During the 2008 election, Barack Obama often used fairness as a key theme in his speeches. He spoke about fairness in the distribution of wealth, fairness in society concerning minorities, and fairness in politics. It is a tactic used by many liberals and left-leaning speakers. Their logic is that government and society should stress fairness in favor of a more egalitarian society.

Conversly, John McCain and many conservative-leaning appealed more to a sense of what was right. Morality is and has always been a key to conservative principles. When jugding a situation, it is more important to remember what is right than what is fair. Conservatives more accept the idea that the world isn't fair and using public resources to try and make it fair is not only a waste, but it is counter-productive.

 

So which is the more proper view? Does working for what is fair create a better society than working for what is right? In an ideal world, the two wouldn't be mutually exclusive. But in the real world, they are two very different concepts. And history is ripe with examples.

 

Take the communist societies of the past 20th century. Countries such as the Soviet Union, Communist China, and North Korea based much of their ideology on a sense of fairness. They believed in destributing wealth and resources equitably. The idea sounded good on paper, but when put into practice it did not work. Instead, it led to brutal authoritarian regimes where rights and freedoms were severely restricted, all in the name of fairness.

 

Take a less brutal example. Look at the welfare state that dominates most Western countries. Programs like social security, nationalized health care, and progressive taxation are all done in the name of fairness. They are meant to provide resources for those who do not have as much as others. The same logic applies as it does in communism. Resources are redistributed in the name of fairness. Just how much it succeeds is hard to guage, but the successes of the welfare state are often outweighed by their failures. At times it's difficult measure, but the same problems the communist nations faced still applies.

 

Welfare reforms like Lyndon Johnson's Great Society or the universial health plans of Europe all have to come from somewhere. They can't be implemented free of charge. So money and resources are drawn away from others to create what is hoped to be something that is fair. But it rarely is. In socialized health care, treatment has to be rationed and quality is lower. There is also a lack of innovation and invention. The same problem is apparent in the public school system, which also tries to grant fairness to all school age children. But the great disparity persists because that's what happens when resources are forcibly distributed by authorities. The quality suffers and progress stagnantes.

 

The problems with fairness all relate to it being so subjective. What's fair to one person isn't fair to another. A poor black woman's idea of fairness is going to differe greatly from a rich white man. But both would probably agree on what is right in terms of morality. They will most likely agree that killing, stealing, torture, rape, and lying are all wrong. In many cultures across history, this persists. Murder was just as wrong in Ancient Egypt as it is in the United States. Lying and stealing is just as egregious in Ming Dynasty China as it is modern day Germany.

 

This is because a sense of right is far less subjective. People can disagree on some issues, but by and large they do agree on the baser points. A sense of right has been repeatedly shown by science to be something that is very much engrained in our biology.

 

Psychology of Morality 

 

Human beings, as social creatures, have strong moral tendancies that make killing, stealing, and lying adversive and when authority is focused on combating these forces people in a society are free to prosper. Throughout history in periods where countries decline, empires fall, and society degrades have all suffered from an inability to enforce what is right. It does not seem to make a difference if they used their resources to enforce what is fair. And societies that place a stronger focus on what is right tend to do better. The American Republic in the early days is one of the best examples because it took authority and limited it to enforcing what was right as dictated by rule of law, not allowing the power to be abused in order to follow the agendas of a king, oligarch, or majority. The wealth may not have been distributed fairly, but it made for a stable and just society.

 

Liberals will accept such ideas as a good thing, but will argue it is not right for some to have so much and others to have so little. This again confuses what is right with what is fair. One must consider whether or not it is right to forcibly take something from someone and give it to someone else in the name of fairness. It's saying that someone that works to gain their wealth is not allowed to keep it all. Is that a fair statement? What about when it's too much? Where's the threshold? Again, it goes back to subjective interpretations about fairness. What is too much for some is too little for others. The moral argument of fairness breaks down because it requires a level of unfairness in order to propagate. It's utterly self-defeating.

 

It has been shown time and again that enforcing what is right is more advantageous to enforcing what is fair. Fairness will always come with conditions and be subject culture, geography, and basic personal differences. But a sense of right and wrong is more universal and just, allowing greater freedom to more people. This is the very nature of the free society, enforcing what is right so that the individuals themselves stand on their own two feet and determine their own destiny. Not every destiny will come out fair. But part of freedom is having a chance to set one's self apart from others. It would not be fair to restrict everyone to the same fate.

