Hoisted from Comments: What Equality of Opportunity?

caraig made the following point:

But what kind of society do we live in when it's apparently considered okay to check with someone if they're really sure they want to shell out a grand for medicine? What kind of society do we live in where we have to shell out a grand for medicine, period?

There's a common meme in right-wing circles that says "We only want equality of opportunity. What the left wants is equality of outcome, regardless of ability."

In cases like ours, though, there is no equality of opportunity. With treatment, Omaha is more mentally and physically capable than many of her peers; she carries a media company, a district-wide political party, and a family on her back day in and day out. But there is no equality of opportunity here.

Indeed, we're in the position David Frum once espoused: financially so precarious that we must not even consider, as Frum put it, "jumping across the big top," acting in that celebratory, individualist, self-assertive mode so fashionable with Fox News-watching retirees with their American-diet induced diabetes and their Medicare-purchased wheelchairs.

But starting a business requires capital-- capital we don't have and can't accrue, because so much more goes into our family than that of the average American just for staying alive. The average, healthy American family spends about 9% of their monthly budget on things they put into their mouths; my family pays 34%. So there's no "equality of opportunity" here. I don't think we as a country ought to pretend otherwise.

Costco makes its moves...

It looks as if the local Costco, our huge-box, members-only, warehouse supply store is making a big play to finally crush Cash & Carry, the other major restaurant supply chain in my neighborhood. Costco has always had a bit of schizophrenia; I qualified for membership when I was a teacher at a local community college, and have maintained membership ever since, but it's obvious that our monthly trips our for a family, not an education, and that's true of many of the people who shop there. So Costco's supplies come in cases small enough for a family to use if they're sensible, but can also be purchased in lots big enough to be meaningful to a restaurant.

Cash & Carry has always been much more targeted at the restauranteur business. Bulk and lots of it, plus restaurant supplies like massive food prepation tubs, 20-gallon soup pots, salt & pepper shaker pairs in boxes of 16 units per.

Costco has made two major changes this month: they've built out their restaurant supply section in a direct attack on Cash & Carry's bulk business model: 50 pound bags of sugar, food prep supplies, 20 lbs bags of chocolate, supplies of flour and rice and all the rest in restaurant-only bulk.

It would be a shame if Costco succeeds: Cash & Carry has a lot of ethnic restaurant supplies that you can't get at Costco, and it also has a much more diverse selection of flavored syrups for coffee. Costco's selection concentrated on coffee, but C&C has flavors for desserts, like kiwi and watermelon.

The other thing Costco is doing now is fine men's suits. But it's the super-cyber cheap-labor-from-India version: you go into a booth and it measures you precisely, you pick the material you want from a collection of examples, and some poor tailor in India or Pakistan gets the order to make your suit. It arrives at your door in eight weeks. The low-end of men's suits just got a lot closer to the high-end.

Costco also just secured the rights to sell liquor in Washington State, although that doesn't go into effect until June 1st of next year. That'll be interesting to see, because the public liquor distribution in this state sucks. We get the most limited selection of scotch you've ever seen, and don't get me started on tequila.

One part of the business didn't change. But I'm not sure I'd want to buy the bed of my eternal repose from a faceless warehouse distribution conglomerate.

Joe Paterno, Ross Douthat, Right and Left.

It occurred to me this morning that the discussion this morning about the difference between blue state and red state expectations is exceptionally well-illustrated in an editorial by Ross Douthat about the Joe Paterno scandal.

Paterno, in case you've been living under a rock, was the coach of Penn State College. An assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, has been arrested and charged with sexual assault on eight boys, all under the age of 12, and at least four of those cases happened on Penn State campus, in the locker rooms and showers of the football team. Sandusky ran a charity for boys in desperate straits, and used his position as an assistant coach of one of the most highly regarded football teams in college football with access to the facilities to exploit vunerable boys. In the most egregrious case reported, ( Triggery )

. The witness reported to Paterno who... nobody's quite sure.

A lot of anger has been heaped upon Paterno and the witness for doing nothing while a sexual predator used their good names and facilities to prey on pre-pubescent children. John Scalzi's Omelas State University (and if that name doesn't automagically put a chill up your spine, it ought to) nails most of the reasons why quite succinctly.

But there has been an awful lot of hang-wringing, "But you don't understand..." excuse-making from the other end. The most poorly-executed example to appear in a nationally syndicated newspaper was Ross Douthat's NY Times op-ed, The Devil and Joe Paterno. Douthat "tries to come to grips" with what may have driven Paterno, when the answer is simple: he was protecting the church of Penn State Football. Jon Stewart nailed that one pretty clearly., but the most devastating takedown yet is Belle Waring's Shorter Ross "I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won't" Douthat, followed on by Patrick Nielsen-Hayden's follow-on analysis. Douthat writes:

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate. Having already cut so many corners, the thinking goes, what’s one more here or there? Why even aspire to virtues that you probably won’t achieve, when it’s easier to remain the sinner that you already know yourself to be?

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness - by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.

For Douthat, Paterno's success is not one of contingency: he didn't happen to be lucky to get in when he did, and his leadership of a football team is somehow viewed as "heroic."

Paterno is one of the elite. And for Douthat, that's all that matters. The elite are there due to merit, not contingency: there is something "special" about them, and so when they show signs of corruption there's a sense of tragedy there that doesn't exist among those who, for all their good deeds, somehow didn't quite come to the attention of the press. For those people, a fall isn't tragic, because they're fallen already. Only a man's relative social position matters, not the absolute content of that man's character.

Douthat's attitude toward the opprobium heaped upon Paterno is clear: "Silly liberals, hoping that if he did the crime he'll do the time. Equality before the law? That's one of your ridiculous equality-of-outcome things, isn't it? Don't you understand? Paterno used his opportunity to build enormous social capital with skill and facility, and now he's reaping the rewards. You had an equal opportunity and you blew it, so if you're caught covering up a crime, don't expect me to cry for you, you red-diaper crybaby you."

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am...

One of the big differences between Stoicism and Buddhism is about engagement with the world around you. Buddha taught that the world was full of suffering, and that every human being had a duty to understand the suffering, to let go of the source of the suffering, to realize the cessation of suffering, and to go forward. The four noble truths are usually written as a diagnosis, you know: "All is suffering," "suffering is caused by desire," etc, etc. I prefer them the way the Buddha intended: not merely a diagnosis of the problem, but a prescription for solving it. To achieve these ends, Buddha taught about disengagement, about "letting go" and so putting an impenetrable wall between yourself and the sources of suffering. One of those sources of suffering was, of course, selfhood, and even that was to be eventually extinguished in the quest for enlightenment.

The Stoics, on the other hand, held fewer mystical beliefs. All was suffering, they believed, and like the Buddha they argued that suffering came from desire. But desire itself wasn't wrong, and good men could desire justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance. The Stoic philosophy posits that we're here, and other men are here. We must engage with our world, for good and justice whenever possible. "We have come into the world to work together," Marcus Aurelius wrote, reminding himself privately. It's because of this that the Stoics, despite their temptations to chuck it all, stayed in the world and stayed involved: they saw a nebulous supernatural state, what the Buddhist would call nirvana, as a waste of what little time we had.