As armed functionaries stand over you demanding tax to redistribute, remember that some of those funds will be redistributed to tenured radicals paid
The Intellectuals and Redistribution
By Max Borders
As armed functionaries stand over you demanding tax to redistribute, remember that some of those funds will be redistributed to tenured radicals paid to dream up new justifications for redistribution.
The fight is being waged on all fronts, and the most insidious idea employed to break down society is an undefined equalitarianism. [...] Such equalitarianism is harmful because it always presents itself as a redress of injustice, whereas in truth it is the very opposite.
– Richard Weaver, from Ideas Have Consequences
About ten minutes from my old apartment in Austin, one professor, Daniel Hamermesh, kept an office at The University of Texas.
Hamermesh found his fifteen minutes when he suggested that attractive people have advantages over ugly people, so deserve to be a protected class.
Did he have a point? Should the fruits of good looks be redistributed among the less attractive? Looks (good or bad) are arbitrary, after all.
Here’s Hamermesh writing in The New York Times:
Ugliness could be protected generally in the United States by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could be allowed to seek help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies in overcoming the effects of discrimination. We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.
Hamermesh’s fifteen minutes was magnified by his appearance on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Correspondent Jason Jones had fun discussing “uglo-Americans.”
Jones walked around with Hamermesh on UT’s campus, rating co-eds on a scale of one to five. What was so funny about this segment? A lot. But the funniest thing was that Hamermesh took his idea very seriously: One’s looks, after all, are something you win in the “natural lottery.” You don’t do any work to be cute and sexy. Why do you deserve much of what your cuteness and sexiness yields?
I used to think it was pretty self-evident to think people should be able to take advantage of their unequal natural endowments. I even used the example of looks once to expose wealth redistribution's absurdity.
“[P]eople use their natural endowments to gain advantages in individual acts of consensual exchange in both dating and trading,” I wrote in 2010.
Such results in natural inequality in the distribution of sex and money. The distribution is such that ugly people normally get dates with other ugly people if they get dates at all. Sexy people get dates with sexier people—and more of them. I think we can agree that it would be wrong to suggest ‘redistribution’ based on any abstractions like the distribution of dates among the sexy and the ugly. So why is this different for other outcomes of consensual exchange?
I guess I was too clever by half.
Leave it to the intellectuals to double down on any absurdities you might expose. The point, though, is not so much to join Comedy Central in poking fun at Professor Hamermesh. He was only a tiny plot point in a pointillist’s painting—one among millions of intellectuals paid to justify taking the earnings of the successful.
It turns out his sexy tax had been a harbinger of absurdities to come.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to conjure up one of the academic left's more obscure proposals. But as I’ve written elsewhere, the idea keeps resurfacing that natural attributes are arbitrary, so justice demands violent redress ([link removed]) .
We have to wonder why so many intellectuals have such [DEL: egalitarian :DEL] authoritarian leanings. But at some point, the justifications differed: Where Hamermesh’s proposal turns on the arbitrariness of natural attributes and seeks to correct for this (redistribute because group x can’t help that they’re born x), social justice fundamentalist ‘scholarship’ agrees that natural attributes are arbitrary, but justifies redistribution despite that fact (redistribute because a group was born x, and group x’s members have been mistreated in the past). In one case, an individual is evaluated according to natural disadvantage. In the other case, groups are evaluated according to historical disadvantage. In both cases, justice is understood as a Cosmic Scoreboard.
Intellectuals and Redistribution
If academia is, itself, a purgatory of redistributed wealth, it is also a museum of strange ideas about redistribution. Such prompts the question: Why are universities chock full of radical egalitarians? And why do so many intellectuals advocate redistribution?
Remember: It’s not just to argue that you ought to share (compassion); it’s to argue that men with guns should make you share (compulsion). And a lot of really smart people support the idea—so many, in fact, that if you’re reasonably intelligent and you don’t support soaking the rich, you might start to gaze at your navel.
How could such smart people be in the grip of groupthink?
Could people like me who don’t support redistribution be missing something?
Are intelligent people morally enlightened in ways the rest of us are not?
When it comes to such questions, there are a few giants on whose shoulders we can stand. Though they are in the minority, a few top-notch intellectuals have asked similar questions about the connection between academics and egalitarianism.
Their answers are fascinating.
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Read the rest of this article and others like it on our website ([link removed]) .
Max Borders is a senior advisor to The Advocates, you can read more from him at Underthrow ([link removed]) .
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