Column: Striking Out, When Sacrificing Freedom For Fairness, Everyone Loses

This story was written by Tim Hadachek, Kansas State Collegian

A childs game of T-ball is the epitome of fairness. Everyone gets to play the same amount; everyone plays each position and most importantly, no one keeps score.

The result is a game that is mind-numbingly and soul-crushingly boring.

Democrats today are proposing a T-ball world that favors fairness over progress. Everyone should be paid the same amount, receive the same benefits and have their job protected. The difference, of course, is that the world is keeping score and every time we sacrifice for the interest of fairness, we all lose.

Fairness should become the official motto for the Democratic Party. In the official party platform found on their Web site, the words fair and fairness appear 35 times, compared to the words free and freedom, which appear only 28 times.

Take for example the partys position on the energy industry. Like a baseball team benching their best home-run hitter in favor of the untested rookie, Democrats want to hinder the largest contributors to our economy the oil companies forcing them to invest in unproven and inefficient alternative sources.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) told CNBC on June 10, The government should be able to mandate what profit is fair for business.

In every game of T-ball, you notice players who probably shouldnt be there: the kind of kids who should probably be reading a book or working on their science fair project instead of playing sports.

Its nothing against these particular children, people have different talents.

This is like the fair-trade policy mentioned in the Democratic platform and by candidates like Barack Obama, as found on his Web site. The Fair Trade Federation lists its main tenet as setting a minimum floor price for producers around the world.

In practice, this creates an artificial market in which small foreign farmers receive extra money for producing crops like coffee, that they arent very good at growing.

As a result, we pay higher prices while they inefficiently stay in the market instead of moving onto something they are better at. The Democrats policy of fairness before freedom extends beyond the economy.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) favors a return of the Fairness Doctrine, which, until 1987, forced radio broadcasters to provide balanced viewpoints on controversial issues.

Today, as conservative talk-show hosts dominate the airwaves, Democrats say it isnt fair that there arent more liberal points of view. But liberal hosts have the same opportunities as conservative ones; its only their small audiences that keep advertisers from supporting their programs.

Like a free snack at the end of a T-ball game, Democrats want to reward people just for trying. Freedom means that you can be in a line of work that you arent very good at if you so choose, but you shouldnt complain that it isnt fair and expect a handout when you dont make the kind of money you want.

An entire society based around fairness has been tried in the past its more commonly known as communism. Communism was like one big T-ball game; everybody was guaranteed a spot on the team, but no one ever improved, because the ball was just sitting there on a stick.

Innovation is driven by failure, so if you are rewarded for failing, society never progresses.

The result of a society in which there are no losers is one in which there are no winners either.