Posts Tagged ‘Social Justice’

Social Justice Fallacies

Posted by M. C. on May 30, 2024

Thus, we hear again and again about how “the rich” are “taking” too high a percentage of “national income.” The reformers want people to think that they are being victimized by greedy plutocrats, thereby engendering support for more governmental activism. What they don’t want people to understand is that when highly productive people earn (not “take”) more, they are adding to prosperity, not depriving others of anything.

by George Leef

Social Justice Fallacies

Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that terrible menace to freedom and prosperity, namely the Left’s demand that we transform the country to conform to its concept of “social justice.”

The obsession with equality

The central obsession of the Left is with equality. Their complaints about a free, truly liberal society usually stem from the fact that freedom doesn’t result in equality, therefore requiring that government employ coercion to bring it about. In the past, those people, who misleadingly call themselves “progressives,” insisted that government power be employed to ensure equal opportunity for individuals. But after decades of government efforts aimed at that, the progressives have taken to demanding equality of outcomes for favored groups. To that idea, Sowell responds,

In the real world, there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone…. People from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into development the same kinds of skills and talents.

He’s right, of course. The world is not geared for equality, and most human beings are content with that fact. As he always does, Sowell supplies plenty of evidence to support his point. For example, in 1912 in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by Turks, there were no Turks among the city’s stockbrokers. That “inequality” was not because Turks were kept out but because the field didn’t appeal to them, so it was dominated by “outsiders.” No one minded that.

What about inequality between men and women? Statists have successfully demanded equal-pay laws, but as Sowell argues, no such laws were ever needed in a labor market with free competition. “As far back as 1971,” he observes, “single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since leaving school were earning slightly more than men of the same description.” Such facts, however, never deter statists from insisting on coercive “solutions.”

The excuse of “institutional racism”

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Equality, Institutional Racism, Social Justice, statists, Thomas Sowell | Leave a Comment »

Social Justice

Posted by M. C. on January 31, 2024

Walter Block on a scary concept.

Walter Block

Colleges and universities therefore ought cease and desist forthwith from labeling themselves in this manner, and from promoting all extant programs to this end. It is unseemly to foist upon its faculty and students any one point of view on these highly contentious issues. It would be just as improper to do so from a free enterprise, limited government private property rights perspective as it is from its present stance in the opposite direction.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/141221787

On many university campuses, there is a push on to promote Social Justice. There are two ways to define “Social Justice.”

First, this concept may be defined substantively. Here, it is typically associated with left wing or socialist analyses, policies and prescriptions. For example, poverty is caused by unbridled capitalism; the solution is to heavily regulate markets, or ban them outright. Racism and sexism account for the relative plight of racial minorities and women; laws should be passed prohibiting their exercise. Greater reliance on government is required as the solution of all sorts of social problems. The planet is in great danger from environmental despoliation, due to an unjustified reliance on private property rights. Taxes are too low; they should be raised. Charity is an insult to the poor, who must obtain more revenues by right, not condescension. Diversity is the sine qua non of the fair society. Discrimination is one of the greatest evils to have ever beset mankind. Use of terminology such as “mankind” is sexist, and constitutes hate speech.

Secondly, Social Justice may be seen not as a particular viewpoint on such issues, but rather as a concern with studying them with no preconceived notions. In this perspective, no particular stance is taken on issues of poverty, capitalism, socialism, discrimination, government regulation of the economy, free enterprise, environmentalism, taxation, charity, diversity, etc. Rather, the only claim is that such topics are important for a liberal arts education, and that any institution of higher learning that ignores them does so at peril to its own mission.

So that we may be crystal clear on this distinction, a Social Justice advocate of the first variety might claim that businesses are per se improper, while one who pursued this undertaking in the second sense would content himself by merely asserting that the status of business is an important one to study.

Should a University dedicate itself to the promotion of Social Justice? It would be a disaster to do so in the first sense of this term, and it is unnecessary in the second. Let us consider each option in turn.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: left wing, Social Justice, Socialist | Leave a Comment »

DIE at 35,000 Feet

Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2024

Falling from the sky the passengers last thoughts were, “Good thing they were quadruple-vaxxed Latinx Lesbian pilots or it could have been so much worse.”

https://substack.com/inbox/post/140557940

Good Citizen

Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip.

