Maggie's Farm

There are at least a couple of different concepts of fairness, an equality of opportunity and an equality of outcomes. For me, fairness involves everybody playing by the same rules. A fair game of basketball between me and Michael Jordan would be both of us playing by the same rules and nevermind the fact that he's going to stomp me, he's a much better basketball player than I am and it's fair that I should be stomped. The alternative is to play a game rigged in such a way that both he and I have an equal chance of winning - perhaps he should be required to wear boxing gloves and high heels and a welder's mask - but the problem with that is that you then can't know beforehand what is fair. If we play a handicapped game and he still stomps me he wasn't handicapped enough, if I stomp him he was handicapped too much. We're just going to have to keep playing game after game after game until we tie and then we'll know it was a fair game? Judging fairness by outcomes rather than blindly applied rules makes for an impossibly cumbersome scheme of judging fairness.

You as a leftist may be comfortable with the idea that fairness dictates equal outcomes (and equal outcomes are the standard for judging fairness) but dealing with merely retrospective fairness where nobody has any way of knowing beforehand what the rules might be that would result in this fairness is no way to run a society. How can you plan ahead for anything when you have no way of knowing what the rules might be after you've carried out your plans? Are you comfortable eating a meal in a restaurant where you're not told the price of the meal until after you've eaten?

Trump and Cruz both faced the same set of rules, Cruz is smarter and worked harder and is a better deal-maker than Trump so Cruz won the contest. You now want a do-over until you get a fair result, but what would be a fair result under your way of thinking if not a 50/50 split on the delegates? How many times would we have to re-vote this until we get a tie? Is that any way to operate an election?

Dorms for adults. Didn't they used to call those boarding houses or rooming houses and didn't most places legislate those out of existence through zoning laws and single-room occupancy laws aimed at keeping "those people" out of the "good" neighborhoods? And isn't this new old idea similar to the mini-home movement that runs into those same zoning laws regarding minimum lot sizes and minimum square-footage requirements that, again, were designed to keep "those people" out of the "good" neighborhoods? Everybody wants affordable housing but the easiest answer to that is to get rid of the laws that keep people from building and buying what they can afford - and nobody wants what "those people" can afford anywhere near their neighborhood. You can be as poor as you wanna be but you're going to have to go be poor somewhere else.