Source; Sent from an on line friend...........
Harvard University used the database consisting of the entire American population from 1989 to 2015 and found racial disparities in adult income, even when childhood households are of equal income and wealth, contradicted the assumption that racial disparities in wealth explain all racial differences in social outcomes, and found equal childhood household wealth did little to equalize rates of criminality. Powerful evidence of cultural and behavioral differences between white and black men were shown to operate independently of wealth or income. And Brandis University, studying wealth changes from 1984 to 2009 on a nationally represented set of families, concluded that inherited wealth accounted for only 5% of the racial disparity in wealth gains over the time period.
These findings are consistent with other research that find racial differences in crime rates even among those with similar economic backgrounds. For example, Darrell Steffensmier found that even after adjusting for poverty and unemployment, black neighborhoods had substantially higher violent crime rates than similar white neighborhoods. Robert Cherry found that even after taking into account employment, education, and poverty, states with a greater share of black men have higher violent crime rates. The point being that race cannot be excluded as a factor.
The behavior of human beings, individually and collectively, is complex. Individuals differ as do many groups, on behavioral measures vital to social economic success. Causes and their effects may take long stretches of time to play out. Stratification explicitly excludes from its analysis of group disparities anything to do with the interests and abilities of the individuals involved - which would only be legitimate if those factors have been proven to be irrelevant to demographic variables. For example, economic disparities cannot be understood if endogenous differences, (average differences in the interests and ability of disparate groups) are a priori excluded.
Arbitrarily claiming laws and norms were explicitly engineered to disadvantage a certain race is a very strong charge that is almost impossible to prove or disprove. It departs from scientific practice since it explicitly excludes from its analysis of group disparities anything to do with the interests and abilities of the individuals involved. Unfortunately, unproven allegations attributing malign motives to whole classes have become common to the bogus left-wing philosophy of critical theory. Certainly, no laws since the mid-1960s have expressed any such intention.
The proper behavioral science approach would be to begin by looking at both endogenous and exogenous causes: at all the germane, cogent interests and abilities of the individuals and the conditions acting on them. Often what's ignored is endogenous causes, the idea that group-based inequalities are due to defective cultural habits and practices on the part of the subaltern or subordinated community. This tends to remove sound science and sound logic entirely from determining the causes.
There appears to be an inverse correlation between wealth and criminality and positive correlations between wealth and cognitive ability. High rates of criminality can reduce wealth and high academic achievement can increase wealth. So, the precise direction of cause and effect is uncertain. Wealth instead of being a dependent becomes an independent variable. Instead of wealth acting on various behaviors, behaviors can and do act on wealth. Wealth is often an outcome of the individual's interests and abilities in the opportunities available to one.
What is holding people of color down are cultural factors other than race that black scholars Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele have compellingly argued with abundant empirical evidence. Promoting that it isn’t true are only making matters worse
"Ironically, the stronger and less victimized a previously victimized group becomes, the more it will insist on its own victimization."-Benedict Beckled
“A sullen spirit of equality can proceed from envy in the baser sort of democracy.”---Paul Elmer More
Wealth is anything that people value. Wealth can be health, love, beauty, happiness, money, and many other things. Money, however, allows us to store wealth, index it and to transmit it. Money comes from some form of earning. Work provides earnings in the form of income. People's incomes go up because people become more productive. That's true of people over time and across nations.
What matters to a person is not whether who he has performed in comparison to any random domain but how he has performed in a domain that is important to him. This suggest that income inequality is not as much of a problem as it is sometimes assumed. The University of Nevada found that in advance nations income inequality on average neither helps nor harms.
The general view among liberals is that economic inequality is socially undesirable because it makes people miserable. Therefore, since liberals are the self-anointed benefactors and self-appointed rulers of all of humanity, they feel compelled to rob the fruits of the successful and give it them to the less successful, primarily through higher taxes.
Under that welfare ethos the individual comes in conflict with his alter ego—his equal in rights. The welfare state, with it’s never-ending poverty, derelicts on the street, unattended illness, and complaints of not enough by every group, cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state, when were the masses are ruled by a handful of elites in black robes. This is the point where alleged good intentions exceed the power to fulfill them and mark for the culture the onset of decadence.
Putting aside for now the issue of envy (which provides ample fuel for the type of equality fire that burns and destroys) and immorality of taking what isn’t yours, the facts show that economic inequality isn’t what frustrates people, lack of an opportunity to try and become richer is what does. In the real world, were liberal minds seldom dwell, one’s own income potential matters a great deal more than what others are earning. In fact, rising incomes of others often serves as positive evidence of what one can achieve.
Focusing on income inequality rather than absolute improvement in the standards of living can be psychologically destructive, for there will always be people who have more money, more things, better health, higher intelligence, better looks, greater height and strength, and more charisma among other things. Do not fall into the trap of instead of being grateful for all the good things in your life be resentful because of the things you lack but others have.
Preoccupation with income inequality risks normalizing envy, a happiness destroying emotion. There is nothing wrong with income inequality, provided that it was fairly arrived at, by creating value others want. In fact, income inequality is in many ways the midwife of progress. Progress would be impossible if society prevented people from trying out and benefiting from new things(1).
Liberal policies that try to take from Peter to give to Paul (technically called redistribution policies) tend to reduce wealth in total for all. That means fewer jobs, less prosperity, less charity, less improving lifestyles and turns beneficiaries into demoralized long-term even permanent dependents, among other things(2).