— Flight Club

What’s it going to take for people to wake up?

Two years ago I wrote a viral essay about how we’re all on our own journeys to find the truth, and there are various stages to the journey with things becoming clear from the top of a f**king mountain.

With less than three hundred subscribers the essay got nearly 14,000 views in a matter of days. I finished the week with nearly 2,000 new subscribers.

Then I followed it up with an irreverent piece about remembering the common cold, and how people seem to have forgotten that sometimes they get ill, especially in winter, and that they don’t need a government test to tell them if they have the sniffles. That essay did nearly as well.

And then instead of playing it safe and counting my chips at the window, I stayed at the table and threw the dice on a social justice essay, and it went over like a white man walking into a POC-only campus safe space.

The attempt at exposing this scam as neither social nor just was met with a less than lukewarm response. That I brought up racism toward one particular race probably scared the shit out of a lot of Good Citizens raised on MLK speeches and programmed to be self-satisfied by virtue of their incredibly tolerant views. I can accept the attempt may have failed, but I suspect something else was at work.

Liberals (and probably some conservatives) left me by the hundreds just as quickly as they found me after claiming to “love” what I had written in the previous two weeks.

Seeing the plandemic scam for what it was is not the same as seeing all the other connections to Agenda 2030 from which it sprouted, including the toxic DIE and ESG madness, more colloquially known as “woke.”

That’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity being forced down the throats of (mostly Anglo-American) Western populations for nearly a decade now.

I had made some false assumptions about the masses on Substack before publishing that piece:

Assumed they knew about the scam of Social Justice, which is just Race Marxism packaged as tolerance and collective guilt for emotional manipulation
Assumed they knew that multiculturalism and diversity are not only not a strength to any society, but that social science research has shown the opposite—it erodes social cohesion, lowers trust, and creates division as people revert to in-group preferences
Assumed they worried this “woke” madness would destroy their children, schools, community, nation, etc.

From that post, I learned a valuable lesson early on in my Substack journey.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: DIE, diversity, equity, Inclusion, Race Marxism, Social Justice | Leave a Comment »

Is Social Justice the Progressive Equivalent of Rent-Seeking Behavior? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 28, 2023

We still see the value the robber barons created from both their commercial efforts and their charitable/social efforts. It remains to be seen whether we will see value from the social justice movement. One thing is for sure, the corrosive effects of rent seeking eat away at the rule of law, which is a foundation of American prosperity.

https://mises.org/wire/social-justice-progressive-equivalent-rent-seeking-behavior

Jeffery Marshall

The term “rent seeking” is a derogatory term that implies companies and people seek to take more than they earn. It hearkens to some Marxist ideology as well. However, especially when combined with regulatory capture and bureaucratic corruption, rent seeking is a valid concept. What happens when the shoe is on the other foot and people and organizations engage in rent seeking from a social justice perspective? Is it rent seeking or corruption for actions to secure social justice? Does the end justify the means?

Investopedia defines rent seeking as follows: “Rent seeking (or rent-seeking) is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. Typically, it revolves around government-funded social services and social service programs.”

Political scientists and economists traditionally apply the term “rent seeking” to capitalists, especially the so-called robber barons from the Gilded Age. However, what the definition does not seem to consider is value creation. Value creation could be a subset of the “contribution of productivity,” but productivity does not mean value creation. We can be highly productive in activities that produce little value or may even destroy value. While the robber barons could be cruel and demanding by virtually any measure, they created the economy and infrastructure that saw the United States through two world wars. The robber barons also provided tremendous social value with the libraries, universities, and museums they funded along with their other charitable activities. These benefits do not excuse their predatory actions, but they created extensive value, which mitigates the amount of rent-seeking behavior.

The term “rent seeking” and its definition hearken back to Karl Marx’s terminology and critique of capitalism. He was most decidedly against any form of rent seeking. Perhaps it is no accident that unions grew and perhaps reached their high point during the Gilded Age. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the West, particularly the US, turned away from anything resembling communism. The term “rent seeking” is still a charged term and concept however.

