All the political talk of tackling inequality should warm the hearts of Jets fans. After next month’s game in the Meadowlands, it will be 45 years since the team won the Super Bowl, a measure of inequality that cries out for justice.
Oh, the unfairness! There are 32 NFL teams, so, in a utopian world, each team would win the championship once every 32 years. But the Jets haven’t won it since 1969 — where have you gone, Joe Namath? Some other teams, including the hated Patriots, are greedy fat cats who win more than their fair share.
There oughta be a law against that. Actually, there is. The NFL, in a quest for socialist-like “parity,” enforces rules that aim to produce equal results.
The worst teams get to draft the best college players. All teams equally share the biggest pot of revenues. A salary cap equally limits payrolls. And each year’s schedule gives weaker teams weaker opponents.
But justice, as measured by Super Bowl victories, has been denied. Maybe Bill de Blasio will require that Tom Brady play for the Jets? Maybe Barack Obama could issue an executive order that gives them extra points?
OK, I jest, but only a little. For while radical Democrats stoke social-justice tempers by focusing on income inequality, the sports pages offer a daily — and delicious — menu of stubborn inequality. Indeed, differences in quality are the whole point of sports.
And also in music and dance and plumbers and car mechanics and everything else that matters. Would you go to a brain surgeon who flunked out of med school?
Merit and skill deserve to be highly compensated. Karl Marx notwithstanding, there always are winners and losers. No system anywhere has succeeded in guaranteeing equal outcomes, including the “everybody gets a trophy” movement among social busybodies.
The societies with the flattest outcomes, according to studies, are Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where everybody except the ruling elite is desperately poor, and North Korea, for the same reason.
America is different, thank God. It was founded to ensure the individual’s right to pursue happiness, and guided by the spirit to cushion the blow of those who don’t find it. Our country, by constantly evolving, finds the balance better than any society in history, and New York is first among cities in offering equal opportunity to all comers.
Yet we are now plagued by false prophets — Obama and de Blasio being prime examples — who make a career out of denying these facts. They would have us believe that unequal outcomes always result from injustice.
They insist they only want equal opportunity, but point to unequal results as proof the game was rigged. They suggest the poor are poor because the rich are rich.
The unstated assumption is that everybody should and can be equally rich, or poor, or handsome or successful. New York’s new comptroller, Scott Stringer, promised to put “shared prosperity above individual success.”
Good luck, comrade.
The most optimistic way to view this “pink tide” washing over us is to realize it is doomed to fail. Whether it’s ObamaCare or de Blasio’s claim that “our mission” is to end a “tale of two cities,” extreme redistribution schemes eventually collapse. They never succeed because they conflict with human DNA.
Unfortunately, they often do tremendous damage before they perish. Taking liberty from individuals and concentrating power in the hands of bureaucrats inevitably results in stunted growth, lost opportunity and human misery. The powder keg grows as freedom is squashed.
That is the consequence of false prophets, even when they have good intentions. Out of ignorance and arrogance, they do more harm than good.
Meanwhile, the Jets, like all people everywhere, must keep striving. They might never win another Super Bowl, but that’s life, and there’s nothing inherently unfair about unequal results.
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