A very long article that details the many ways in which serious thought can be derailed by bad behavior. It's all worth reading (although it should be taken with some tongue-in-cheek, as its choice of language makes clear). I just want to pull out the serious nuggets:
Bar Patron 1 seems moved not by facts but by a certain idea of a capitalist society, the idea that, in a free market, people get what they deserve.
Even on philosophical grounds, however, this view is exceedingly hard
to defend. That is true according to none other than the
archconservative twentieth-century apologist for capitalism, F. A.
Hayek. He writes:
There is little a man can do to alter the fact that his
special talents are very common or exceedingly rare. A good mind or a
fine voice, a beautiful face or a skilful hand, a ready wit or an
attractive personality are in a large measure as independent of a
person’s efforts as the opportunities or the experiences he has had. In
all these instances the value which a person’s capacities or services
have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to
anything that we can call moral merit or “deserts.”
The billionaire investor and oracular philosopher Warren Buffett echoes the point:
My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system
that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our
country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves
the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great
teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can
detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the
billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly
capricious.
How Fox News created a new culture of idiots
As an ironic example of the decay of modern discourse, note how the piece consistently misspells "desserts." It's even wrong in the Hayek quote, which leads me to conclude that Slate has replaced its editors with interns and/or Microsoft Word.
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