“Diversity is celebrated and individuality praised, yet so many are looking to equality as a prescription for human flourishing. All of people’s varied talents, interests, backgrounds, make up, etc, all that diversity renders egalitarian utopianism unworkable…it seems that one of the most important things all humans are equal in is that we are all unique.”—Rev Robert Sirico
- Nobel prize winner William d. Nordhouse who concluded only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers. He estimated that innovators are able to capture only 2.2% of the total surplus from innovation. Steve Jobs is but one example. He was able to create trillions of dollars in value for all of humanity, while receiving just a tiny fraction of that, because he enjoyed a culture that awarded risk, creativity, and discipline.
2. The dogma of equal opportunity, an ideal when demanded to be fully realized, can only happen when the institution of the family (with self-sacrifice, advantages, ambition, cooperation, etc) is no longer respected, and when parental control and responsibility passes to the State.
“Every human has four endowments—self awareness, conscience, independent will, and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom ... The power to choose, to respond, to change.” --Stephen Covey
The wide range of differences in individual capacities and potentials is one of the most distinctive facts about the human species. Not all human impulses are laudable. To think otherwise would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy. Not all types of inequality are detrimental to human well-being. But one example are the geniuses who have invented things you can neither explain nor understand but yet you benefit immensely from. Such people are but one small demonstration that inequality of ability can benefit all of us. If the differences are not very important, then freedom is not very important and the idea of individual worth is not very important.
Honest achievement that cost those in the lead much to achieve enables those who follow to reach the same level at a much smaller cost. A truly egalitarian society, which can exist only through force, would progress by essentially being parasitical, taking from those who have paid the cost. In a non-egalitarian society those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating later diminish it. Even those who find themselves at the short-end of inequality have more to gain from faster growth that inevitably comes in a free market than from any conceivable forced redistribution.
Freedom, which equality when before the law creates, is progressively destroyed by demands for another kind of equality, economic or outcome. We can achieve either equality before the law or a material equality (which will diminish), but not both at the same time. Equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality. The desire of making people more alike in their material condition cannot be accepted in a free society as a justification for further and discriminatory coercion. To preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion Those who demand an extension of equality do not really demand equality but the distribution of it as they desire regardless of individual merit, which is irreconcilable with freedom. Like Plato said: “Equal treatment of the unequal ends in inequality, when not qualified by due portion.”
Even if the impossible could be achieved, that we all have equal chances, this will produce unequal results, proportioned to the “successful efforts” of the individual, on the value of the achievement. To be successful the individual must be free to use the capacities and knowledge they have which often others do not have. Life in society necessarily means that we are dependent for the satisfaction of most of our needs on the services of some of our fellow members. In a free society these mutual services are voluntary, and each should be able, within reason, to determine to whom he wants to render services and on what terms. The benefits and opportunities which others offer to us will be available only if we satisfy their conditions, to be otherwise is mandatory servitude. This is as true of social as of economic relations.
If in the pursuit of uncertain goals people are to use their own knowledge and capacities, they must be guided, not by what other people think they are to do, but by the value others attached to the result in which they aim. If renumeration did not correspond to the value that the product of a man’s effort has for others, he would have no basis for deciding whether the pursuit of a given object is worth the effort and risk. It is only by the value of the result that we can judge with any degree of confidence. Otherwise we presume that we are able to judge in every individual instance how well people use different opportunities and talents given to them and how meritorious their efforts are in light of all the circumstances which have made them possible. We would also have to presume that some human beings are in a position to determine conclusively what a person is worth, or entitled to determine what he may achieve. That presumes then that others can and do know all that guides a person’s actions.
To decide not on achievement but on the intent means we must judge whether people have made such use of their opportunities as they ought to have made and how much effort of will or self-denial this has caused them. This presupposes also that we can distinguish between that part of their achievement which is due to circumstances within their control and the part which is not.
All human differences therefore create different advantages. Since acquisition by any member of the community of additional capacities to do things which may be valuable is to be regarded as a gain for the community. This implies that the desirability of increasing the abilities and opportunities of any individual does not depend on whether the same can also be done for others.
The discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful rests on envy. It is the modern tendency to ignore traditional definitions of morality, to gratify that vice and to disguise it in the garment of social justice (which John Stuart Mill called “that most antisocial and odious of all passions” ) which has become a serious threat to freedom. History testifies that freedom empty of such morality and the dictates of moral law ends in violence and despair.
Each of us is inherently different from one another in our potential, talents, and merit. Therefore equality and liberty are incompatible. Our government, however, is tending to reward those who have less and punish those who have more. External factors such as work ethic and lifestyle choices are ignored. History shows that nations fail whenever this approach has been tried. With great cost and far too much human suffering(1).
In 1965 Mao Satan plunged China into the cultural revolution, arguing that expertise and merit was a source of privilege that undermined socialist equality. The result was millions of people murdered, a whole nation of almost a billion people suffered in a more intense gulag and in the end it was reversed.
“The secret passion of citizens in a DEMOCRACY is envy, expressed in demands for equity.”—Alexander de Tocqueville
“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to be merely idealizing envy.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior.
Further info:
Poll: Voters Prefer System Where All Have Equal Opportunity
https://apple.news/AL32w-LEjPrulZyapkW1T_Q
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