This Simple Thought Experiment Explains Why the Rich Don't Give a Damn About Fairness

John Rawls' veil of ignorance vs. why we can't have nice things.

Three Lawyers is a painting by Honore Daumier, 1855 | Public Domain

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Imagine you have died. Sorry about that.

An angel suddenly appears before you and promises rebirth. However, to determine your birth circumstances, you must roll a pair of dice.

Roll high, and you will probably be born some wealthy, white, handsome son of a hedge fund manager. Roll low, and you are stuck as a poor, undocumented, snaggle-toothed daughter of a janitor.

No do-overs. That one roll of the dice determines your start in life.

But here's the twist — you get to make the rules for the world you are born into. You can create a world with universal healthcare, decent wages, affordable housing, equal education, funded childcare, and a four-day work week that ends with a hot tub filled with naked Jason Momoa lookalikes. (My dice roll. My rules.)

This thought experiment is John Rawls' veil of ignorance. Rawls argues that when you don't know where you'll end up, you will build a fairer society. In essence, he challenges people to pose an uncomfortable question: What if people can't pull themselves out of a shitty life with mere grit, determination, and bootstraps?

Once you abandon these meritocratic ideals, Rawls believes you will design a system where, even if you end up at the bottom, the safety net is there.

It's a nice thought — utopian even — but let's add a twist…

The Veil of Ignorance for the Rich

Now, imagine you are a filthy rich billionaire. But still dead. Again, sorry about that.

However, you were not some tacky nouveau riche dead billionaire. You were a smoking hot trust fund baby, or at least someone who grew accustomed to conspicuous consumption. Throughout your life, your biggest problem was which jet to take with which supermodels to which private island. You've spent decades enjoying the perks of a system that keeps you perched high on your gilded throne, often above the law. Heck, you could even bankrupt six casinos, become best friends with a "terrific" pedophile, and you would still have some meme coin to burn.

And now, it's your turn to make the rules.

You can create any society you want. You could level the playing field by giving everyone a fighting chance, a decent education, and access to healthcare. Or…you could create a society where the rich stay rich, where tax cuts flow up, and the poor remain out of sight, out of mind. The choice is yours.

However, the billionaire must also roll the dice. And he, too, could end up with nothing. With one roll…poof. He is stuck in a dingy, rat-infested apartment, born into a life of chronic illness, drowning in debt, working three jobs just to stay afloat.

Now, the die feels like an anvil in his hands. His entire life has been built on the assumption that the system will protect him — that the rules will favor him, the comfortable billionaire. But now, he's facing the possibility that all his wealth, his power, could be stripped away in one roll.

Would the billionaire risk his cushy life to create fairness, knowing the potential consequences for his own fate?

If you answered yes, you probably think the man who shits on a gold toilet cares about the 15 million Americans about to lose their healthcare. Sorry folks, but most billionaires, unless stuck in a Dickensian dream sequence, are not going to change the rules to help the downtrodden.

Why would they? If you've never had to worry about the consequences of a broken system, why would you bend toward fairness? The system was built for you, and by God, you're not about to throw it all away for this abstract, distant concept of wealth disparity.

The data supports my cynicism. A study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that rich people are less likely to offer help to a stranger in distress than lower-class individuals.

But it doesn't stop there. Another study found that the rich are more likely to break the law. Apparently, the more zeros in your bank account, the more likely you are to break traffic laws, cheat to win anything from a contest to an election (ahem), and turn a blind eye to shady business practices. So, not only do the rich step over the little guy to climb higher up the food chain, they're also the ones kicking the ladder away once they get to the top.

In this light, Rawls' veil of ignorance reveals the hypocrisy of classism: The people who make the rules are often the ones who have the most to lose if fairness is ever achieved.

The Big Beautiful Bloated Corpse of America Bill

The wealth gap is a problem as old as time. The rich take too much, the poor starve, and then it is "Vive la Résistance," until the whole system gets a reset minus a few heads.

We are in that moment now. In the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill Act," our elected officials — those in the pockets of the ultra-wealthy — recently voted to transfer a staggering $1 trillion in wealth to the richest people in America. And guess who's left holding the bag? Everyone else.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that by 2026, more than 70% of the net tax cuts from this bill will go to the top 20% of income earners, with less than 1% going to the poorest 20%. That means the top 1% will see an average net tax cut of $66,000 annually, while the bottom 40% will see a net loss, as tariffs and reductions in benefits offset the tax cuts.

And then there is the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget warns that these cuts could accelerate the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare by one year.

Of course, it's hard to imagine a safety net when you've never needed one, but there is a ray of hope. One study found that higher-income people are more generous when they live in areas of economic disparity. In other words, when rich people see poor people, they are more inclined to help.

Unfortunately, for the uber wealthy, Medicaid is an abstract concept — something others rely on, but not something they'd ever have to worry about. Recent comments from the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Mehmet Oz, underscore this point. According to Dr. Oz, "able-bodied" Medicaid recipients must "prove that you matter" by working or going to school a set number of hours.

You wanna prove people matter? How about not ripping healthcare coverage from the most vulnerable when sick days might mean eviction or bankruptcy?

Sure, Washington charlatans can send their "thoughts and prayers," while sugarcoating this bill as "fiscal responsibility," but the data doesn't lie. Work requirements won't boost productivity. Arkansas already tried that experiment, and it failed miserably.

Overall, studies show 64% of Medicaid enrollees already work full or part-time, 7% are not working due to school attendance, 10% are not working due to disabilities, 12% are not working due to caregiving, and 8% are not working because they are retired. But sure, let's put the 80-year-old grandma back to work while the billionaires lounge on their yachts.

Dr. Oz and all his heartless goons can call Medicaid cuts "healthcare reform," but that nonsense will only work on his dumbest rubes. The billionaires basking in privilege are the last people who should be dictating moral tests to people navigating chronic illness, unstable hours, unpaid caregiving, or regional job deserts.

All this "prove that you matter" bullshit is just rich people telling poor people to jump higher for the same stick.

Rawls's thought experiment was meant to be an ideal. It asks the question — if we created society's rules with the knowledge that we could end up at the bottom, would we be more inclined to make the world fairer?

Unfortunately, most systems don't favor fairness. They favor the few. The 1% have everything to lose if the system is reworked. The veil of ignorance shows us that as long as those with power continue to make the rules, the veil will remain just that — an illusion of fairness.

“The privileged do not easily relinquish their privileges.”— Simone de Beauvoir

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.