George Rebane
The use of ‘fair’, as in ‘the rich need to pay their fair share’, is one the most nefarious misuse of language in the public square. Oxford Languages defines the adjective as “impartial and just, without favoritism or discrimination”. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (Nobel 1972, here) proves that in collective decision making among alternatives it is impossible to satisfy any commonly accepted set of fairness criteria (q.v.) for all participating parties. From a systems perspective the reason for this is even simpler, the decision-making parties each have a distinct, different, and often incoherent measure of utility that they want the group’s decision to satisfy. Given this reality, they usually don’t communicate their utilities to each other and therefore talk past each other in their deliberations. The result is almost always regarded as ‘unfair’ by one or more of the participants.
Leftwing politicians who use ‘fair’ as one of their sales tools to convince their ignorant constituents have always been able to lure their well-meaning naifs into supporting socialist policies, e.g. in wealth redistribution. Today we have a posterchild of this tactic in Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ communist candidate for NYC mayor who advertises himself as a socialist. In his support several Democrat congress critters have gone on the air to tell us that we really don’t know what socialism means and that it’s not all that bad.
According to Rebane Doctrine any time you hear anyone, especially a politician, claiming to have come up with a policy or process that is fair for all concerned, you know that you are asked to believe bullshit. Exercise for the student – what is a fair share of taxes that the rich should pay? And before that – what is a fair definition of ‘the rich’?
rebanesruminations.com 
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