Combining elements of two earlier posts this morning ? Thomas Sowell and social justice ? Thomas Sowell’s latest column posted at Human Events focuses on “social justice.”
Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as “social justice.”
The idea cannot be refuted because it has no specific meaning. Fighting it would be like trying to punch the fog. No wonder “social justice” has been such a political success for more than a century– and counting.
While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right– that it is unjust– that some people are so much better off than others.
Justification, even as the term is used in printing and carpentry, means aligning one thing with another. But what is the standard to which we think incomes or other benefits should be aligned?
Is the person who has spent years in school goofing off, acting up or fighting– squandering the tens of thousands of dollars that the taxpayers have spent on his education– supposed to end up with his income aligned with that of the person who spent those same years studying to acquire knowledge and skills that would later be valuable to himself and to society at large?
Some advocates of “social justice” would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person’s chances in life radically different from the chances that others have– through no fault of one and through no merit of the others.
Maybe the person who wasted educational opportunities and developed self-destructive behavior would have turned out differently if born into a different home or a different community.
That would of course be more just. But now we are no longer talking about “social” justice, unless we believe that it is all society’s fault that different families and communities have different values and priorities– and that society can “solve” that “problem.”