Few things are more powerful in a civilization than money. For better or for worse, money is a fundemental building block of society and a key engine to prosperity. It is also a major source of power. Whoever has money has the potential to wield power. So in a free society, one would expect the value and power of money to be limited in the same spirit as government is limited. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

 

The power to control the supply of money and regulate the value of the dollar rests in the hands of the Federal Reserve. This single independant body of unelected officials meets in secret and carries out it's policy with little oversight and next to no accountability. They have the authority to print money out of thin air and destribute it as they see fit. They also have the ability to adjust interest rates to their whims. They claim to be a defender of the market when they are by definition a mirror opposite of the market. Few organizations wield the kind of power the Federal Reserve wields. It is independant, hence not subject to oversight by any branch of government. Yet few question their power and even fewer understand the flawed system in which they operate.

 

The Federal Reserve, like all central banks, practice what is known as fractional reserve banking. David Kretzmann summerizes the practice as follows:

 

 

So what this means is that whatever money one has in the bank, they will only officially have access to 10% of their deposit. Most people don't contemplate this. They assume that when they deposite X amount of dollars, they'll be able to withdraw the same amount at any time. The bank never makes it clear that this is not the case. It is because of this misunderstanding that panics occur and banks go under. It is, essentially, a kind of fraud. An organization (the bank) is promising one thing to another (the customer) and doing something else. So in essance the fractional reserve system is a kind of fraud.

 

So why was the Federal Reserve founded in the first place? The country ran fine without one for over a century. David Kretzmann explains again:

 

After the Panic of 1907 and the umpteenth failure of fractional reserve lending, the attacks still were not aimed at the fractional reserve system. This system, when protected through law, gave banks the undoubted opportunity to inflate the money supply, overextend themselves in ways that would never be sustainable in a free market economy, and give little regard to the customers' original property. Instead, economists began calling for a "lender of last resort" to bail out banks if they were caught overstretched in commitments. Many people don't realize it, but the U.S. financial system has been in bailout mode for nearly a century since this event. In an otherwise relatively free market system, banking started as the largest sour grape of interventionism in the bunch.

Now here's how their logic followed. Because the fractional reserve system was inherently flawed, creating the many panics of the past, the government created an organization that would use the same flawed system to prop up the other flawed systems by making loans with money printed out of thin air to banks that keep their reserves. It is essentially solving a problem by creating a bigger problem. The end result is inflation, financial bubbles, devalued money, and false prosperity. Since the Federal Reserve came into existance, the US dollar has lost 95% of its value. It has also been behind depressions and recession, including the major housing bubble that burst in 2008. But is the Federal Reserve deemed a failure? Is it reprimanded for it's actions? Not in the slightest. In fact, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama have both talked about giving MORE power to the Federal Reserve. It fits the very definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

 

Nowhere in the constitution does it say the government can create an entity like the Federal Reserve. The essance of the American Republic was to limit the power of government, not grant it an authority that can easily be abused. A free society can't be free if the livelihood of the citizens are at the mercy of an entity like the Federal Reserve. Under the principles of free socities, government is only supposed to protect the rights of individuals, regulate a court system based on rule of law, provide for a national defense, and enforce contracts. And fractional reserve banking like that of the Federal Reserve is a fraud on the people, plain and simple. There can be no true freedom or prosperity when the peoples' money is at the mercy of a central bank. It is a tyranny few realize, but a tyranny that has the potential to do the greatest damage on the free society.

 

More Information on Banking 

Most people don't understand or appreciate how much science has done for them. Anybody living in the United States or any industrialized country owes their lives to science and all it has brought us. Because of science millions if not billions of lives have been saved thanks to medical advancements that have cured diseases like polio and smallpox and millions more can survive thanks to lower infant morality. Because of science our civilization has an abudnence of food that is unsurpassed compared to any other time in history and because of science our understanding of how nature and the cosmos work has been greatly expanded. Everytime someone is able to eat ample food, drink clean water, or heal with modern medicine they are indebted to the advances made by countless men of science who used their reason and ingenuity to further our knowledge and create new ways to live and survive.

 

And yet despite all science has given civilization, there are those who seek to undermine it with age old superstition and dogma. These people feel so threatened by the advancements science has made they are willing to undo it and all the good it does just so they can keep their age old beliefs. Chief among these anti-science zealots are those calling themselves 'creation scientists.' Yet it would be an insult to real scientists everywhere to call these people scientists because what they do isn't science. It is just another way for them to push their religous beliefs on people and by disguising it as science they try to get a certain level of legitimacy, which is impossible because they completely ignore the tenants of science.

