Monday, May 12, 2014

Check your privilege then buy life insurance

Check your privilege! This veiled attempt to delegitimize success is but the latest iteration of "you didn't build that". If the reason for success can be delegitimized or stigmatized then the fruits of that success would be unearned and therefore subject rightful seizure by a benign and all knowing government. As one who grew up delivering the morning newspaper when he was 12, who paid every damn dime of his college tuition out of his own pocket pardon me if I look askance at at well heeled academics who have never done an honest day's labor.
Success is about work and the most glaring inequity in the workplace is not some silly made up 77% of what a male makes statistic but rather the overwhelming discrepancy in work place deaths. ( Square this circle. 26% of women earn more money than their spouses while only earning 77% of what a male earns.)
A perusal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2012 makes it clear that the so called privileged class is honored with an over generous portion of work place fatalities. The academic and political classes see no inequity in the fact that in 2012 of the 4628 workplace deaths 4277 were males. That is 92.4%! Or put another way its about 12.2 times higher than the female death rate and you probably won't hear that from your women's studies instructor.
Shall we look at race too? There are no minority set asides at the mortuary- no affirmative action. White males did most of the dying. White deaths in the workplace totaled 3177, Blacks or African-Americans 486, Asians 147, and Latinos or Hispanics 748.
Before you buy into the leftist argument that they were victims of a evil capitalist system that puts profits ahead of safety you would do well to consider that nearly a quarter of the deaths, 1,057, were those of the self employed. Far be it from me to suggest that we kill too few women and minorities in the workplace but rewards frequently come from risks and those who are willing to take risks reap a disproportionate share of rewards and deaths.

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