You can’t really mean this.
Did you read the article linked in the OP?
If physical beauty plays any role in dating (and from the examples you chose, I would guess you think it does), then Porizkova, et al. came by their looks as much as any person is born into a family that gives him a greater chance to become financially successful.
Surely you are being humorous! (my bold)
Do I need to point out the obvious?
When it comes to dating, physical attractiveness is clearly a merit. People who are good looking do better in the dating game than average looking people. (Obviously, it’s not the only merit in dating. Many people are successful in relationships due to other merits and many good-looking people fail in relationships due to other flaws.)
Meritocracy doesn’t mean everyone is equal or that everyone achieves equal results. Meritocracy is when your success is directly linked to the amount of merit you have as an individual. In dating, your success is based on the attractiveness (or other equivalent merit) that you personally have. Nobody can give you attractiveness. It doesn’t matter how attractive your family and friends are - if you’re average looking, they can’t give you their good looks.
Financial success is different. Yes, some people earn their wealth through their own efforts. But some people are wealthy because other people gave them their wealth.
yes, true meritocracy, will lead to the very rich, & very poor. So should we provide for the poor, the answer is yes, we are not cannibals, no way can we have the poor die out of hunger , lack of healthcare etcc…
However the core issue is a financial system & governance that can sustain itself. State provision for social security, healthcare etc… will eventually lead to bankrupt state leading to total collapse.
so the govt should only stick to military, internal security, foreign affairs. All else should be determined by the free market.
Social security also should be provided for by the free market, where the rich can contribute to the poor in the society. This is the only model that can sustain itself,
In this regard, the GOP is correct, however what a mess they have created instead of rationally arguing this. !
Then I don’t believe you are familiar with the whole of prosperity theology. One part of it, for example, is that you get rich by donating large amounts of money to the church, even before you actually have it. Absent some sort of karmic restitution, there is no way that will make you rich.
Prosperity theology teaches the opposite of the concept that hard work produces monetary rewards. It teaches that, because we are God’s children, we already have the all the riches, and they will come to us if we just believe hard enough. (And, again, one way to show your belief is to give away more money than you have, since obviously that means you believe that money will be coming in.)
Somewhat of a tangent, but…
Suppose we lived in a very different society where everyone had truly equal opportunity from birth, ie, all children were raised by the government so no one ever inherited anything, no one ever had their parents pay for their college (and conversely no one was ever neglected by a crack-addicted single mother). In a society like that, I’d be MUCH more receptive to the whole “well, the poor people are poor because they don’t have jobs and are lazy, why should my stuff be taken to give to them” argument. (I’m not saying I wish we lived in such a society, or that even in a society like that I’d just let people starve in the street, but I feel like a lot of Republican philosophy would make more sense in that world.)
I can see four main reasons to support a less regressive taxation and social welfare structure:
- The idea that we live in a meritocracy.
- The discredited idea that this will help the economy.
- I got mine, fuck 'em.
- Then of course there are those who don’t think about it at all really like Lobohan said.
So no, not all conservatives believe in a true meritocracy, but when one of them engages in an actual argument based on principle, it’s invariably based on #1 or #2. Those who do not wish to provide coherent first-principles-based arguments fall into #3 and #4. Which isn’t to say that those who try to argue coherently don’t slip into #3 or #4 either, especially when they are losing the argument. (They will sometimes slip into rah rah tu quoques or Argumentum Ad Hitlerium or eggs-omelettes-I’m all right Jackisms when confronted with irrefutable evidence against #1. Doesn’t happen as often when defending #2, possibly because just like people, you can get numbers to say something vaguely like what you want them to if you torture them enough.)
One of the many problems of the OP is the assumption that Republicans do not want to help the poor (and that Democrats, presumably, do). Both Republicans (for the most part) and Democrats (for the most part) want to help the poor. They disagree on [ul][li]the means by which this can best be accomplished, and []whether those means are more just than any others, and []what are the consequences of what we decide to do, intended and otherwise.[/ul]And especially we disagree on [ul]what we do when what we do doesn’t work.[/ul]I don’t think cost-benefit analysis is immoral, but I hear a lot of objections when it gets applied. [/li]
But in answer to your further question, no, it is not possible to construct a society in which everyone agrees everyone is getting what they deserve. Those at the bottom will always resent those above them, and will always be able to come up with reasons why it isn’t their fault they are poor, and it’s no fair. That’s human nature.
