What Is True Social Justice?

In an article entitled Why Trump frightens the GOP Illuminati, author Lee Cary quoted Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution–a political think tank that claims to be independent and non-partisan. Here’s a sample of their non-partisanship, in which Trump supporters are analyzed in the most arrogant, insulting way, adding selfishness and a dearth of empathy (i.e., sociopathy) to the usual descriptors applied by the elite to Trump supporters:

racism and nativism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia and anti-Semitism.

And they wonder why folks in flyover country support Trump.
It follows, then, that Kagan’s opinion of Trump’s candidacy is that Trump represents

how fascism comes to America.

According to one definition, fascism

stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition …

Kagan, who was once a Republican and who is married to Victoria Nuland, must not have been paying attention for the last 7 1/2 years during which Barack Hussein Obama II has placed the U.S. well down the path towards fascism.

We currently have a president who refuses to enforce immigration laws, and other laws as well; who thumbs his nose at Congress, the courts, and the Constitution; whose wife dictates what school children must and must not eat; who uses the power of his office to menace the media; who, as a candidate, formed a “truth squad” that used prosecutors and sheriffs to police what people said about him; who threatens banks and businesses to make them to bend to his will; whose “justice department” warns states that they’d better not try to keep people from using a bathroom (or dormitory, or gym locker room, or shower room) that doesn’t conform with their birth sex, and which threatens citizens that they’d better not say anything on social media that criticizes Islam … Well, you’ve got the picture.

In the American Thinker article, Cary quoted the founder of the Brookings Institution, Robert Somers Brookings (1850-1932), millionaire entrepreneur and businessman, philanthropist, erstwhile President Emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis, and author, who wrote three books about politics and economics. The building at the top of the post is on the Washington University campus and is named for Brookings. The Brookings Institution is in Washington DC. In 1932, Brookings wrote,

… our present system for the distribution of wealth is unjust to those who mainly produce it and whose needs would easily absorb all of its products, could there be brought about some modification in our system of compensation providing a more equitable distribution and so increasing the consumption power of workers. This – distribution based on social justice – is the main problem of the world today.

I believe that Cary’s point in citing Brookings was to signal that he was a typical progressive redistributionist, which is likely, given that Brookings worked in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, the “progressive’s progressive.”

A book by Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and FDR: The True Story of how Franklin D. Roosevelt Colluded with  Corporate America, identifies Brookings as a “quasi-Marxist” and a “good socialist,” who had admiring words for  communism as well as fascism, with regard to their collectivist economic systems. Following are my thoughts about the above quote from Brookings:

Who knew that we even have a “present system” for distribution of wealth? Mind you, Brookings was writing in 1932. Freedom, capitalism, individual autonomy. These are what individuals like Brookings, Wilson, Obama, and Clinton desire to abolish. Brookings admired fascism because of its efficient collectivist economic system. Since Trump is a renowned capitalist, isn’t it more likely that an avowed progressive like Clinton, rather than Trump, would usher fascism into our country? Her supporter Obama has made a fine beginning.

I can’t help but agree, as most conservatives would agree but most progressives probably would not agree, that our system is unjust to those who produce the wealth, if you’re talking about the wealth that progressives in the government want to redistribute, and I am, even if Brookings was not.

When you have a large portion of the population (to each) sitting back and too easily collecting money taken by the government from the producers (from each), then of course the system is unjust.

Brookings, a progressive, nailed what’s currently wrong with big government as overseen by the likes of Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom resemble (and admire) Brookings’s patron, Woodrow Wilson.

But of course that’s not what Brookings meant. He was talking about the wealth created by capitalists, not wealth stolen from them by the government.

Progressives today seem to disbelieve that CEOs, managers, owners, entrepreneurs, and investors create and therefore own the wealth they create. In the typical progressive’s mind, wealth is created and owned by the workers, such as those who sit in cubicles at Microsoft, not Bill Gates, who pays the workers, or those who invested in his businesses.

For Brookings, an ideal system was a collectivist one wherein (Kumbaya!) everybody shared equally in the wealth created by a business. So during WWI, Brookings promoted price controls and regulation of the profits owners and investors could accrue.

Collectivism. Pie in the sky. That always works, doesn’t it?

Can one truly “increase the consumption power” of people by taking from them their own hard-earned wealth to give it to those who do not produce (by their own choice)? All that redistributive welfare programs accomplish is to redistribute consumption power, as well as wealth (and the choice of what to consume).

But again, Brookings wasn’t talking about money the government takes to redistribute. More likely he was talking about wealth tied up in savings or other assets and controlled by the people who created the wealth in the first place.

This is never a situation that progressive elites like Brookings, Clinton, or Obama prefer. No, they prefer to put that wealth to work, instead of allowing it to be “hoarded” by those who created it and so own it.

Progressive elites prefer to have all wealth controlled by the elites themselves and redistributed to those whom the elites decide are more in “need” of it. In their ideal world, a global government, run by themselves, would institute a system that would take wealth from its owners and see to it that this wealth is redistributed and used for consumption by those in “need”, so that wealth doesn’t just sit “idle.”

Brookings was probably not  talking about his own wealth or the wealth sitting idle in university endowments instead of being utilized for “consumption power.” Of course not!

I do completely agree with Brookings that

distribution based on social justice is the main problem of the world today.

Because through this concept of social justice, communists, socialists, fascists, liberals, and progressives have incrementally instituted our “present system” that features producers from whom wealth is taken and recipients to whom other people’s wealth is given.

There are as many definitions of social justice as there are fish in the sea, but the definition doesn’t really matter. What matters is how progressives use that phrase as code words for Marxist redistribution of wealth.

So, yeah. I do agree. “Distribution based on social justice IS the main problem of the world today.”  The problem being:

How do we stop progressive elites from creating a system of global fascism, collectivism, progressivism, communism–whatever ism you want to call it, in the name of social justice?

Whatever ism they end up calling it, it’s not the ism that made America great:

CAPITALISM.

Free enterprise, coupled with autonomy and freedom from government intrusion, which meant that individuals could enjoy the fruits of their labor (private property) and pursue happiness.

Trump knows this, and that’s exactly why progressives hate him.

Of course, what Brookings meant to say was that, in his opinion, the main problem of the world (of 1932) was how to bring about a system of wealth (re)distribution–or collectivism–-based on what today’s progressives call social justice.

As it is so often with progressives, what they say means the exact opposite. They speak in euphemism. When they talk about social justice, they mean the opposite: injustice. An excuse to be unjust to some and to unjustly reward others, especially if those others provide them with a means to power, and more power, and ever more power. (Voters!)

Hardly anyone is against the concept of charity, but charity is an act freely engaged in by the giver. Charity is not theft disguised by the euphemism of social justice.

So what really is social justice? Here’s my definition:

Not so fun facts: The book written by Robert S. Brookings that called for “more equal” distribution of wealth was entitled The Way Forward. That just happens to also be the name of a book by Senator Paul Ryan. Coincidence?

Forward, of course, was a slogan used by Obama in his 2012 campaign. That slogan has a long history in socialism, Marxism, and communism:

No, let’s not go forward. Let’s go back. Let’s renew. Let’s return to the values of our Founders, before it’s too late for our Republic. Let’s

Make America Great Again!

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