Egalitarianism, sports and rewarding failure

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

~ Sir Winston Churchill

Prologue

In a 2007 study published in Nature, titled, “Egalitarian Motives in Humans,” a modern and disturbing view of egalitarianism demonstrated by American college students showed that highly educated people are willing to pay, even collude with one another to reduce inequality. “When subjects were placed into groups and given random amounts of income, they spent their own money to reduce the incomes of the highest earners and increase the incomes of the lowest earners,” the authors concluded.

In a rational society, such behavior would be called Marxist, socialist or communist and be eschewed with full vigor by the people. Instead, the philosophy of egalitarianism, which Churchill characterized as socialism, “was a philosophy of failure,” “ignorance,” “envy” and “misery” and has since the early 1930s and FDR’s “New Deal” permeated every aspect of American society and culture. For almost 100 years socialism and egalitarianism have been the dominant form of government in Western Europe and has since then spread to every major country in the world as virtually all of humanity, like Hitler’s Brownshirts, is goose stepping into oblivion.

Detroit’s love affair with egalitarianism

My hometown of Detroit, Mich., has been in the news as of late for all the wrong reasons. This can in part be traced to egalitarianism and the entrenched, endemic, racialist big-city liberal politics – a corrupt political culture that with Stalinesque efficiency punishes success and rewards failure, incompetence and idiocy. Think: President Bush’s “bailout” of the Big Three automakers which was an unconstitutional case of corporate welfare and thievery of $17.4 billion of taxpayers’ money despite the fact that Congress voted down this spending measure only a few weeks before.

I was born in Detroit. Recently it has overtaken disaster-ravaged New Orleans as the most dysfunctional city in America. For example, Detroit’s twice-elected mayor, the infamous Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to four months in jail for perjury, obstruction of justice and destroying the careers of two decorated police officers who were investigating his profligate ways; particularly a party the mayor had at the Manoogian Mansion in October 2002 where shortly thereafter two of three strippers who danced at that party were mysteriously murdered by the same police-issued Glock handgun. The case remains unsolved.

One of the exotic dancers, Tamara Greene, a mother of three, was murdered in cold blood literally a block from where I grew up on the Northwest side of Detroit. Mayor Kilpatrick, despite his plunging Detroit into a $300 million deficit, winning “Time Magazine’s worst mayor in America” and Forbes Magazines’ “Most miserable city in America,” is still very popular with black people. Despite his felony record, disbarment as a lawyer and present incarceration in jail, Kwame Kilpatrick is actively planning on running for mayor of Detroit again in future.

The egalitarianism displayed in Detroit and in many other major American cities where black people tend to populate is ironically more likely to be oppressive and “racist” to black citizens than the white leaders they began to replace in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Churchill was right: “An equal sharing of misery.”

Egalitarianism and the Detroit Lions

How do the foibles of Detroit’s ex-mayor relate to sports teams rewarding failure? Let’s examine the 0-15 Detroit Lions, the NFL team of that city. The Detroit Lions, a now legendary horrible football team who last Sunday (Dec. 20) in their 42-7 loss to the New Orleans Saints, has forever sealed their legacy into football infamy.

The question here I want to address is why does the NFL as well as the NBA, and no doubt other sports franchises, reward failed teams with the honor of picking the best player for the draft? This public policy seems to be an application of the negative effects of affirmative action assumptions to sports – reward failure rather than rewarding excellence.

The presumption for allowing the worst sports teams first pick in the draft was originally designed to allow the bad team’s equal parity with the better teams by giving them access to the better players. Secondly, and most diabolically, it sought to keep the best sports teams from getting even better by blocking their access to the finest young talent available.

Does affirmative action work in sports? No. Just look at the pathetic Detroit Lions. Look at their increasingly dismal record over the past 50 years where they have only won one NFL Championship (1957) and only one playoff game in the past 50 years (1992).

You can see a sobering look at the Detroit Lions first-round draft picks throughout history, particularly their all-time draft choices, and how the Detroit Lions have ruined the careers of many very promising, young football players and coaches simply by the misfortune that the Lions drafted them as players or hired them as coaches. For many players, coaches and administrators alike, the Detroit Lions was an entrance to career oblivion, even to this day.

Epilogue

I contend that affirmative action and other anti-meritorious public policies were born out of a perversion of equality, a philosophy derivative of the secular humanist Age of Enlightenment, called egalitarianism. Thus one can see why liberals in politics and sports are loathed to dismantle a failing sports either by force of law or by revision of sports policy.

Egalitarianism is a diabolical philosophy that feigns like it stands for social, legal and economic equality, but in reality egalitarianism is not for an equality of access but for an equality of results and therefore is artificial, a fantasy, diabolical, or as Churchill eloquently stated, “An equal sharing of misery.”

My suggestion: Get rid of affirmative action in sports and the cynical policy of giving perennially losing teams like the Detroit Lions the first pick in the draft. Let the bad sports teams have, say, 10 years to reform, to make it to the playoffs or the owners lose their franchises, which can be auctioned off to other potential owners who can effectively demonstrate a better plan for being competitive. This reform alone will end the shameful practice by sports teams of rewarding failure.

Finally, let’s stop rewarding failure in all aspects of society. I’m not saying don’t give people a hand who are really in need, but stop social welfare, corporate welfare, pork-barrel spending, earmarks and affirmative action in all of its permutations. Let those people who need help: 1) be the first to step up and demonstrate what they have done to help themselves and 2) conclusively demonstrate how that their present predicament isn’t of their own laziness, ignorance, bad life choices or poor judgment.

Once this two-part test is conclusively demonstrated, then, and only then, should a citizen, a race, a gender, a farmer, a sports team, an auto industry, a mortgage industry, an education system, a healthcare system, a retirement system, a juvenile system, a political system be given limited aid under the Constitution to perform. Otherwise, all other aspects of egalitarianism and affirmative action should be deemed unconstitutional and dismantled immediately.

Come on, America! Let’s start rewarding true excellence and stop rewarding incompetence, cronyism and failure. Churchill said it best: Socialism (also liberalism and egalitarianism) is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
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