The Dictator of Fairness

What is fair is a very subjective thing. It means different things to different people and it’s relative to all sorts of circumstances or situations. Unless you have a king or a dictator, what’s fair is rarely decided by a single individual. That’s why we have laws. Still some people think certain laws are unfair, and that’s why we have lawyers, arbitrators, judges, and juries. They help us interpret the law and decide what is fair. Those of us, who have been around for some time, have come to realize that this world is not always fair. We have wars, sickness, criminals, famine, poverty, terrorists, corruption, and con men operating everywhere in the world, all the time.

This leads us to the question of whether any head of state, including President Obama, has the right or authority in a democracy to decide what is fair for all the people. Politicians seem to believe that they have the job to decide what is fair for their constituents. For example, the other day both the Mayors of Chicago and Boston (who happened to be on the left side of our political spectrum) have decided because of their “authority”, that they will prevent Chick-Fil-A to open anymore stores in their cities because the founder/owner of the company supports the conventional definition of marriage. Is that fair? Why don’t they just not patronize Chick-Fil-A restaurants? That would be fairer! I don’t like Alec Baldwin’s politics, but I still go to his movies because he is a good actor and comedian, however, I have a choice not to and that would be fair. Wouldn’t it?

Our progressive tax system is another way to look at fairness. I think most of us accept the fact that those who can afford to pay more due to their income should, and thus we accept a progressive system. However, at what point does the system become unfair? A new Congressional budget office report shows that the share paid by the top 20% of income earners (those making more than $74k/yr.) pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes collected. The remaining 30% is borne by 80% of the taxpayers. In addition, the progressive trend in this group continues in the unfair direction. This same group paid 55% of all taxes in 1979; by 2009 their share was 68%. Over this same period the top 1% of wage earners paid 14% of all taxes in 1979 and now pays 22%.

By contrast, the bottom 20% paid a paltry 2% of total taxes in 1979 and now pays a minuscule 0.3%. After looking at this data, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama is right, the system isn’t fair, but not because the top 1% pay too little. It’s because they pay too much!

It’s clear from this that fairness is in the eyes of the beholder, and Mr. Obama is not the arbitrator of fairness. In fact, he is one opinion out of 300 million of us. When he told Joe the Plumber in 2008 that, “it’s only fair to spread the wealth around, right?” Who knew that a community organizer from South Chicago would be the sole judge of fairness for the United States?