Social Justice Fallacies

Milton Friedman clearly understood this: A society that puts equality— in the sense of equality of outcome— ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.14

As an example of consequential knowledge— knowledge affecting decisions with meaningful consequences in people’s lives— the officers in charge of the Titanic no doubt had much complex knowledge about the intricacies of ships and navigation on the seas. But the most consequential knowledge on a particular night was the mundane knowledge of the location of particular icebergs, because collision with an iceberg is what damaged and sank the Titanic.

Hayek’s argument was that the kind of world idealized by social justice advocates— a world with everyone having equal chances of success in all endeavors— was not only unattainable, but that its fervent but futile pursuit can lead to the opposite of what its advocates are seeking. It was not that social justice advocates would create dictatorships, but that their passionate attacks on existing democracies could weaken those democracies to the point where others could seize dictatorial powers.

message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. But that agenda, and the wide consensus it had, began eroding in the years that followed. The goal changed from equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race, to equal outcomes for groups, whether these groups were defined by race, sex or otherwise.

Social justice advocates themselves obviously do not share the conclusions of their critics, such as Friedman and Hayek. But the differences in their conclusions are not necessarily differences in fundamental moral values. Their differences tend to be at the level of fundamentally different beliefs about circumstances and assumptions about causation that can produce very different conclusions.

produced books, was not an economically viable prospect. Only after Europeans developed mechanical printing themselves was it feasible for them to educate more than a small fraction of their populations. And only after all the languages of different European peoples developed written versions was an equal education, and the development of equal human capital, even theoretically possible. Differences in human capital— including honesty and languages, as well as occupational skills and industrial and commercial talents— have been common between nations and within nations.

An early study at the University of Michigan followed specific individuals— working Americans— from 1975 to 1991. The pattern it found was that individuals who were initially in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 had their incomes rise over the years— not only at a higher rate than the incomes of individuals in the higher brackets, but also in a several times larger total amount.50 By 1991, 29 percent of those who were in the lowest quintile in 1975 had risen all the way to the top quintile, and only 5 percent of those initially in the bottom quintile remained where they had all been in 1975. The rest were distributed in other quintiles in between.

In putting assumptions to the test of facts, a clear distinction must be maintained between equal potentialities at the beginning of life and equally developed capabilities later on. Some social justice advocates may implicitly assume that various groups have similar developed capabilities, so that different outcomes appear

There were hundreds of courses on eugenics in colleges and universities across the United States,90 just as there are similarly ideological courses on college and university campuses across the country today, promoting very different ideologies as regards race, but with a very similar sense of mission, and a very similar intolerance toward those who do not share their ideology or their mission.

They also had similar practices in dealing with empirical evidence. Both remained largely impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs.

Even more dangerous than ignorance, however, is a fallacious certitude, which can afflict people at all educational levels and all IQ levels.

In short, honesty is one of many factors that cannot be assumed to be equally present in all places or among all peoples. Nor does empirical evidence suggest an equality in this factor, any more than in many other factors. Among the simple tests used to assess the honesty in various peoples and places have been projects that deliberately left wallets containing both money and personal identification in public places in various cities around the world. When one such project in 2013 left a dozen wallets in public places, in various cities, the number of wallets returned with the money still in them varied from eleven out of twelve in Helsinki (Finland) to one out of twelve in Lisbon (Portugal). Moreover, the one wallet that was returned in Lisbon was returned by a couple visiting from the Netherlands; no Portuguese returned any.

The people subject to price-setting laws have seldom remained passive, as if they were inert chess pieces. How many governments understood this before they passed such laws is unknown. But what is known is that a President of the United States— Richard Nixon— who was fully aware of the adverse economic consequences of price controls, imposed those controls anyway. His response to criticism of that decision by economist Milton Friedman was: “I don’t give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. He’s not running for re-election.”18 President Nixon was in fact re-elected, by a larger majority than that which first put him in the White House.

John Stuart Mill pointed out in the nineteenth century that the level of honesty or dishonesty in a society was a major factor in the development of its economy.

Whether in law or in other areas, one of the hallmarks of elite intellectuals' seeking to preempt other people's decisions- whether on public policy or in their own private lives- is a reliance on unsubstantiated pronouncements, based on elite consensus, treated as if that was equivalent to documented facts. One revealing sign of this is how often the arguments of people with other views are not answered with counter-arguments, but with ad hominem assertions instead.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, “when only 3 percent of the population of Great Britain was illiterate, the figure for Italy was 48 percent, for Spain 56 percent, for Portugal 78 percent.”92