It could be argued that evaluating candidates purely upon GPA, SAT scores, and the like is akin to claiming that a high jumper who clears a 6 foot bar while jumping from ground level has jumped higher than one who clears 5 1/2 feet while jumping from the bottom of a 3-foot trench.
May I claim that you are using the wrong measure here? Suppose a person with an IQ of 80 gets 90% of the score of someone with an IQ of 150. Shouldn't they get that coveted slot an Stanford or Harvard Business School? Why not not base this on intelligence rather than economics?
But let me raise another point: While you are giving equal opportunity to your second-best, what are your competitors in the world going to do? Are the Japanese (or Taiwanese or Malayasians or ...) going to agree to raise their prices and underproduce so that you can compete?
Is government required to be neutral?
No. Milosevic's government was not. You'd better be Serb. China's government under Mao was not. You'd best be a peasant. The UK's government used to blatantly discriminate in favor of the wealthy- -the opposite of what you advocate.
Is this what the civil rights movement has come? Now discrimination on other than merit is fully legal and approved- -and enforced?
You can define fairness many ways. Basically life is not fair. Since you must pick a measure that produces unfairness in some dimension or other, I'd say we had best pick one that produces good overall results. And that, I believe, means we provide incentives and rewards for each person to perform to the best of their abilities.
I would prefer to use economic advantage as the "handicapping" factor, rather than race, because the assumption that all racial minorities are poor and all Caucasians are rich is not valid.
And there are many handicaps other than economic too. Cold, driven rich parents who inflict emotional damage on their children are legend. Should we not take that into account?
This search for fairness clearly can rapidly turn into a quagmire. The advantage of GPA, SAT scores, and the like is that they avoid this endless hall of mirrors.
Since our current nuclear capability is sufficient to ensure that anyone attempting a nuclear attack would face certain and total destruction
What has been achieved is a balance of terror where no one but a madman would consider the nuclear option.
The side effect of that is that confrontations are now conventional. And that is what we must be prepared to handle.
I will have to look the numbers up, but as I remember defense is now 10%-20% of the budget. It is no longer 30%-50% as it used to be. How much more can you achieve for social programs if you take it to 0%? And at what cost? Somewhere down there you stand a serious risk of losing everything. |