The definition of rent seeking says it is often a function of government programs. I have covered this in several blog entries (“Defending the Republic: Scenario 1 Regulatory Capture,” “Defending the Republic: Scenario 2 Policy Domination,” “Regulatory Capture and other Bureaucratic Problems,” “DIE Hydra,” and “Critical Thinking and Policy Development and Analysis”). Organizations use regulatory capture to engage in rent seeking from government programs.

A good example of rent seeking among government programs is a homeowner that builds a house in an area with frequent floods, fires, or hurricanes, yet he does not purchase the appropriate hazard insurance. When disaster strikes, the homeowner expects, if not demands, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay the costs to rebuild. FEMA does—why? Is there some deep regulatory capture going on by the home lenders and insurance companies? More study is required, but I suspect so.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: progressive, rent-seeking, Social Justice | Leave a Comment »

‘ESG,’ the Threat to Liberty You Haven’t Heard Of

Posted by M. C. on June 20, 2022

by Tommy Salmons

In March of 2020 COVID-19 spread to the shores of the United States, introducing a medical threat that had all the signs of devastating families from sea to shining sea. But in the shadows, slipping in under the veil of a potentially deadly pandemic, another threat loomed. This threat, known as ESG, was not airborne or viral in the traditional sense. This threat was birthed in the imaginations of banks, corporations, and governments, and much like COVID, this threat is going to alter the life of millions of people worldwide.

ESG is an acronym that stands for Environmental, Social (Justice), and (Corporate) Governance. The goal of ESG, as World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab stated in Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is to utilize investors to move corporations into a more socially progressive direction; moving technologies and businesses away from the current models of doing business to a new stakeholder method of business.

“Entrepreneurs and Investors are the vanguard when it comes to marrying a values-based approach to technological development…It makes sense that thinking about broader social impact at this stage would have significant cascading effects. Investors, on the other hand, have the carrot with which to direct the development of technologies…The values of entrepreneurs and organizational leaders have a tremendous influence on the workplace and how technologies are developed. Leading from the front can transform company culture and prioritize societal values.”

When Coca-Cola, Gillette, Disney, BP, and other multinational corporations act counter to good business practices to advance a political agenda antithetical to the beliefs of most of their consumer base it is an effort to improve the new value-based credit score known as ESG. As corporations respond to investors and the credit score used to determine societal value, they push agendas intended to move the Overton Window and cultural acceptance towards a more progressive agenda.

Proponents of ESG metrics utilize the famous libertarian mantra of private companies being able to do whatever they feel is best for their company and fiduciary responsibilities, but there’s nothing private about ESG. In March of 2020 the SEC announced they would be forming an ESG Taskforce. The initiative has expanded to requiring publicly traded firms to make detailed disclosures on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. As with all regulations ESG is being sold as serving the greater good at the cost of business, costing the consumer more money.

Proponents of ESG make a litany of arguments to justify their regulatory dreams:

But they will never address in any detail how ESG metrics will be utilized to make these changes to society. And if ESG is just a tool to help investors make decisions why is the SEC mandating ESG data disclosures? And who is considered an investor?

Chart published by the Ethics and Compliance Initiative

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Corporate Governance, Environmental, ESG, Social Justice | Leave a Comment »

Woke Capitalism Is a Monopoly Game

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2022

And, as Xi Jinping acknowledged in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, it is not “egalitarian.” It vests economic and political power in the hands of corporate and state elites, and it uses coercion and state power to concentrate the control of wealth in their hands—however much they promise to redistribute it through “social justice.”

https://mises.org/wire/woke-capitalism-monopoly-game

Michael Rectenwald

In 2018, Ross Douthat of the New York Times introduced the phrase “woke capital.” Essentially, Douthat suggested that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic value for economic value. Under woke capitalism, corporations offer workers rhetorical placebos in lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages and better benefits. The same gestures of wokeness also appease the liberal political elite, promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender pluralism, transgender rights, lax immigration standards, climate change mitigation, and so on. In return, woke corporations hope to be spared higher taxes, increased regulations, and antitrust legislation aimed at monopolies. Although woke capitalism alienates cultural conservatives, the Republican Party remains procorporate, making woke capitalism a win-win strategy for corporations.

