Equity: The Thief of Human Potential | Thomas Sowell
A speech from 1999, eerily prescient.
He touches on a point I hadn't really considered before. That equity ("cosmic justice") requires someone to be put in charge to decide what everyone should end up with. Henry Rogers (aka "Ibram X. Kendi") has designs on himself being that authority. In this situation, someone is assigned to act as the cosmic authority to decide what should be the outcome, what the cosmos should want, essentially making themselves what we might call karma. That way leads authoritarianism and corruption. It's no wonder that any society based on equity turns into a communist hellhole, when the apportionment of social and economic equity is dependent on the incorruptibility of people operating arbitrarily and opaquely.
In an equality ("equal opportunity") scenario, there may need to be people put in charge, but their role is different, to make sure that the rules of the game are being adhered to, not deciding how the game should play out. Referees, for example, are tasked with making sure that the participants in a race don't jump the gun or interfere with other participants. Their job is not to make sure the outcome is morally correct. Someone will win. Other people will lose. That's fair, as long as the rules were fair and everyone abided by them. Referees aren't incorruptible or even infallible, but their decisions are discrete and specific, and can be reviewed and checked.
