Why Leftists are Like Children
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
This poignant quote from America’s third President, Thomas Jefferson, summarizes the guiding principle behind the resounding success that capitalism has brought to the advancement of society, freedom, and happiness. In total opposition to socialism and communism (which assert the premise of equality in outcome), capitalism purports the supremacy of equality in opportunity.
Evidently, according to a recent study published last month in the journal Science by researchers at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, this seemingly self-evident concept of fairness, whereby all individuals within a society are granted the same opportunity to succeed or fail, actually becomes understood as an individual matures and grows out of an egalitarian-based view of justice and equality.
The intriguing results from this study have been summarized in a wonderful article from the June 2010 issue of Reason magazine titled ‘Do Liberals Suffer from Arrested Moral Development?‘.
Here is the premise from the Norwegian study, as presented in this Reason article:
The Norwegian researchers studied about 500 children beginning in the fifth grade through the 13th grade (ages 11 through 19) as they played modified versions of the dictator game. In the standard dictator game, a sum of money, say $100, is divided up between two players. The dictator decides how much to keep and how much to give the second player, the responder. Interestingly, research shows consistently that most dictators do not keep all the money.
Interestingly, as conveyed by Reason, the researchers discovered that the younger the average age of the test subjects, the more likely they were to evenly distribute the money to both players, regardless of contribution or merit. However, the older subjects were more prone to reward a larger sum of money to the individual who worked the hardest and/or contributed the most.
Reason stated the results in the following manner:
It turns out that as people move from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood they become increasingly meritocratic, that is, they come to believe that people deserve unequal rewards based on their individual achievements.
The results from this small survey parallel the results from the on-going global exercise called ‘civilization’. Societies maximize their wealth, harmony, and happiness as they embrace free markets, free trade, and merit-based economic structures. Simply compare a political map of the countries on this planet to a map ranking gross national product, freedom, life-expectancy, birth rates, or happiness.
Sometimes correlation does mean causation. Even if Leftists have not matured to a level that enables them to accept this fact.