Marxism and the left's war against merit

Glenn Beaton:

In an environment of limited resources – which is to say an environment in the real world – those resources get allocated. Not everyone can start and build Microsoft and not everyone can conceive of the General Theory of Relativity.

So how does society decide which people do?

The answer is that society doesn’t decide. Instead it happens as a result of merit. The most meritorious aren’t allocated those titles, wealth, inventiveness, prestige and accolades. They earn them.

The founder and builder of Microsoft is an extraordinarily talented, hard-working and risk-taking individual named Bill Gates. The guy who thought up the General Theory of Relativity is an obscure and un-trumpeted (at the time) but brilliantly creative man who is now synonymous with “genius” named Albert Einstein.

Others could have done what they did. But others didn’t. They lacked sufficient merit.

If this sounds like social Darwinism, that’s because it is. In the animal world, it’s survival (or, more precisely, reproduction) of the fittest. The individuals who are most able to pass on their DNA, do. As a matter of logic and semantics, Darwinism goes beyond a theory; it’s an axiom.

Millions of years ago, hominids with bigger brains tended to survive and reproduce, thereby passing on their big-brain DNA to another generation, while those without didn’t.

Was that unfair to the ones without the big brains? Maybe, depending on how you define “unfair.”

Nature itself knows nothing of unfairness. I suppose that to us it’s “unfair” that nature culls out the weakest to die in the mouths of predators. But the result is that the strongest, not the weakest, pass on their stronger DNA to produce a stronger species. In short, “survival of the fittest” is a colloquial term for merit.

The big-brained hominids passed on their big-brain DNA, and that’s why we’re here to ponder the issue of fairness – an issue that other species don’t spend a lot of time on.

Recently, society has become so wealthy as a result of the innovation and hard work by people of merit that we can, or we suppose we can, abolish merit as a tool for allocating our abundant but still limited resources.

But why would we abolish a tool that has taken us out of the animal world and into a world of humanity and spirituality where we, uniquely, care about fairness?

The answer is that some groups in America have failed to wield that tool successfully in the short time that it’s been available to them. We are concerned, rightly, that some racial groups, chiefly blacks, have not competed well in an environment that allocates resources on the basis of merit.

And so simple-minded social engineers, mainly leftist whites, not blacks, have decided that our only choices are either (1) to eliminate blacks or (2) to eliminate merit. They’ve chosen the second choice.
...

A lack of merit makes slaves of everyone who is not a dictator.  Slavery was a poor economic system because all the incentives for increased productivity were negative.  Marxism is a system where there is no reward for merit and that is why it inevitably creates a poorer society. It is why you see people in Venezuela eating of the back of a garbage truck.