Word: equalized
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...from 518 in 1967 to more than 600,000 between 1968 and 1974 -some 200,000 of them financed from public funds. Reagan now generally opposes publicly funded abortions. On another sensitive issue still dividing conservatives and liberals, Reagan in Sacramento took the liberal side: he strongly supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which the California legislature ratified in 1972. He now opposes the amendment...
These attempts range from experiments to reduce assembly-line monotony to employee stock-purchase or profit-sharing plans that give workers a larger stake in company earnings. The furthest reaching program is West German co-determination, which allots workers and management equal numbers of seats on the supervisory boards of large firms. But both sides have become somewhat disenchanted with the system. Management charges that union representatives have leaked board secrets, like plans to lay off employees. Workers claim that they are usually outvoted on the board by the employers, who have a tie-breaking extra vote in case...
Such charges are extreme and often unfounded. For the most part, the inequality of wealth under the free enterprise system is the unavoidable price that must be paid for genius, hard work or plain luck. The equality of results demanded by many leftist reformers would stultify society; complete equality can only be enforced by dictatorship. Income-leveling experiments in Britain and Scandinavia have proved that an economy without reward for success produces social entropy. There is little incentive for anyone to do more than the minimum necessary to maintain his own standard of living. Argued Winston Churchill: "The inherent vice...
...doubt is one of the basic tenets of American capitalism: faith in the future. Though capitalism has always been regarded as raw and risky, people accepted the system because it held out the promise that hard work and talent would lead to high rewards. Not everybody was created economically equal but, with the indefensible exception of some minorities, everybody had a full, free opportunity to prosper. Ever distant frontiers and ever brighter tomorrows created a nation of optimists, who believed that a rising tide lifts all boats. This was the U.S. social contract...
...then backstage with the show's star, Zero Mostel. "How old are you?" asks Mostel. "Sixteen," says Philly, without hesitation. "Me too," says Mostel. Then they sing If I Were a Rich Man together, a comic genius and a man who could be called an idiot, meeting on equal terms of humanity...