Over a year ago, I posted a column here titled “Why Equal Opportunity Is Immoral And Wrong.” As I expected, my message sailed over some readers’ heads. Multiple commenters weighed in with the typical, programmed response: “Well, it’s bad to try to force equal outcomes — but guaranteeing equal opportunity is good and right, and what our system is about,” etc.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I had tried to explain that if the doctrine of equal opportunity is really applied in principle, some third-party entity (government, of course) would by necessity always have to step in to forcibly strip parents of their ability and natural prerogative to give their children any advantages over the children of other parents who are, by comparison, derelict and/or less prudent, less competent at breeding successful offspring, and giving them better chances.
My earlier article/argument was soundly vindicated recently when a cultural bombshell of a news item went viral all across the fruited internets: A Leftist British professor has caused a huge sensation by claiming that parents who read to their children at home are giving their kids unfair advantages over the children of those who (for whatever reason) don’t read to them.
In my previous piece, I took pains to point out that this type of dogma is at the very heart of Marxist philosophy and practice — advocating the destruction of the traditional family as a cultural institution, replacing it with cultural indoctrination by the state: Public education instead of primary parental influences.
To those of us on the Right, that’s an abomination, immoral, and wrong. Unfortunately, many of the same people who know this, also mistakenly think “equal opportunity” means something good and right. I say they’ve just never really thought about it enough.
I’ve had people react with disbelief when I’ve tried to point out that every single opportunity is really also an outcome, and therefore, to speak of equal opportunity is to speak of equal outcomes.
One guy’s incredulous comment was “How is giving everyone the opportunity of equal access to public school an outcome?!” I had already gone around and around with him to the point where I realized that engaging him any more was pointless folly, so I just didn’t answer him further. But if you, dear reader, cannot fathom how it is that the very existence of just the physical structure of a public school building is, by itself alone, the outcome of endless decisions and actions by others, not to mention the redistribution of others’ rightful property, then I probably cannot help you.
By definition, equal opportunity doesn’t merely mean the idea that everyone should have a shot at some job as long as they meet minimum criteria, or that everyone be given the chance to take some test (even that supposedly “fair” philosophy is rife with widely unrecognized absurdities). In reality, what equal opportunity actually means is that nobody starts out in life with, or ever gains any, advantages over anyone else, ever. It means no inheritance rights, and no enjoyment of benefits of any kind by the children of those who worked and/or made smart choices in order to afford them.
The doctrine of equal opportunity means nothing less than completely erasing and cancelling out all benefits of parental involvement in their children’s lives, because for everyone to start out in life with equal opportunities, no child can have any better condition than, say, a crack baby abandoned in a garbage can, or some arbitrary minimum threshold determined by socialist bureaucrats(as if even that were possible).
It is the ‘classless’ dystopia of communism. That is, relying mostly on the brute force of bureaucracy, instead of the personal benevolences and free market forces of capitalism, to compensate people.
This past Tuesday, Affirmative Action Obama went on one of his rambling socialist pontifications again, droning on with the same old crap, complaining about how awful it is when “society’s lottery winners(that is, people who generally make good choices and/or are the rightful beneficiaries of others’ good choices)” often do whatever they can to distance themselves from dangerous and inferior elements & influences in society.
Obama’s ungrateful Affirmative Action wife, as I’m sure you noticed, also did quite a bit of the same old race-baiting/bellyaching very recently — much worse than her husband did, in fact.
If you caught his tedious lecture at Georgetown University, you heard Obama doing his usual bashing of FOX News, saying the network depicts the poor of our society mainly as “undeserving sponges and moochers.” Obama griped on about FOX News: “Very rarely do you hear an interview with a waitress, which is much more typical, who is raising a couple of kids and doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.”
There’s much of the rub, right there. According to Obama and his party, unwed mothers are “doing everything right.”
Marx and Engels would agree. To them, and to modern “progressives,” an intact, two-parent family is the problem, the enemy of the egalitarian state.
Think they won’t try it? Will ‘Equal Opportunity’ Thugs Outlaw Reading To Your Kids At Home?
