A sharp Martian visiting Earth would make two
observations about the United States–one true, the other only superficially
so. On the basis of its ceaseless exercises in self-congratulation, the US
appears to him to be a place where free thought is encouraged, and in which
man makes war against all the fetters on his mind that reactionary forces had
once placed there. That is the superficial truth.
The real truth, which our Martian would discover after
watching how Americans actually behave, is that the range of opinions that
citizens may entertain is rather more narrow than it at first appears. There
are, he will soon discover, certain ideas and positions all Americans are
supposed to believe in and salute. Near the top of the list is equality, an
idea for which we are never given a precise definition, but to which everyone
is expected to genuflect.
A libertarian is perfectly at peace with the universal
phenomenon of human difference. He does not wish it away, he does not shake
his fist at it, he does not pretend not to notice it. It affords him another
opportunity to marvel at a miracle of the market: its ability to incorporate
just about anyone into the division of labor.
Indeed the division of labor is based on human difference. Each of us finds
that niche that suits our natural talents best, and by specializing in that
particular thing we can most effectively serve our fellow man. Our fellow
man, likewise, specializes in what he is best suited for, and we in turn
benefit from the fruits of his specialized knowledge and skill.
And according to Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage,
which Mises generalized into his law of association, even if one person is
better than another at absolutely everything, the less able person can still
flourish in a free market. For instance, even if the greatest, most
successful entrepreneur you can think of is a better office cleaner than
anyone else in town, and is likewise a better secretary than all the other
secretaries in town, it would make no sense for him to clean his own office
or type all of his own correspondence. His time is so much better spent in
the market niche in which he excels that it would be preposterous for him to
waste his time on these things. In fact, anyone looking to hire him as an
office cleaner would have to pay him millions of dollars to compensate for
drawing him away from the extremely remunerative work he would otherwise be
doing. So even an average office cleaner is vastly more competitive in the
office cleaning market than our fictional entrepreneur, since the average
office cleaner can charge, say, $15 per hour instead of the $15,000 our
entrepreneur, mindful of opportunity cost, would have to charge.
So there is a place for everyone in the market economy.
And what’s more, since the market economy rewards those who are able to
produce goods at affordable prices for a mass market, it is precisely the
average person to whom captains of industry are all but forced to cater. This
is an arrangement to celebrate, not deplore.
This is not how the egalitarians see it, of course, and
here I turn to the work of that great anti-egalitarian, Murray N. Rothbard.
Murray dealt with the subject of equality in part in his great essay
“Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor,” but really
took it head on in “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature,” which serves as the title chapter of his wonderful book. It is
from Murray that my own comments today take their inspiration.
The current devotion to equality is not of ancient
provenance, as Murray pointed out:
The current veneration of equality is, indeed, a very
recent notion in the history of human thought. Among philosophers or
prominent thinkers the idea scarcely existed before the mid-eighteenth
century; if mentioned, it was only as the object of horror or
ridicule. The profoundly anti-human and violently coercive nature of
egalitarianism was made clear in the influential classical myth of
Procrustes, who “forced passing travellers to lie down on a bed, and if they
were too long for the bed he lopped off those parts of their bodies which
protruded, while racking out the legs of the ones who were too short.”
What are we to understand by the word equality?
The answer is, we don’t really know. Its proponents make precious little
effort to disclose to us precisely what they have in mind. All we know is
that we’d better believe it.
It is precisely this lack of clarity that makes the idea
of equality so advantageous for the state. No one is entirely sure what the
principle of equality commits him to. And keeping up with its ever-changing
demands is more difficult still. What were two obviously different things
yesterday can become precisely equal today, and you’d better believe they are
equal if you don’t want your reputation destroyed and your career ruined.
This was the heart of the celebrated dispute between the
neoconservative Harry Jaffa and the paleoconservative M.E. Bradford, carried
out in the pages of Modern Age in the 1970s. Equality is a concept
that cannot and will not be kept restrained or nailed down. Bradford tried in
vain to make Jaffa understand that Equality with a capital E was a recipe for
permanent revolution….
