President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Thanks for that. I just did a very quick read. I will go back to it later. She has basically come to the place I have always been. You can sum it up as the difference between "equality of opportunity" versus "equality of ouctomes," in the more simplistic way I have always thought about it.

The problem with what a lot of people focus on is the notion of equality itself. People have different notions of what constitutes equality. As a practical matter, people who want to engineer the world to their "equality" liking, don't want to take into account that by our nature we aren't all equal. People are born with different innate attributes and talents and abilities, and that means that outcomes in life are going to always be very different.

I am always wary of people who talk about how some amorphous "we" can engineer or build up a society of some sort that meets certain objectives that they have constructed. That approach is incompatible with freedom by its very nature, because if someone (or lots of someones, even if they are a small minority) else doesn't value what you insist is the overriding value, you need to use coercion to force those outliers to conform. And that means the opposite of freedom.

I think we all benefit the most when the primacy is put on individual liberty -- the freedom part of it at the individual level. When you can make as many choices for yourself as possible, valuing the things that personally give you the most utility, that is the purest freedom there is. As far as equality goes, it's an impossible construct. And I don't understand why it is so important to people. I have never gotten it. There are so many inherent things that are part of being human and living your life that create differences among people. Someone, as their individual preference, might want to work harder than I do, and as a result earn more money. Another person might have some freakish athletic talent that others value a lot, and achieve fame I never will. I can come up with zillions of things like that, which inherently make us unequal. For me, the important thing has always been equality of opportunity. Or an equal chance at freedom, as she put it. At least as the ideal. Where we have gone wrong, and a lot of people still get it wrong in my opinion, has been in turning that ideal into trying to force equality of outcomes on the world. And if that is your notion of equality, you can never get there without shitting all over the freedoms of others. It sounds like she came to that conclusion.