RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/

There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.

A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.

Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?

An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.

When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/reparations-taking-money-from-people-who-never-owned-slaves-and-giving-it-to-people-who-never-were-slaves/

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/27/nobel-economists-who-got-bidenflation-100-wrong-now-predict-trump-will-ignite-inflation/

Reprinted, with permission, from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity‘s daily must-read Hotline email.

We have our hand on the Bible swearing we are not making this story up.

A gang of 16 Nobel prize-winning economists signed a letter yesterday endorsing Joe Biden for president because: “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite inflation with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

But then our colleague, Scott Bessent, noticed something strange and ironic about the signatories: 13 of these economists signed a highly-publicized open letter three years ago assuring Americans that Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending spree would “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”

Then — whoops! — 18 months later inflation soared to 9.1% under Biden – the worst U.S. inflation in almost 40 years! This would be the medical equivalent of amputating the wrong leg. 

Here’s the overlapping list of these economists who were spectacularly wrong in 2021, but whom we are supposed to believe are right this time around.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/cultural-marxism-a-century-old-and-thriving/

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals. Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

Also, according to an analysis from OpenTheBooks.com, the University of North Carolina spends an estimated $90 million each year on 686 employees who promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in their departments or across the system. But change is on the horizon. In a repudiation of DEI ideology, the UNC Board of Governors voted on May 23 to repeal its diversity policy.