As Byron York noted last night, Mitt Romney used his victory speech yesterday to join President Obama in a debate over which candidate can best honor how Americans value “fairness.” AEI President Arthur Brooks presciently previewed this battle in a Washington Examiner column earlier this month:
He used the word “fair” 14 times in his December speech in Osawatomie, Kan., where he implored us to “restore fairness.” He demanded tax reform that “makes sure everybody pays their fair share.” And it is only his policy proposals that ensure “everyone engages in fair play and everybody gets a fair shot and everybody does their fair share.”
From his proposed tax hike on high-income households — the so-called Buffett Rule — to health care reform efforts, the president has defined fairness largely in terms of government income redistribution. He has also set out to paint his political opponents as, at best, uninterested in fairness and, at worst, committed to making society less fair.
For months, free-market policymakers seemed willing to concede this term, preferring to argue against Obama’s policies on the grounds of economic efficiency and constitutional first principles. No longer.
Brooks went on to detail how some Republicans have begun to invoke fairness in their rhetoric, but Romney was not among them. Now Brooks can add Romney to the list. Here is the fairness portion of Romney’s speech from last night:
…
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. …
This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.
How can both Obama and Romney make “fairness” the center of their campaigns? How will this provide a contrast to voters. University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed back in 2010:
On more karmic notions of fairness, however, conservatives and libertarians begin to split apart. Here’s a statement about the positive side of karma: “Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most.” Everyone agrees, but conservatives agree more enthusiastically than liberals and libertarians, whose responses were identical.
“Karma” may be a odd way of putting it, and in his new book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt calls it “fairness as proportionality” instead:
The danger for Obama is that his push for the Buffett Rule will look too much like the liberal definition of “fairness” as equality and redistribution. That is why he is always insisting the Buffett Rule has nothing to do with class warfare.
