Fairness

When I was in college, I sometimes experimented with trying to bait my dad into oppositional debates about politics. At the time, he was a Reagan/Bush supporter and I was more or less anything but.

One of the big concerns of the time was worry over our trade deficit with Japan in particular and loss of US industrial capacity overall. Also, at that same time, his company was sending him pretty regularly to Mexico to move production lines for Stanley Tools from the US to our southern neighbor. It seemed to me, this was the perfect chance to engage in some gotcha politics.

When I pressed him about how he could support the Reagan/Bush rhetoric on how other countries were eroding our industrial capacity at the same time he was working to move part of our industrial capacity out of the country his reply was something like this: "By now I've spent a lot of time in Mexico. I've seen a lot of poverty -- really heartbreaking poverty. What makes you think that their right to prosperity is any less than yours?"

Well, he was right, of course. The needed changes are not always clear or easy, and we may not always agree on the best course. But it comes down to this: when a person faces economic struggles and/or struggles for justice that are more or less entirely determined by the accident of where they are born or who their parents are, that is unfair. When that unfairness extends across wide demographic groups or persists across generations, I believe we cannot simply ignore it as a problem that will resolve itself.