Spoiled Brats

Thomas Sewell has a strong piece today about the ridiculousness of bias claims and "rights" claims in our now overwhelmingly bias-leveled, rights-granting culture. The thesis of his Real Clear Politics piece:

Equal opportunity does not mean equal results, despite how many laws and policies proceed as if it does, or how much fashionable rhetoric equates the two.

The best example he gives is of two golfers, one the former head partner of a successful law firm, who sued a golf course hotel under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because it did not provide expensive golf carts that allow disabled golfers to hit the ball from their golf cart seat. Sewell says:

If golfers want this kind of cart, there is nothing to stop them from buying one -- except that they would rather have other people be forced to pay for it.

One of the golfers in this lawsuit has been confined to a wheelchair as a result of a diving accident and another as a result of a gunshot wound. Apparently the hotel had nothing to do with either.

I see the same spoiled brat politics when someone who lives in a home made possible by cut down trees, graded dirt and his abilitity to drive to and fro on public roads says someone else shouldn't have the same right to the same sort of home next door.

The natural enemy of greatness is selfishness. The selfishness of trial lawyers and politicians is leading to laws that feed on the selfishness of people and is causing the diminishment of America's greatness.

The physical monuments to our country's greatness could not be built today because of these laws. Washington DC is built over a wetland; forget about doing that today. Rushmore changed someone's view. The Interstate system encourages growth and fuel consumption. Saturn rockets pollute. Washington had no permit to camp at Valley Forge.