Posted on 06/17/2013 8:14:04 AM PDT by Rusty0604
Speaking at the Princeton University graduation in June, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spelled out his political philosophy: from each according to his luck, to each according to his need.
He explained that meritocracies were inherently unfair, and that those who were the luckiest needed to give back to society to make the concept of meritocracy work ethically.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The meritocracy as defined by where your degree came from, often ain’t so meritorious. I know a research scientist at Yale who often deals with students. His take - Ivy league schools are very difficult to get into, but also very difficult to flunk out of.
Luck? What an idiot I’ve been. I thought working days, nights, and weekends had something to do with it. Heck, I’m such a fool I thought I was supposed to pay my own way though college, and when I finished I found a job for which my schooling had prepared me. I chose and paid for my shelter according to what I could afford. I married and had children, in that order. I paid for health insurance with money I would rather have used for vacations and ballgames. We made a lot of mistakes, too, but most of the time we did the best we could, we don’t think we’re special. We’re Americans, and that’s what most Americans do.
I once had a young woman ask hubby and me how long we had been married. At the time, it was 30 years. "Oh, you're lucky." That is what she said, I was stunned. I may have been "lucky" to have found him; but, getting and staying married requires a little bit more than that.
Just keep printing those greenback IOUs at warp speed, Ben.
This is absolutely repugnant!
Delegating compassion to government is like delegating peacekeeping to criminals.
At the end of the day fairness and compassion are acts of individuals not bureaucracies.
We should differentiate three types of people:
Those born into wealth and privilege, for whom it is honorable to live lives of benefaction.
Those born into the mass of ordinary people, who having talent and ambition, create wealth and move society forward.
Those born into the mass of ordinary people, who not being particularly talented and ambitious, are engaged in work, family and community.
America’s strength has always been in the second and third type of person, not the first. To the extent Bernanke relates the graduates of Princeton to the first type, he differentiates them from the mass of ordinary people.
Those people - the elitists - have their place, but it is not in ruling over us. When they confuse privilege with being part of a natural aristocracy, they are not only handicapped from serving others, they are dangerous to the liberties of the masses of people.
This is what Lincoln spoke about when he said freedom means different things to the fox and to the sheep.
For the sheep, who are productive of wool and mutton, freedom mostly means being left alone (which means the government should play the role of policeman to protect us from the fox).
Whereas, to the fox, freedom means being able to take the product of those who work, our wool and our mutton, for their own purposes, unrestrained by law and custom.
Another “winner of Life’s Lottery” speaks.
He must be channeling Clinton.
He has been reading too much of Rawls's Theory of Justice which says that it is perfectly just for society to sacrifice the men of intelligence and creative ability-to seize their products and redistribute them to the world's losers-because their superior ability was a lucky gift from nature.
Thanks to the law of comparative advantage and the pyramic of ability principle,in a rational modern division of labor society, there is not only room, but also actual need, for everyone in the competition of a division of labor society, even for those who are less capable than others in every respect.
Thanks to economic inequality,and the fact that in a rational division of labor society,a growing body of technological knowledge, manifested in ever improved tools and machines and in man's growing power over the physical world in which he lives, makes possible a continuous increase in the total of what is produced. Where the total of what can be produced expands it can be concluded that when the so called "lucky" get rich, the less fortunate also get richer.
So if he won the lottery, he would distribute all of his winnings to the rest of us, since that CLEARLY would have been “luck”?
You know who is lucky? The guy born with athletic genetics. Sure, they work at it, but no more than we all work at what we do. But because they are “athletes”, they make sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
Maybe those people should all give their money back, instead of taking all of our tax dollars to build the stadiums where we then pay all the money to watch them play?
Barack Obama is President, so it is hard to argue that you can’t get ahead through dumb luck and incompetence.
>> He explained that meritocracies were inherently unfair
Nonsense. A meritocracy where there is equal opportunity for all — as the US was intended by the founders to be — is NOT inherently unfair.
It is inherently *unequal* in *outcome*, but so what? So is EVERY OTHER sociopolitical system put into practice by human beings.
As long as we’re going to get all philosophical, Ben — the best system would be a free society populated by practicing Christians (not Christians in name only). Kinda like our founding fathers envisioned.
God’s saving grace, freely given to all through the work of Jesus Christ — there’s your “equal outcome”, Ben. Meanwhile, free Christians use their freedom to “work quietly with their hands”, love one another, and ensure that the “least of them” are cared for. Greed — the downfall of capitalism — is abhorrent to a practicing Christian, as is laziness and self-indulgence at the expense of your fellows — the downfall of socialism.
There would be no better, more pleasant, more productive way on Earth to live than in uniform joyful obedience to God — and then go on to live with Him for all of eternity when our time here is done.
But Satan screws it up.
>> ‘Benny and the inkjets’
rofl
See my post #20
Is this one of those semi-news/ semi-satire things?
I told him to assign the next big project to somebody else and see if he's lucky.
Moved on to something else.
BTW, he was a Democrat and he lived in Maryland. His wife was divorcing him for 'getting lucky' and 'getting caught' one too many times, and yet he was afraid of moving to Virginia.
She cleaned his pockets!
I wish it were.
Yeah.
Sometimes things do fall your way but only because you worked your fingers to the bone to be where they will fall.
Since when does LUCK have to do with a MERITOCRACY???? Goodness apparently English is not his first language.....
We all know people who appear to have gotten ahead by luck, or by cheating or other unethical behavior.
And we all know people who’ve worked hard and done their best, and due to bad luck have never really gotten out from behind the 8 ball.
These are just facts. The free market is not fair, anymore than life in general is fair. But it’s a lot more fair than any system humans can conceivably devise and run to make it more fair. At least its “decisions” are made without malice or bias.
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