that point. My question brought it out.

Thanks for asking. :smile:

It reveals how the left abuses the law by elevating equality above freedom. I don't want equality. I want the freedom to be unequal, because I don't want to conform to the leftist equality of political correctness. I want the freedom of income inequality, because it means I'm free to work to create wealth.

Greg

Now, that is very good, Mr. Greg: "I want the freedom to be unequal".

To one's advantage, or 'disadvantage', who cares - this is freedom.

I have always thought a practising and practical capitalist understands Capitalism as well or better than many economic-political theorists.

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Greg,

For the record, there are good ways to share material from other sites, so here are some guidelines.

1. Always give a link to the article. Always. You removed the link for some reason, but the backlink is a kind of payment to the content creator since Google rewards the content owner with a slight nudge in search engine rankings (really tiny coming from a site like OL, but it's still there).

2. The law that governs this stuff is called Fair Use. But it is not a separate law, it is actually a section of the US Code--Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107.

3. Certain best practices have evolved about how to do this. Rather than go into all of them and their different contexts, let's simplify:

Rather than copy/pasting an entire article from a different website (unless you have permission to do so from the content owner or the material is public domain), extract what you want to talk about (generally a few paragraphs), make sure people understand this is an excerpt, and link to the article for those who want to read the whole thing. Mention the author and title. (I generally include date and site name for the reader's benefit.) Also, make some kind of comment. Doing it this way is called content curation and that is always perfectly fine.

This is a general guideline, though, and there are times when you can step over the bounds.

But following this formula will keep DMCA takedown notices from OL's door.

:)

Michael

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Thanks for the reminder, Michael.

Concurrently, there is another situation that explains the popups yesterday. This is a message I got today from my internet security provider...

This morning, we learned of a new problem affecting Adobes Flash product. This is a serious situation that affects nearly everyone using Microsoft Windows. Because of that, heres what you need to know and, most importantly, what you should do about it.

Whats the problem?

The problem is that theres a newly discovered vulnerability affecting Adobes Flash product on Microsoft Windows. This vulnerability or flaw can be used by attackers to run code or programs on your Windows computer as if you ran it. Anything you can do on your computer the attackers program can do. In a worst case like this, they can load malware on your computer.

Vulnerabilities are found all the time. But usually vulnerabilities are fixed with a patch when theyre found, before attackers can target them. As long as you keep your system up-to-date, youre protected against most vulnerabilities. What makes this situation serious is that researchers, including our TrendLabs researchers, have discovered that attackers found this vulnerability first and have been attacking it before a patch is available: this kind of situation is called a zero-day situation, because defenders have zero days to protect against attacks. This means even if you keep your system up-to-date, youre still at risk of attack until Adobe releases a patch.

What makes this situation more serious is that the attacks weve seen are using banner ads (called malvertisements) to spread malware. This means that you can go to trusted sites you expect to be safe and still get malware on your system. These attacks work by attackers targeting and compromising the third-party ad servers that offer the ads you see on legitimate and popular sites. This is a particularly nasty form of attack, one that puts average users at great risk.

The situation is even more serious because this vulnerability is being used by what we call an exploit kit: a tool that cyber-criminals make and sell to other cyber-criminals so they can carry out attacks. An exploit kit spreads attacks much more widely. This particular vulnerability is being used in the Angler exploit kit.

Taken all together, this means that this is a vulnerability that can be widely attacked. Its a potentially very serious situation that everyone running Microsoft Windows should be aware of.

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Now, that is very good, Mr. Greg: "I want the freedom to be unequal".To one's advantage, or 'disadvantage', who cares - this is freedom.
It sure is, Tony. :smile:Each of us is personally responsible for whether being unequal is to our advantage or not. This is what I love about Ayn Rand's being such a proponent of acting in self interest. If I do what's best for me, it will also naturally be what's best for everyone else around me.
I have always thought a practising and practical capitalist understands Capitalism as well or better than many economic-political theorists.
Business is where intellectual theories go to either live or die. I had a business fail before I succeeded. That how I learned... by doing.The beauty of Capitalism is ethical value for value mutually beneficial win/win transactions. And if they aren't... then it damn well isn't Capitalism.Greg
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Concurrently, there is another situation that explains the popups yesterday. This is a message I got today from my internet security provider...

There is a simple solution: don't run Windows. I run xubuntu, a linux distro.

The only use I had for Windows was to run Age of Empires. But Windows 8 doesn't run AOE; wine does. wine is a program that runs Windows programs on linux, without Windows.

The last few times I bought a computer, it had Windows on it, and I replaced Windows with xubuntu.

I used to run ubuntu but canonical put unity on ubuntu and I got an error message telling me that my graphics card is not good enough for unity. That's when I switched to xubuntu, virtually the same as ubuntu except it uses xfce instead of gnome and unity and it is lighter weight and designed for older computers. My computer is no longer old but I like the simplicity of xubuntu.

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Business is where intellectual theories go to either live or die. I had a business fail before I succeeded. That how I learned... by doing.

The beauty of Capitalism is ethical value for value mutually beneficial win/win transactions.

And if they aren't... then it damn well isn't Capitalism.

Greg

Yes, it is the freedom to fail - or the 'right to be wrong', one might call it. Nothing and nobody can take that away from one, except our wonderfully humane "fair-and-equal" enforcers. Who and what measures who are equal and unequal, after all? There's no standard to judge each person's combination of creativity, learning, energy, perseverance, commitment, luck, and all the rest... and still further, these elements fluctuate in time according to each individual.

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Now, that is very good, Mr. Greg: "I want the freedom to be unequal".

To one's advantage, or 'disadvantage', who cares - this is freedom.

It sure is, Tony. :smile:

Each of us is personally responsible for whether being unequal is to our advantage or not. This is what I love about Ayn Rand's being such a proponent of acting in self interest. If I do what's best for me, it will also naturally be what's best for everyone else around me.

I have always thought a practising and practical capitalist understands Capitalism as well or better than many economic-political theorists.

Business is where intellectual theories go to either live or die. I had a business fail before I succeeded. That how I learned... by doing.

The beauty of Capitalism is ethical value for value mutually beneficial win/win transactions.

And if they aren't... then it damn well isn't Capitalism.

Greg

What literalists don't understand respecting self interest are the psychological issues involved in correct actions. Thus they unknowingly act against their own self interest thinking they are "selfish" (and some observers think they are just that), sometimes to the extent of criminal activity. Some of them then complain about their low self esteem, if they are perceptive enough.

--Brant

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What literalists don't understand respecting self interest are the psychological issues involved in correct actions. Thus they unknowingly act against their own self interest thinking they are "selfish" (and some observers think they are just that), sometimes to the extent of criminal activity. Some of them then complain about their low self esteem, if they are perceptive enough.

--Brant

Those unknowing acts against self interest aren't unknown. They can only be done within the blindness of emotion.

To invoke the term "correct actions" alludes to the truth that there is an objective standard of what where when and who is acting correctly. This blows moral relativism out of the water.

Greg

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What literalists don't understand respecting self interest are the psychological issues involved in correct actions. Thus they unknowingly act against their own self interest thinking they are "selfish" (and some observers think they are just that), sometimes to the extent of criminal activity. Some of them then complain about their low self esteem, if they are perceptive enough.

--Brant

Those unknowing acts against self interest aren't unknown. They can only be done within the blindness of emotion.

To invoke the term "correct actions" alludes to the truth that there is an objective standard of what where when and who is acting correctly. This blows moral relativism out of the water.

Greg

Moral relativism doesn't work because man qua man is one thing only at the core

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