No Racial and Social Justice. Only Justice!

Happy Monday!

My family went to Lake Tahoe for vacation last week, and it was awesome! I should probably take a break more often… 🙂

Being out in nature is a great time to clear my head, reprioritize, and make sense of some of the things going on in the world. This morning I was thinking about an article I read about how capitalism needs a reset so that it can merge with socialism in order to give more power to government to ensure racial and social justice.

I’ll include a few excerpts, but the premise is basically that there’s too much inequality in the world, people can’t better their lives through hard work, and so the world needs a reset of capitalism in order to make things fair for everyone. By “fair,” of course, they are talking about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity under law—we already have that. And for many, that’s not good enough.

The piece opens with this:

Wealth needs to be more broadly redistributed.

Governments will need to intervene more to ensure better and fairer outcomes from private sector investments.

New institutions need to incorporate profound reforms to ensure better racial integration.

Capitalism as we know it needs to be reformed. The growing discontent at the ideology that has created so much wealth and progress on the one hand, and yet so much inequality and instability on the other hand, is causing increasingly frequent social disruptions across the world. The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare most of these dysfunctions, ranging from uneven access to healthcare, education, economic opportunities, and social progress, to growing inequality among and within nations and racial and ethnic groups. At the centre of these multiple crises lies the tension between privilege and meritocracy.

Nothing creepy about that, right? I love how they go on to talk about capitalism in the past tense—like we are all just in agreement that it didn’t work and that it should be abandoned. They try to assure us that they aren’t advocating communism, but, call me crazy, I just don’t know if I really trust these guys:

Firstly, the slow death of capitalism does not equate to a resurgence of communism. However, rethinking capitalism, or giving capitalism a “Great Reset” as World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab has suggested, means that capitalism and socialism will need to merge to create a productive and inclusive economic and social model.

Wealth has become abundant, thanks to capitalism, but it now needs to be more broadly redistributed, as socialists have long called for.

In the new institutional context, governments will need to intervene more to ensure better and fairer outcomes from private sector investments. One way this can be done is by introducing a universal basic income (UBI) funded by taxing wealth and passive income, and by making better use of public savings.

Oh, by the way, this article is from the World Economic Forum. It’s not like I pulled it from some super-lefty opinion columnist’s anti-capitalist rant in The San Francisco Chronicle or something. So now that they’ve established that in order to make up for all the problems that capitalism has caused we need government-mandated redistribution of wealth and a UBI, they go on to talk about “white privilege” and the need to ensure equality of outcome across the world:

On systemic racism, new institutions need to incorporate profound reforms to ensure better racial integration and to rectify centuries of accumulated prejudice to colonized countries and to minority groups, especially black and brown communities. It is important to acknowledge “white privilege” and to break the myth of pure meritocracy that has persisted for too long as an explanation for not only the divergence in outcomes between rich and poor countries, but between rich and poor people along all dimensions of society.

They’ve even found a way to bring COVID-19 into their narrative—that’s shocking (eye roll). They’re essentially crediting the global pandemic with bringing to light the “defining challenge” of capitalism, which they say is “systematic injustice.”

Systemic injustice is the defining challenge of our era of capitalism, and COVID-19 has brought it to the surface. Underneath the abundance of the few lies a high degree of inequity. Meritocracy does exist, but it is important to distinguish outcomes driven by privilege from those resulting from meritocracy and to diagnose contexts where privilege hinders meritocracy.

They offer up the solution of a new social contract (chills should go up your spine right there) to fight social injustice and, of course, government with enough power to enforce it:

With all that said, there is an urgent need to design institutions that can address the wide ranging imperfections of the world as we know it. A new social contract that accounts for the specific challenges and histories of each country but that also aims to ensure that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is needed to lay the past to rest and pave the way to a better future.

Nevermind that within the United States—and most first-world countries—there are no laws that discriminate against people based on their race, or any social identifier. No one is even making that claim.The claim being made by this powerful global organization is that we must judge people based on their skin color and their social identifiers and give or withhold privilege—in the name of justice—on that basis alone.

I swear, sometimes I feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone! It’s like we are somehow going backward in time where now, in order to be inclusive, we must have a legal system and an economy based on how people look or who they love or what their sex is. I can’t help but picture the heroes of the civil rights movement, and the suffragettes literally rolling over in their graves right now—not to mention all the entrepreneurs and those who crafted a really great life in spite of really tough circumstances.

Surely this is not what they would have wanted.

One of my favorite pages in all the Tuttle Twins books is in The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom. It shows two images of hands with one image depicting hands chained together under the title “Collectivism,” and the other showing a handshake under the title “Individualism.” This picture is so powerful in its perfect visualization of what happens when we view and judge people based on collective traits or identifiers versus what happens when we view all people as individuals regardless of how they look, love, dress, vote, or worship.

Is the world imperfect? Absolutely.

Are there instances where racial or social inequality exist? Yep.

Should something be done about it? Yeah… I think we should all be concerned for others and look within our neighborhoods and communities—and then farther to other neighborhoods and communities—to lift those in need and help those who are in any way afflicted.

But the answer isn’t to take from the “haves” and redistribute to the “have-nots” under threat of violence at the hand of government. The answer certainly isn’t to throw away all the progress of the last century in terms of equality, and revert to some race-based, sex-based, social status-based legal and economic system. That’s moving backwards, and no amount of wordsmithing by the folks at the WEF can make it moral.

Kids are being spoon-fed this garbage in government schools throughout the world—it’s made its way into nearly every classroom, and every curricula. No one is going to save our kids from this globalist, dystopian, marxist view of “privilege” and “justice” so it’s up to parents, grandparents, and good teachers to teach them the truth.

That’s the power and purpose of the Tuttle Twins books.

I’ll close with a quote by Ron Paul. He’s talking about race here, but his words can apply equally to nearly every form of collectivism. It always demands that we see people not for who they are or for their potential as powerful, individual thinkers and doers, but as members of a group—powerless to act, think, advocate, or create outside their collective.

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist. The true antidote to racism is liberty.”

Viewing people in collectivist terms isn’t empowering them—it’s enslaving them.

So let’s liberate them with individualism and by empowering each person to act and be accountable for their actions.

— Connor