It is no secret that most college campuses are breeding grounds for left-wing thinking, and that the professed desires of students, faculty, and administrators alike for tolerance and diversity end where those values are most important: the tolerance and diversity of thoughts and ideas.
It seems that in matters that hit closer to home, however, even liberal college students do not care for socialist/redistributionist policies when it comes to things they have earned, such as their grades.
In a clever, yet simple, experiment to expose the implications and consequences of socialism (not to mention liberal cognitive dissonance), recent college graduate and Exposing Leftists co-founder Oliver Darcy asked college students at the University of California, Merced, whether or not they would favor redistributing grade points from the highest-earning students to those most in need on the low end, the same way they tended to support the redistribution of wealth through tax policies.
Darcy discussed this thought experiment recently on the FOX News Channel with “FOX & Friends” co-anchor Gretchen Carlson.
As one student offered, “If I do give GPA points to students that don’t deserve it, it just isn’t fair. I work for what I have.” When another student was asked why he needed that 4.0 GPA, he responded, simply, “Cuz I earned it.”
And that is precisely the point. Free-market proponents oftentimes stick to arguing that free-market capitalism is a more efficient and prospoerous system than socialism. That is certainly true, but they should not ignore the even more important moral argument that it is simply wrong and unjust to forcibly take the wealth or property from one person and give it to another, no matter how well-intentioned the theft may be.
See the full GPA redistribution raw video here. Additional man-on-the-street-style interviews illuminating various issues — such as whether affirmative action should be applied to basketball teams and whether conservatives should be banned from radio and TV — can be found on the Exposing Leftists Web site.