 

These creation scientists actually believe that the stories in the bible are literally true. They believe that the world was created by a supernatural being and that there was a global flood that only one man survived by building a single boat that housed two of every animal. They genuinely believe that the entire world was destroyed by their 'loving god' and they can prove this with science even though all of their claims have been rejected by legitimate research. But this doesn't seem to bother them. They reject vast body of geological and fossil evidence, claiming it can be explained by their faulty reasoning and misconstrued, out of context, and often outrageous biblical interpretations. They openly admit that if any evidence or theory of any kind comes along that my counter what their old book of Judeo-Christian myths and legends says then it must be thrown out.

Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis (or Answers in Magic would be a more accurate description), is a well-known creationists who claims to know the actual 'science' of creation, but his claims and methods are about as steeped in science as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. His site openly admits in it's mission statement that "We proclaim the absolute truth and authority of the Bible with boldness." This basically destroyed their scientific credibility because it states they have their conclusion already and will only shape the facts to agree with it. And that is NOT science. That's nonsense.

Science works in the opposite direction. It takes evidence and draws conclusions of it and often new evidence comes along to change that conclusion. People used to believe demons caused disease, but new evidence came along in the form of scientific observation of bacteria and microbes that proved otherwise. But if Ken Ham's method were applied and the idea of demons causing a disease was assumed since the bible says nothing about bacteria and affirms that demons cause disease, that evidence would have to be thrown out because it contradicts his assertion. Imagine if germ theory had been thrown out and science was not able to develop an understanding of disease. Millions if not billions of people would have died from a lack of understanding of how to treat diseases like polio and smallpox. But at least people like Ken Ham would have felt comfortable that their faith was secure. It only cost millions of lives and countless suffering. Is that really worth it?

Another common claim people like Ken Ham and his cohorts Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research (which is also an oxymoron because they don't research anything but the bible) and convicted fraudster Kent Hovind (the man who loves to claim dinosaurs and man walked together) like to espouse is that they are looking at the same evidence, they are just interpreting it differently. This is also a bogus argument because their 'interpretation' is steeped in dogma that allows for supernatural forces to play a part in natural processes. And in science there can be no supernatural forces whatsoever, otherwise it is by definition not science. Science does not claim to have all the answers, but when it doesn't know something it admits it doesn't know. It doesn't claim to know saying their version of a supernatural entity is behind it all. It actually seeks to investigate the phenomenon and explain it through natural forces.

This is possibly the biggest crime creationists and other anti-science zealots commit. They stiffle human curiosity into looking into a phenomonon. Someone out there may have had the answers to these questions about the universe a long time ago, but because of zealots and dogmas they were afraid or unable to pursue their curiosity and their knowledge was lost. Dogma such as creationism and anything like it teaches people to be content with not knowing something and attibuting it to supernatural forces they can never grasp. It hinders creativity and the human mind itself. These dogmatic zealots are not scientists, they are tyrants of the human spirit.

And their reverence of scripture and age old text (not just the bible but books like the Quran and the Book of Mormon), tries to parade nonsense as science even when it has been thoroughly disproven. There are still people who believe in the geocentric model of the solar system, that is having the Earth at the center of the universe, because that's what the bible implies. And their arguments are even laid out int the following website:

Geocentric Earth Nonsense

Creationists fight so hard to get their views forced into schools in regards to evolution. Yet you don't see many trying to push the Geocentric aspect of their dogma on anybody yet. As Penn Jillette so eloquently put "I'm sure they're just thinking...one step at a time."

This is the ultimate irony. The beliefs and nonsense these creation science and anti-science zealots try to push on the public is known by many to be wrong and good science has debunked it time and again. So they actively seek the government to support them through use of force either through policy or monetary support. They know they can't win in the ligitmate arena so they have to use force and that shows just how flawed their principles are.

I take this time to rant against these anti-science dogmatic zealots parading around as real scientists because they really do undermine the foundations of modern civilizaton. They would have it that we reject that which has given us so much just so they could feel good and secure about their beliefs. They would gladly march us all back into the Dark Ages where medicine involved prayer and exorcism and anybody doing research that contradicted sacred scripture was imprisoned or put to death and where irrational superstition took precedence over reason. And they do it with a smile, not caring of how many people would suffer and die as a result. If there isn't a greater example of ture evil then I've never heard one. If they have such a big problem with science then they should move out of our modernized world and live in hut in the middle of nowhere farming with pick axes and hand tools, just as it was in the days of their sacred tales. Because if science is so bad and so anti-god, then they should practice what they preach.

This is a free society. People have a right to believe whatever they want to believe. But in the world of reason, if you're going to make a claim you must support it with evidence. And faith is not evidence. Faith is faith. Don't confuse the two. Otherwise you'll damage both and all of society, not just science and religion, will be undermined.