Not long ago I was talking to a guy on the phone, a retired fellow who had earned his living as a professor at one of the local universities. His son had described him as an ultra-intelligent conservative. We were talking about my helping him with some of his money, but not a large enough amount that to dissuade me from trying to engage him on some of the bigger topics of the day, both to hear his perspective and to determine if I would enjoy talking to him enough to justify taking a small account.
At some point in our discussion he described himself as having had the good fortune to have been born white, clearly admitting that race had played a role in his success and conversely in others' struggles. Either I nudged him or he continued on, noting that some people also had the benefit of being good looking while others were hindered by ugliness.
When I was a kid I often wondered about how strange it was that my brain ended up in my body, when it just as well could have landed elsewhere, that it was largely a random effect. While over time I've been disabused of this naive Cartesian mind-body dualism, it's hard for any of us to escape the feeling that there's a certain randomness to the advantages conferred on us.
Conservatives will argue that there is none, that our parents and grandparents and so on have labored and planned and schemed assiduously to make it possible for us to thrive. But even they will admit certain random effects. The aim of policy must be to diminish the impact of randomness on human destiny. Or, rather, to arrive at a mid-point of intervention in human affairs that optimizes for the control of randomness while disincenting individual initiative as little as possible.
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