Several recent news stories highlight the bitter fruits of social justice, the idea that the law should seek equal outcomes rather than equal treatment before the law. Social justice always begins by trying to change the law so people in different circumstances are treated differently. The problem is this always turns out to be more complex than you might originally think, a path fraught with unintended consequences—for instance, a law designed to encourage purchasing electric cars has actually turned into a subsidy for those who want to buy electric golf carts. A common thread in this first stage of social justice is the redistribution of income through various programs. Over half the households in the US pay no income taxes at all, and the top 20% of earners pay 91% of the income taxes.
The next stage is to simply bend the law where needed to assure the outcomes a specific person, or group of people, think are best. No story better illustrates this thinking than the four video tapes released of two journalists going into ACORN offices throughout the US and recording the ACORN counselors help them to start a prostitution business. Once you’ve come to the realization that laws simply can’t be written to “do the right thing,” you increasingly write very broad laws that try and cover a wide variety of situations, and give the “person in authority on the spot” wide latitude in interpreting what needs to be done to “resolve the problem.”
What we fail to realize about the entire ACORN mess is this is just the tip of the iceberg in how far we’ve gone down this path to realize “social justice” in the US. ACORN has, in fact, had many problems similar to this one in the past, only they’ve been swept under the rug by a government and press that don’t want anyone to see the “messy” side of social justice. Back in 2008, an ACORN employee blew the whistle on issues with the use of taxpayer funding to support political causes. The government and press swept these charges under the rug, as well—the reporter who was investigating the story was actually fired by the New York Times. We see this second stage of “social justice” in full bloom with the “Pay Czar” telling employees at large companies how much they can make, and banks being forced to sell themselves to the Federal Government.
There are two side effects to these overly broad laws. The first is that everyone, at some point or another, becomes a criminal. This is rather mild, however, compared to the second side effect: broadly written laws can be taken advantage of by just about anyone in any government position to get what they want at the cost of others. Forfeiture laws in the US have gotten to the point that objects, themselves, are considered criminals, rather than people. Money and other objects can be taken into custody, and held indefinitely (used) without any real proof they were used in any sort of a crime. As long as you’re not locking a person up, you don’t have to follow the same rules of evidence. And this, of course, leads to rampant abuse, because people are not, in fact, generally “good.” Pro Libertate documents a large number of cases in this last category in a recent post titled End the Occupation.
We ignore the direct path between social justice and totalitarian rule at our own peril.
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