If more of the American electorate were aware of three things, I would like to think that one of our two national parties would have a significantly more difficult time maintaining power.<\/p>\n
These three things pertain to the contemporary American university.\u00a0 And the party that has an interest invested in keeping Americans in the dark about these facts is the party of which President Barack H. Obama is the titular head.<\/p>\n
The first fact is that the professorial class consists overwhelmingly of hard leftists. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The second is that these hard leftists vote almost invariably vote for Democrats and never\u2014never\u2014for Republicans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Third and finally, Democratic politicians are continually busy at work advocating on behalf of the ideas that their academic counterparts are just as busily formulating.\u00a0 To put it more simply, there is an inseparable connection between the theoretical imaginings of leftist academics and the policy prescriptions of leftist politicians\u2014i.e. Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Take the Democrats tactic of choice, for instance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Democrats are known for nothing if not their penchant for wailing over \u201cthe greed\u201d of \u201cmillionaires and billionaires\u201d who \u201cexploit\u201d the rest of us by refusing to \u201cpay their fair share\u201d of taxes.\u00a0 As his relentless assaults against his election opponent have amply demonstrated, Barack Obama is the Democrat par excellence <\/em>when it comes to advancing this line.<\/p>\n Republicans refer to this as the politics of \u201cclass warfare\u201d and\/or \u201cenvy.\u201d Democrats resist the charge.\u00a0 However, when we look beyond the surface of sound bites, sloganeering, and photo shoots to the university, what we discover is that the Republicans\u2019 charge is not wide of the mark.\u00a0 Leftists, you see\u2014always to be counted upon to depart from the ethical traditions of the civilization to which they owe their existence\u2014do not regard envy as the vicious character disposition that it has always been held to be.\u00a0\u00a0 Much less do they view envy as one of the seven deadly sins that St. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theorists spent centuries deploring.<\/p>\n Ronald Dworkin is one of the better known legal scholars of our time.\u00a0 A Harvard professor and prolific writer on topics ranging from philosophy of law to ethics to political philosophy, he has engaged in lively exchanges with the most distinguished of contemporary thinkers, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, Dworkin is not some fringe thinker.<\/p>\n This is important to bear in mind, for Dworkin reveals just how Obama and his fellow partisans think about \u201csocial\u201d or \u201ceconomic justice.\u201d<\/p>\n For Dworkin, justice is to be measured in terms of an \u201cideal\u201d distribution of resources.\u00a0 There are two kinds of resources, \u201cpersonal\u201d and \u201cimpersonal.\u201d\u00a0 The former consists in those mental and physical attributes, like health, strength, talent, that make success in life either harder or easier to come by. Impersonal resources, on the other hand, are material goods, tangible things\u2014properties and property rights.<\/p>\n We can determine whether there exists an ideal distribution of resources\u2014justice\u2014by applying what Dworkin refers to as \u201cthe envy<\/em> test.\u201d\u00a0 He writes: \u201cSomeone envies the resource-set of another person when he would prefer that resource-set to his own, and would therefore trade his own for it.\u201d\u00a0 If, though, \u201cno member of the community envies the total set of resources under the control of any other member,\u201d then \u201cequality is perfect\u201d and, thus, justice is achieved.<\/p>\n Notice, an \u201cideal\u201d distribution of resources is an \u201cequal\u201d distribution of resources, and such a distribution is a \u201cjust\u201d distribution.<\/p>\n Things get worse.<\/p>\n Dworkin invites us to engage in an imaginary \u201cauction\u201d where only impersonal resources can be traded.\u00a0 That is, only property and property rights can be \u201cequalized.\u201d\u00a0 Still, even if there is perfect equality of material possessions, some people may still envy the looks and talents of others.\u00a0 And even if personal resources are more or less comparable, luck may supply unfair advantages to some people.<\/p>\n In order to rectify, as much as possible, these situations, there must be \u201ccompensatory strategies to repair\u2026inequalities in personal resources and luck.\u201d\u00a0 These \u201ccompensatory programs\u201d can be \u201cmodeled on hypothetical insurance markets\u201d and \u201cfinanced by general taxation.\u201d<\/p>\n Dworkin is clear that if there are conflicts between the demands of equality and liberty, then \u201cinvasions of liberties\u201d will be justified if they are \u201cnecessary to protect an egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n The point here is clear: there is nothing <\/em>of a person\u2019s that the government may not confiscate as long as there are others in society who envy it. \u00a0<\/p>\n The kind of thinking on display in the work of academics like Ronald Dworkin finds expression in the policies of Democratic politicians like Barack Obama.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is what Americans need to realize\u2014even if the Democrats would like for us to remain ignorant of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If more of the American electorate were aware of three things, I would like to think that one of our two national parties would have a significantly more difficult time maintaining power. These three things pertain to the contemporary American university.\u00a0 And the party that has an interest invested in keeping Americans in the dark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n