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe one way to put it is that, for Republicans, the ideal is equality of opportunity, not equality of results. In a society where opportunity is readily available to everyone, some people will take more advantage of it than others, and so some people will end up richer, others poorer. Republicans don’t believe that we currently have equality of opportunity, only that that’s the ideal, or at least closer to the ideal than trying to assure that everyone is equally wealthy.
I don’t know if that’s a fair and accurate way of putting it or not; I am willing to be corrected. (Of course, not every Republican holds the same views, and there may well be cases where what individual Republicans pay lip service to differs substantially from what they truly believe.)
Let me join the Amen Chorus on this post. Very well said.
I associate social Darwinism with laissez faire capitalism, libertarianism, and a severely limited government.
In a true meritocracy every child would start with the same economic and educational advantages. This would require a much larger government than than libertarians find tolerable. It would restrict the freedom of wealthy parents to pass on their wealth to their children.
This sounds all well and good until you actually apply it to what conservatives are DOING, which is trying to give tax cuts to the wealthy who pay a much smaller percentage of their income in taxes, while making lower income earners pay MORE.
It’s obviously only the wealthy who “deserve” their income since you think the poor and working should be paying more in taxes than the rich. Since it only works one way for “conservatives”, obviously you DO in fact agree that the rich deserve their money more than the poor, unless you find what republicans are currently striving for to be wrong.
Nobody opposes aiding those who truly “can’t do X, Y, and/or Z.” … but conservatives are a lot more inclined to suspect that it’s a matter of “don’t want to,” or at least “don’t want to if it means giving up other things.” It’s one thing to say “I want a job;” it’s another to say “I want a job enough that I’m willing to clean toilets or work weekends or give up partying.”
I don’t think most Republicans care if someone chooses to be poor; I surely don’t. The issue is making self-destructive, poverty-creating choices and then making demands, via government, on other people. When you ask me to pay for your rent, I might be willing to help, but I’m first going to ask why you can’t pay it yourself and expect a good answer.
I was devoted liberal at 18; I changed in large part because I worked for several years with the homeless, and saw up close the way the (liberal/government-run) groups I worked for refused to allow people to make their own choices and live with the consequences. Even when clients deliberately, obviously made self-destructive choices, the liberals I worked with insisted it couldn’t possibly be their fault.
The irony of these kinds of threads is that it is Liberals, not conservatives, who tend to see everything as boiling down to money.
My father, a very staunch Republican, chose a low-paying career. He did so because he felt it was a calling, and that he was doing the right thing. He doesn’t think of himself as a failure because he never made more than 50k in his life, and he doesn’t feel entitled to some kind of redistribution: he made his choice, and I don’t think he envies Donald Trump or George Soros.
The most hard-core Republican I know lives in one of the most expensive cities in America, relying on his 35k and his wife’s barista income to raise their kids. They might qualify for aid AFAIK, but he’d be damned if he’d take it.
I’m a libertarian, but I chose to spend most of my career as a teacher. I’ve never made money, but I’ve never complained … because I chose to spend most of my career as a teacher.
No it isn’t. First, because a lot of deception and manipulation is often involved. And second, money is a major factor in attractiveness; both the fact of having it, and the accessories it can buy you.
Nonsense. Conservatives typically equate money with moral worth, and demonstrate hatred and contempt against the poor, and often towards anyone who isn’t rich.
Wrong. There are people who think that those who can’t help themselves should be left to die. People have argued for that on this board even.
Nonsense. Conservatives are obsessed with money.
“Meritocracy” is maybe the wrong word to use. The suggestion seems to be more that poor people don’t try hard enough (and that rich people have). What do we call a society based on effort rather than merit?
That is meritocracy by another name. It is actually the more common form of the meme considering that they don’t want to look all highfalutin, and so pretend that hard work is even more important than talent. So therefore the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy.
Of course that is, like I said, only pertaining to those who actually want to defend high regressivity rationally. There are always those who say “because fuck you, that’s why.”
That was precisely the point that I was suggesting. 
How do you feel about Romney’s plan to increase military spending and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthiest? Or his support for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting states from allowing gay marriage?
Or Obama saying that the wealthiest should pay at least as high a tax rate as the middle class?
(FTR, I think of myself as libertarian too, and disagree with a lot of Democratic policies – I was more aligned with moderate Republicans. Since the Democrats moved to the formerly moderate Republican positions and the Republicans have fallen off the right side of the scale, I’ve switched my support.)
Much of the purpose of that philosophy has always been to keep people under control by eliminating free time; “idle hands are the devil’s playthings”. Workers who buy into that “work ethic” are going to spend as much time as possible working, which means they won’t have the free time to do anything that would inconvenience their masters. It’s a control technique the powerful have exploited for literally centuries.