Wild-eyed enthusiasm can be expected when your candidate wins office and even a brief self-congratulatory honeymoon understood. But eventually rhetoric faces reality and concept must become concrete plans. So when the party’s over and you go home to ponder the ramifications of victory please consider the following.

Fairness

Pilfering what belongs to another is a crime, we call it theft. The thief basically takes for himself what someone else has earned. The injustice of the act and the crime of the robber are clear.

But when government uses coercive means to take the lawfully earned property of a citizen and give it to another who has not earned it we don’t call that theft. No, the powers that be have a magic word which somehow justifies this felonious activity: Redistribution. So, here is my first question…

What’s fair about taking from those who earn and giving to those who do not?

Equality

There’s a story about a boy who grew tired of aiming his toy arrows at paper targets. So he turned his bow upward and let fly his arrows into the sky. When asked by his Dad why he was doing this he explained “I’m shooting at the moon!” Since it was broad daylight the man asked “Son, can you see the moon?” With a determined frown the little fellow replied “No…but it’s up there somewhere.”

We can admire the young man’s pluck but we also have to recognize the reality of gravity, mass and escape velocity mean his enterprise is doomed.

Let me be blunt.

Equality of opportunity is laudable and achievable, equality of outcomes is impossible in a free society. Depriving anyone of the opportunity to reach their full potential is reprehensible and already against the law in the USA. But we must recognize that not all people have the same capabilities! Equality of outcome can only be attained (theoretically) by a totalitarian government. (Note that it has never been achieved even by those fully committed to the idea i.e. The USSR, China, Cuba, etc…)

Now for the question…

What exactly do you mean by “Equality?” Can you demonstrate it or is it “…up there somewhere.”

Compassion

“Moved with compassion” is a familiar phrase containing a mountain of meaning. Implicit in this little saying are action, motivation and intention. Action occurs because the status quo will no longer be tolerated. Motivation is supplied by the perceived violations of standards of right verses wrong or good verses bad. Finally, our intentions are for good, to “right” the “wrong.”

Completely absent from the notion of compassion is method. And method makes all the difference. Moved by compassion we might end the life of a suffering animal or see to the care of a suffering child. But “compassion” could also be used to justify a reversing of that order. Consensus can be surprisingly difficult to reach. Thankfully, however, we can measure, or at least observe the results of our methods.

“The New Deal”, “The War on Poverty” and “Affirmative Action” are three examples of specific methodology (i.e. social engineering) born of compassion. For the sake of brevity we will focus on Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The brightest minds have labored to produce a socially engineered remedy for poverty. I believe forty years is enough time for us to make a useful evaluation. The incontrovertible, observable, measurable result of these efforts is a series of programs which entice people to make short term decisions with disastrous long term consequences. So here is the question…

What is compassionate about inducing the nation’s poor into a proven cycle of poverty?

To my honest liberal friends I must humbly point out that you hold no monopoly on real fairness, actual equality or true compassion. One hundred fifty years of conservative ideas made America the land where multitudes were lifted out of tyranny, poverty and despair. Ok, last question…

Why destroy that?