The 1961 short story, Harrison Bergeron, imagines a future where everyone is equal. No one is allowed to be smarter, better looking or more physically able / talented than anyone else. People who are too pretty, smart, etc., are required to wear handicaps designed to bring them down a notch or three.
I may have mentioned this once before, but I just saw an article that reminded me ….
Years ago, I was speaking with a professional colleague who believed that the government should compensate her for the extra money she had to spend on rent.
Her argument went like this. If she was a man, she could live in a cheaper area of town, because she wouldn’t be as likely to get attacked. But as a woman, she had to live in the safer areas of town. This was, in effect, a tax on women, so the government should give her a deduction, or rent assistance, or something.
I didn’t have the sense to ask her at the time, but I obviously should have asked her for the limiting principle.
Should the short get a tax deduction? How about the ugly? Studies consistently show that taller and more attractive people make more money.
Imagine the bureaucracy you could create on the back of such a principle. In addition to tall privilege and hot privilege, you’d have “raised in a two-parent home” privilege. “Your mother was not on crack” privilege.” “You grew up where there were stores with fresh vegetables in reasonable walking distance” privilege.
There’s no end to what you could justify once you accept the idea that the government should make everyone equal.
Trying to play devil’s advocate — because I’m in agreement — I can stomach some of this.
For example, there are a bunch of disability exemptions and supports which make sense to me. I don’t think it’s morally necessary to grant exemptions to copyright laws so people can republish books in Braille, but I’m not particularly bothered that we do so. The benefits are clear and the costs — though real — are modest. Whether the policy will continue to make sense as reading technology of different sorts improves, who knows?
So I reject the underlying principle, that it’s obligatory for the gov’t to square things up whenever they’re not equal. But that doesn’t mean that I therefore oppose any such efforts. I don’t think there’s One True Answer to where we should draw the lines, although buying boxes so short people can watch baseball games IMO should definitely fall outside it..
Which, if you look at it, is simply yet another way of saying I’m a conservative who doesn’t think human society can be formalized into crank-turning applications of Rawlsian principle.. which by this point should surprise exactly no one around here. 🙂