The Problems with Liberalism, Part 8

8. A liberal believes that everyone deserves a chance.

• There was once a city-state in ancient Greece that believed that everyone deserved an equal chance to rule the city. They rotated that role among everyone. A true democracy. What happened? The city fell into ruin. My conclusion: everyone can't do everything.
• By everyone deserves a chance, do we mean that everyone deserves a chance to be equal to everyone else or that everyone deserves a chance to be exceptional, to be better than others?
• Everyone deserves as many chances as they want to take. The entire concept of chances is much more complicated than this simple homily. So many factors are involved, some known, others not yet fully conceptualized.
• I will take an example from medicine. Everyone deserves a chance to beat cancer. OK, what if you fail your first chance? Your second? Your third? You are now down to very expensive therapy. Does everyone still deserve that chance? What if the cancer was caused by poor life habits (ie smoking)? What if the person is a prisoner on death row? In Great Britain, everyone gets a chance, but no one gets all the chances.
• If you give a person a chance based upon a poor understanding of how to do it, you really haven't given the person a chance at all, even though you may feel good about having done something. The failure to understand, experiment, prototype and use best practices is the main failing of the Liberal mindset.
• Liberalism was once about science. Now it is a one trick pony, Big Government. Liberalism is now about building progessive Titanics out of fabulous ideas and slick backroom deals.