Do you work with Harrison_Bergeron?
I think you have to look at equality as having the chance to achieve parity. Not that you will actually achieve it. The Declaration of Independence, says all men are created equal, but it doesn’t mention that not all men are born equal.
Those born will privilege will have more opportunities to succeed, of course they have more opportunities to fail. But of course when they fail, they have the financial resources to overcome said failure.
So you see how the argument carries on.
But as long as we have the chance to be equal, that is the important thing, not that we are all equal.
I mean I can go online and create my own search engine to compete with Google. Will it succeed? No, but at least I have the opportunity and equality to try.
Posted before ready, sorry
XT, I keep coming back to your idea that employees should know how to negotiate for better pay, and if they don’t feel they are making enough they simply need to go out and get a better paying job.
I don’t think this is at all realistic. First, negotiating for pay is not that simple. If it was, we wouldn’t have the huge differences in what men and women are paid for the same work. It’s not because women, minorities, and other groups who tend to make less are bad at negotiating. I also think a system like this would put anyone who isn’t confident and aggressive enough to negotiate with someone whose job is negotiating pay for the company.
And the idea that a person should just get a better job if they aren’t happy with the one they have fails to take into consideration the huge unemployment rate, not to mention how hard it is to find decent paying jobs even in the best economy. It just isn’t realistic (or fair) to put the entire responsibility on workers instead of employers.
IMO, this seems like how someone who hasn’t been out in the real world very long would see things.
Your salary is largely a product of the market.
What “equality” means is that theoretically you have the opportunity to apply for any job and be evaluated on your qualifications and ability to do that job. Where it gets complicated is that when you are looking at ten candidates who, on paper, cand do the job and you can only hire one, some level of subjectiveness is required. And quite often that subjectiveness manifests itself in the form of personal biases.
Sounds like a strawman communist/ liberal/ todays society trend of lifting people’s self-esteem version. *
An often quoted phrase about equality is “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”.
I often hear the confusion between “Everybody gets an equal chance” and “everybody gets to win”, but always maliciously by libertarians or right-wingers or conservatives against helping the poor.
Giving everybody the same starting chance in a race - which can mean giving a 6-year-old a head start against an Olympic sprinter, too - doesn’t mean that everybody has to win; it only means everybody gets the same starting chance. Because not everybody is the same, people will end up differently as a matter of course. No real liberal or social democrat denies this, only people erecting strawman usually use this argument.
*In one Simpson episode, Lisa wanted to learn ballet dancing, and her teacher was - as often at least in US TV shows - a former star, but terrible at pedagogy. At one point, after Lisa had been shown to be bad at dancing, but still wanting to participate in the big show of the class, her teacher told her that “if everybody gets the same, that’s communist - pull the curtain!”, which is obviously cruel to a kid of 8 years.