What Is Fairness?

British Prime Minister David Cameron asked polling organization Policy Exchange to find out what the people think it is.Telegraph Columnist Janet Daly tells us what they found out:

The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report's title – "Just Deserts" – implies, that people get what they deserve. And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.

She goes on:

Imagine that. After all these years of being morally blackmailed by the poverty lobby, harried by socialist ideologues and shouted at by self-serving public sector axe-grinders, the people are not cowed. Even after being bludgeoned by the BBC thought monitors and browbeaten by Left-liberal media academics with the soft Marxist view of a "fair" society – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – they have not bought it. They do not believe that if people are poor, it is necessarily society's fault, and therefore society's duty to deal with the consequences.

The left isn't really interested in alleviating poverty. If the problem of poverty went away they would have no reason for being. Poverty allows them to buy votes with other peoples money.

Read the whole thing.

C. Edmund Wright - Recovery When? How About If?

Back in December I posted on and linked to an article in the American Thinker by C. Edmund Wright, a small business owner who had been reading the handwriting on the wall post election and not liking what he saw, decided to wind his business down. He has just written another article for the American Thinker entitled, "Recovery When? How About If?". He lays out a very good synopsis of the series of events that have led the economy to where it is today. It starts with energy prices. Go and read the whole thing of course but here is the lede:

"Shhh. Don't let this get around, but Warren Buffet just let the cat out of the bag -- no economic recovery in sight.

Well no kidding. I have long tired of the economists and investment gurus debating "when our economy recovers" and how to position your investments for "when America bounces back" and so on, as if it's a foregone conclusion. Haven't they heard? The America that always recovers is not in anymore. Any assumption of a recovery fails to consider the idea that we now have a government run by people who ignore American history and who are hell bent on changing America's future.

Obama has done more than apologize for America's greatness and generosity while abroad. He is wreaking havoc on the economy that paid for that greatness and generosity at home. Don't you remember? He is "the one" we've been waiting for to finally do something right around here.

Thus the conviction that Americans always bounce back and bring their economy with them is not necessarily relevant anymore. The rules for business have changed and continue to do so daily. Incentive has been devastated. The reliable motivations of the past do not matter, because most of those dynamics have been targeted as what is wrong with this country and they are systematically being removed at a stunning pace.

In reaction, Atlas is shrugging. And who can blame him (and her)."