Unfairness

Remember when Jimmy Carter said "Sometimes life isn't fair?" Libertarians, never mind conservatives, get kicked for saying that now, but not so long ago, even Democrats realised that it was not the job of government to fix all ills.  I doubt Birdhouse still feels that way, but I believe he did then.

Piggybacking on Texan99's comment, it is true that almost all of us these days want to mitigate some of life's unfairness.  The political difference is that some of us want to restrict the mitigation to those unfairnesses that are clearly that are caused by our society. There is some messy agreement that unfairness caused by our government is also our responsibility. What with the EPA, crony capitalism, the Legacy of Slavery, public education and public debt, Not In Our Name, and police intrusion we have enough disagreement to last a lifetime, but if that were the remaining debate I believe we could get there.  We could wrestle out the type of compromises common to the Constitutional Convention, theoretically unsupportable by anyone's definition of government or morality, but enough to go forward.

It's the cosmic unfairness that is our real split, however.  In the major British founding groups of the American colonies, having terrible things happen to you was not at all considered the problem of anyone else in society-at-large. They might attribute vessels lost at sea to Providence, or to Luck, or to Fate, or to Skill, but no one thought your widow and children deserved anything thereby. It might be a problem for your immediate family.  If you had a serious reversal of health, business, or environment your culture might insist that your town, your extended family, or your parish might be on the hook for some assistance. Might. There was no belief that the colony as a whole, never mind the whole nation, had any obligation. And these were the groups which in all the world in the 17th and 18th C's cast their nets widest in terms of supporting the poor or unfortunate. No one else did anything.  Drop down in Latvia, Italy, Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, Siam, Japan - there was no sense of obligation by anyone.  People gave individually to beggars. Easrly Christians took up collections for distant co-religionists.

What we think of as normal safety net - what even American libertarians of the strictest stripe think of as a normal safety net - is very modern, very unusual. Yet that level of "callousness" was typical worldwide for thousands of years because almost everyone was impoverished and the rescue of others meant the starvation of your own children. Before 1700, everyone brushed against starvation some years.  Before 1900 everyone went hungry sometimes, even in the very few rich countries of the world.

It may be a real moral advance to live in a society that believes if you are sick and a treatment exists you deserve access to it; to have a nation that says we will not only have some educational stuff lying around on the coffee table if you want it, but will take it upon ourselves to accommodate you and get education to you.  I think it is a moral advance.  But I also see it as an extremely expensive moral advance that I hesitate to lay on others. I don't think it is automatic and unquestionable.  Such thinking only comes from people who believe "Oh, there's plenty of money out there, we just have to make those greedy people cough it up." Very, very recently, no one thought that the world was even remotely fair.