"Fairness - The Solution to our Problems?"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“Fairness – The Solution to Our Problems?”

December 12, 2011

Fairness. That was certainly the message the President wanted to send when he spoke in Osawatomie, Kansas last Wednesday. “It is a view,” he said, “that says in America we are greater together – when everyone engages in fair play and everybody gets a fair shot and everybody does their fair share.” The words sound more than fair. The problem is defining “fair.” My dictionary, an unabridged Random House of 2214 pages, has 31 definitions for “fair.” A first edition of Webster’s Dictionary published in 1828 sitting on an adjoining shelf, and which is used more to look at than look through, has a mere 17 definitions. When “Obama” and “fairness” are googled, 14,100,000 results appear in seven seconds. Fairness tends to be one of those conditions that comes under the category of “we know it when we experience it.”

The three witches in Macbeth, creatures of the night, are meant to confuse their audience by proclaiming that “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” However, just to toss more mushrooms into the stew, there are at least three other sayings: “fair is fair”, “all is fair in love and war” and “Life is not fair!” How many times have we expressed the last sentiment, or heard it said. We walk away dizzy. I asked my ten year old grandson, Alex, what he thought the word meant; he suggested that something was fair when all agreed to it – a definition as good as I could find, but one seemingly impossible to achieve and certainly not in Washington today – what is fair to one seems foul, or unfair, to another. When Mr. Obama uses the term “fair”, it implies that government be the arbiter.

As mentioned above, we generally recognize fairness, or unfairness for that matter, when we see it. Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and former U.S. Senator and Governor of New Jersey, became CEO of MF Global a little less than two years ago. $1.2 billion dollars of customer funds disappeared on his watch. On Thursday, in testimony before Congress, Mr. Corzine said: “I simply do not know where the money is.” Co-mixing customer funds and a firm’s capital has been a no-no ever since the concept of banking began. It so happens that the chairman of the regulatory body principally responsible for MF Global – the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC) – was Gary Gensler, a former partner of Goldman Sachs when Jon Corzine served as CEO of the firm. It would appear that Mr. Gensler cut a little slack for his friend and former boss, Mr. Corzine. That does not have the appearance of being fair.

Fairness and justice are strongly linked. Astraea, a daughter of Zeus and Athena, in part because of her predilection for fairness, was considered the Goddess of Justice. Recently, Nancy Koehn reviewed The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards by Paul Woodruff in the New York Times. When Achilles, Athens chief warrior, was slain in battle, Odysseus and Ajax argued before King Agamemnon as to which of the two would replace him. Ajax was considered, as Ms. Koehn writes, “courageous, loyal and hardworking.” Odysseus was thought of as “innovative and articulate, but not completely trustworthy; his values seem to fluctuate to suit his interests.” Ajax loses. Professor Woodruff makes the analogy to present day Wall Street – that Odysseus, with his less than fixed moral compass, represents Wall Street, or the “one percent.” In denying Ajax the top prize, the King and his jurors “effectively destroy not only Ajax’s motivation, but also the morale and engagement of the other troops, virtually all of whom see themselves as loyal.” But somebody did have to win – a concept perhaps difficult to comprehend at a time when elementary schools hand out awards for participation, rather than recognizing that young children have differences in talent.

Talent versus loyalty; brain against brawn – an age-old dilemma and intimately tied to fairness, or perhaps the lack thereof. In a meritocracy, there are winners; and when there are winners there must be losers. Is that fair? Was it fair for the poor souls – as many as two million – who were born within two or three years of 1894 in England, Germany or France who died in trenches in World War I, for a cause with which they had no input? Was it fair that my father died of cancer at the age of 58, or that my brother, Stuart, was born with Prader-Willi symptoms? Of course it is not. Should assistance be provided to help those such as my brother? Of course. But, there are murkier questions. Is it fair that some are endowed with greater intelligence or more athleticism than others? Is it fair that some people got into financial trouble because they took out a mortgage they could not afford? Is it fair that the more prudent have been penalized, first by having interest rates kept artificially low on their savings and, second, by having to bail out their profligate neighbors? Should we provide a head start on life’s race to those who work less hard, or who have less ability? I don’t think so. As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Fairness on the part of government, in my opinion, has to do with opportunities, not with outcomes. The greatest opportunity a state can provide a young citizen is the best education available. In this instance, as scores and competition tell us, we have not performed well. Fairness means choice, especially in education. In schools, the needs of the students should supersede the demands of teachers. There is little I have ever seen that is sadder than watching a mother’s crestfallen face when, at a lottery, her child is denied an opportunity to attend a charter school because the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA) have limited the number of places available. Competition in any endeavor is fairer than having choices made for one by some appointed committee. Immanuel Kant put his finger on an eternal truism: “The death of dogma is the birth of morality.”

It is all well and good for President Obama to travel to Kansas and tell us we should be fairer, but his record does not match his rhetoric. He has increasingly made the state the arbiter of what is right and wrong, the best examples being healthcare, the EPA and the Consumer Protection Agency. He has sought equality of outcomes, at the expense of equality of opportunity, the best example being his ties to teacher’s unions. At its essence, his assumption is that the state knows best and, as head of state, he knows better than anyone else. The Declaration of Independence expressed far more humility than does Mr. Obama: “Government derives their power from the consent of the governed…The people have the right to abolish or alter it.” Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have at their core that those who govern work for the people, not the other way around. Fairness means that those in Washington should acknowledge that inalienable right of the people. Fairness is critical to a healthy and prosperous future, but it is a fairness that stems from the people, not from some bureaucrat telling us what “fairness” means.