QOTD -- Fairness

 

"...The justices sounded almost as though they were advocating a strict version of communism, under which no one should receive any government benefit that isn’t given to everyone. You could ask why Social Security is so unfair to people who aren’t elderly, or farm supports are unfair to people who aren’t farmers, or funding schools is unfair to the childless.

"These same justices, and the party they come from, seem to rouse themselves to fret about fairness only when those who don’t ordinarily get a lot of breaks — people struggling with debt or who need help feeding their families — are given a government benefit. When that happens, the fairness police of the right turn on their sirens, usually with the argument that someone else’s gain must be your loss — even if you didn’t actually lose anything...." -- Paul Waldman, writing on the Republican Supreme Court's notion of "fairness" when it comes to President Biden's student loan forgiveness program.  Waldman uses the loan forgiveness question to broaden the scope of how questions of fairness -- or unfairness -- are deployed by right- wingers to promote resentment and maintain "hierarchies of power" that benefit themselves.