Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called “humanity.” Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore’s championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers’ jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
All are products of state-planning based on the supposedly scientific doctrine of liberal-socialism.
Seldom noted, however, is the inherent contradiction between scientific socialism and its allied scientistic perversions of true scientific inquiry.
On the one hand, state planners presume to dispense with God and to substitute their own intellects as the ultimate determinants of the human condition. On the other hand, their dismissal of God is the product of scientistic doctrine, most notably the speculative hypothesis of Darwinian evolution.
The first requires a controllable universe within the intellectual grasp of liberal planners. The other postulates that all of life is the product of chance, working through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection.
Liberal statistical virtue requires the ability to eliminate random chance and to impose uniform conditions upon humanity. Darwinian scientism rejects that in favor of an unpredictable and unknowable future for life in the struggle for survival in a changing world. Both reject the idea of personal sin and individual moral responsibility. There are only the impersonal, statistically-quantifiable, and material factors of a world devoid of spiritual meaning.
Since the late 19th century, liberals have perverted the understanding of political liberty that impelled the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
Rather than individual freedom from oppressive government taxation and regulation, liberal-progressivism defines the statistical virtue of freedom as equal distribution of income. Every person is to have free access to all of society’s goods and services, without regard to how hard or how effectively he works.
The minimum wage is nothing more nor less than a step toward forcible redistribution of income, in the same vein as graduated income taxes to finance the welfare state and the Federal regulatory behemoth. All of these are designed to homogenize the populace into standard statistics labeled with Social Security numbers to the end that bureaucrats can manipulate us as social classes, ignoring individual differences and special situations. If an individual doesn’t fit into a box in the regulations, too bad.
Ironically Joseph Stalin described the ultimate impact of statistical virtue: "true conformity” is possible only in the cemetery,” he wrote in Our purposes, Pravda #1, 22 January 1912. And, in an undocumentable quotation ascribed to him, Stalin said, When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic.
This is the essence of the statistical, abstract nature of the so-called social justice of socialism that is inculcated by our educational system today. Individualism, other than hedonistic license, is bad. Group-think and the priority of group interests over individual liberties (which presumably were to be guaranteed by the Bill of Rights) is statistical virtue.
What accounts for the appeal of this liberal-socialistic nonsense? The best explanation is Charles Murray’s aphorism that the poor are poor, not stupid. Or as Albert Jay Nock wrote, Economists have sometimes (rather inaptly, as I think) called it the Law of Parsimony; and its formula is: “Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.” This being so, then obviously the easiest way of satisfying one’s needs and desires is by exploitation; and hence the tendency towards exploitation is a natural one for man in common with the rest of the animal world.
Liberalism’s statistical virtue is simply taking the apparently easy path: pandering to the wishful thinking of the masses by telling them that they don’t have to work hard, that they are entitled to the good life via exploitation of “the rich.”
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