Business Insider columnist Josh Barro suggested that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for workers and corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement, woke capitalism offers them representation in the public sphere, as they see their values reflected in corporate pronouncements.

Others have suggested that corporations have gone woke only to be spared cancellation by Twitter mobs and other activists, that wokeness is a good “branding tool,” or that progressive shareholders also demand corporate activism.

But woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists. Rather, as wokeness has escalated and taken hold of corporations and states, it has become a demarcation device, a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Woke capitalism has become a monopoly game.

Just as nonwoke individuals are cancelled from civic life, so too are nonwoke companies cancelled from the economy, leaving the spoils to the woke. Corporate cancellations are not merely the result of political fallout. They are being institutionalized and carried out through the stock market. The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index is a Chinese-style social credit score for rating corporations. Woke planners wield the ESG Index to reward the in-group and to squeeze nonwoke players out of the market. Woke investment drives ownership and control of production away from the noncompliant. The ESG Index serves as an admission ticket for entry into the woke cartels.

Research suggests that ESG investing favors large over small companies. Woke capitalism vests as much control over production and distribution in these large, favored corporations as possible while eliminating industries and producers deemed either unnecessary or inimical.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: monopoly, Social Justice, Woke Capitalism, Xi Jinping | Leave a Comment »

An open letter: why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness by Africa Brooke

Posted by M. C. on December 16, 2021

If there’s one thing I’m NOT afraid of, it’s being ‘cancelled’.

If being cancelled means me living in integrity as a human being who thinks for themselves, CANCEL ME TODAY!

I repeat; I am not afraid.

What I’m truly afraid of is existing in a world that forces me to submit to an ideology without question, otherwise I’m to be shamed (or pressured to shame myself) and cast out of the community.

A world that tells me that because I inhabit a black body; I will forever be oppressed and at the mercy of some omnipresent monster called ‘whiteness’.

That because of the colour of my skin; I am a victim of an inherently racist system by default – and me rejecting the narrative of oppression means that I am in fact, in denial.

How empowering!

*You know, as someone that comes from Zimbabwe, a country where the general population is truly oppressed, it perplexes me that oppression is now being worn as an identity piece in most parts of the West, especially by those who claim to be ‘progressive’*

What I’m truly afraid of is existing in a world that forces me to consider the colour of my skin and my gender (and that of others) at every fucking turn, instead of living by Martin Luther King’s teachings and prioritising the content of mine and other people’s character.

I dread the prospect of a world where context, nuance, critical thinking, meritocracy, mathematics, science, and rationality are considered tools of ‘white supremacy’, and the rule is that you’re not allowed to question or argue this senseless statement – especially if you’re white.

A world that is conditioning you and I to believe that we will always be trapped in some weird hierarchy because of our race, our genitals, our physical abilities, our neurodiversity, our sexuality, and our politics.

And that if we do not agree on every single thing, it’s a sign that we are interacting with an enemy – or at the very least, someone to be wildly suspicious and judgmental of…instead of another complex human being worthy of being seen and heard.

I wish this world I’m speaking of was just a figment of my imagination, but we are already inside it. Our suitcases have been unpacked here for quite some time.

This absolutist, authoritarian world is being fiercely crafted under the guise of ‘social justice’, and I want no parts in this. I AM OUT.

As someone that, politically speaking, leans left on most things (although I’m neither left or right) – the current state of affairs and this push for obedience at all costs is NOT what I signed up for.

I never signed up to be hit over the head with disempowering narratives that tell me that I need to refer to myself as a ‘person of colour’ (how is this different being called a ‘coloured’ person?), a minority, a marginalised person, and BAME (UK version of BIPOC).

I cannot stand any of these terms.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Africa Brooke, BAME, BIPOC, neurodiversity, Social Justice, wokeness, Zimbabwe | Leave a Comment »

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Posts Tagged ‘Social Justice’

The obsession with equality

The excuse of “institutional racism”