Fairness is a Human Concept

Nixon surrendered South Vietnam to North Vietnam, so North Vietnam got exactly what it wanted out of the war. One can argue that South Vietnam wasn't worth saving. If so, what were our guys doing there in the first place? I believed at the time that the whole thing was deliberately contrived to make the United States look weak and ineffective so as to advance the cause of global government, and I'm still not sure that wasn't the case. Meanwhile, while we were being paranoid about the prospect of global government, they snuck the global economy in right under our noses.

I don't know enough about the Tea Party to defend them, and I'm not sure that I even want to. The best I can do is to point out that their purpose seems to be to advance their particular political agenda, an agenda with which I generally agree. I'm not aware that they have ever used violent or illegal means in this effort, which is more than you can say about some of the radical groups that were active in the 60s.

Fairness is indeed a human concept, and not all humans have the same idea of what it means. When I was driving school buses, I often heard kids complain that something wasn't fair. After awhile, it dawned on me that they weren't using the same definition of "fair" that I was. One day I asked one of them if, as it appeared to me, that by "not fair" they meant something wasn't going exactly the way they wanted it to. He said "Of course, what did you think it meant?" Apparently these kids had learned that, by crying "No fair!", the could get adults to reconsider their position on an issue. The thought that the kids themselves might want to reconsider their own position never seemed to occur to them.

In my story about the Englishman and the Irishman, the Englishman thought that his ownership of the property was fair because his father had given it to him. As he thought further about it, he realized that, at some point, one of his ancestors had obtained the property by fighting for it, and that also seemed fair to him. It must have seemed fair to the Irishman that he could obtain the property the same way that the Englishman's ancestor had, but I doubt that the Englishman felt the same way about it. That's because, what was considered fair in the Feudal Era, is not the same as what is considered fair today.

The story doesn't go into the details of the fight by which the property came into the possession of the Englishman's ancestor. Our knowledge of history tends to lead us to the assumption that the Englishman's ancestor took the land away from the Irishman's ancestor, but we don't know that for a fact. He may have taken the land away from another Englishman, or even a Roman citizen who may have himself taken it from whatever indigenous tribe occupied the region at the time. That tribe may have taken it from another tribe, and so on. Determining who "rightfully" owns the land might be a daunting task indeed, which is probably why they do it differently nowadays.

At some point, the British government must have decided that whoever was currently in possession of the land should draw up a legal document to that effect and register it at the court house. From that point on, it was no longer considered fair to obtain real estate by force of arms. You want this land, you can buy it fair and square. If the owner doesn't want to sell, that is his right. If he wants to pass it down to one of his kids when he dies, that is also his right. While this system might not seem fair to the landless peasants, it was certainly more fair than the old system where you had to fight to obtain land and then periodically fight to defend it. The peasants never would have gotten any land under that system anyway, so they are no worse off now than they were before. Indeed, if a peasant wants to learn a marketable skill, get a job, and save his money, he has at least some chance of eventually buying some land. When his ancestors lost the land, if indeed they ever owned it, they lost it because they weren't as good at fighting as someone else was. Was that fair?

One alternative is for the state to confiscate all the land and redistribute it so that everybody has the same size parcel. Of course, not everybody wants the responsibilities of land ownership, so some of them would sell their land and squander the money on wine, women, and song. Then they would be right back where they started from. One way to prevent that would be to prohibit people from selling their land and forcing them to live on it whether they wanted to or not. Can you see where this is going? Do you really want to go there?