As anyone who has been on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain.
What exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, National Review magazine and the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers us a succinct explanation in this brief video from Prager U.:
Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name.
It's not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard for all his life and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.
We've seen this form of justice played out in once prosperous Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where farms that had been in the family of white farmers for generations were simply confiscated from them and handed over to black Zimbabweans who had no knowledge of farming. Not only was the confiscation of the property a terrible injustice, but the result has been disastrous for Zimbabwean agriculture.
Now South Africa, having failed to learn the lessons of its neighbor's foolish policy, is about to embark on the same ill-considered policy itself, all in the name of social justice.
One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if their GPA was reduced by the college so that some of the points they earned could be distributed to students who didn't do as well.
I'll bet not many.