Now, do egalitarians mean we are committed to the proposition that anyone is
potentially an astrophysicist, as long as he is raised in the proper
environment? Maybe, maybe not. Some of them certainly do believe such a
thing, though. In 1930, the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
claimed that “at birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as
equal as Fords.” Ludwig von Mises, by contrast, held that “the fact that men
are born unequal in regard to physical and mental capabilities cannot be
argued away. Some surpass their fellow men in health and vigor, in brain and
aptitudes, in energy and resolution and are therefore better fitted for the
pursuit of earthly affairs than the rest of mankind.” Did Mises commit a hate
crime there, by the standards of the egalitarians? Again, we don’t really
know.
Then there’s “equality of opportunity,” but even this
common conservative slogan is fraught with problems. The obvious retort is
that in order to have true equality of opportunity, sweeping government
intervention is necessary. For how can someone in a poor household with
indifferent parents seriously be said to have “equality of opportunity” with
the children of wealthy parents who are deeply engaged in their lives?
Then there is equality in a cultural sense, whereby everyone
is expected to ratify everyone else’s personal choices. The cultural
egalitarians don’t really mean that, of course: none of them demand that
people who dislike Christians sit down and learn Scholastic theology in order
to understand them better. And here we discover something important about the
whole egalitarian program: it’s not really about equality. It’s about some
people exercising power over others.
At the University of Tennessee this fall, the Office for
Diversity and Inclusion explained that traditional English pronouns, being
oppressive to people who do not identify with the gender they were “assigned
at birth,” ought to be replaced with something new. The diversity office
recommends, as replacements for she, her, hers, and he, him, his, the following:
ze [pronounced zhee], hir [here], hirs [heres]; ze [zhee], zir [zhere], zirs
[zheres]; and xe [zhee], xem [zhem], xyr [zhere]. When approaching people for
the first time, students were told, we should say something like, “Nice to
meet you. What pronouns should I use?”
When the whole world burst out laughing at this proposal,
the university was at pains to assure everyone that these were just
suggestions. Of course, what are not suggestions are the thoughts all
right-thinking people are expected to have about moral questions that have
been decided for us by our media and political classes.
Another aspect of equality that’s been in the news in
recent years is, of course, income inequality. We are told how terrible it is
that some people should have so much more than others, but rarely if ever are
we told how much (if any) extra wealth the egalitarian society would allow
the better-off to have, or the non-arbitrary basis on which such a judgment
could be rendered.
John Rawls was possibly the most influential political
philosopher of the twentieth century, and he advanced a famous defense of
egalitarianism in his book A Theory of Justice that
attempted to answer this question (among others). If I may summarize his
argument in brief, he claimed that we would choose an egalitarian society if,
as we contemplated the rules of society we’d want to live under, we had no
idea what our own position in that society would be. If we didn’t know if we
would be male or female, rich or poor, or talented or untalented, we would
hedge our bets by advocating a society in which everyone was as equal as
possible. That way, should we be unlucky and enter the world without talents,
or a member of a despised minority, or saddled with any other disability, we
could still be assured that of a comfortable if not luxurious existence.
Rawls was willing to allow some degree of inequality, but
only if its effect was to help the poor. In other words, doctors could be
allowed to earn more money than other people if that financial incentive made
them more likely to become doctors in the first place. If incomes were
equalized, people would be less likely to go to the trouble of becoming
doctors, and the poor would be deprived of medical care. So inequality could
be allowed, but only on egalitarian grounds, not because people have the
right to acquire and enjoy property without fear of expropriation.
Since no one in his right mind accepts full-blown
egalitarianism, Rawls was bound to run into trouble. That trouble came in the
form of his attempts to deal with equality between countries. Even the most
dedicated egalitarian living in the First World doesn’t seriously favor an
equalization of wealth between countries. College professors who teach the
moral superiority of egalitarianism during the day want their wine and cheese
parties at night.
So Rawls came up with a strained and unpersuasive
argument that although inequality between persons was outrageous and could be
justified only on the basis of whether it helped the poorest, inequality
between countries was quite all right. He then proceeded to give reasons that
inequality between countries was quite all right, even though these were the
exact reasons he had said inequality between individuals was unacceptable.
Even if egalitarianism could be defended philosophically,
there is the small matter of implementing it in the real world. Just one
reason the egalitarian dream cannot be realized involves what Robert Nozick
called the Wilt Chamberlain problem; James Otteson has called something like
it the “day two problem.” In Chamberlain’s heyday, everyone enjoyed watching
him play basketball. People gladly paid to watch him play. But suppose we
begin with an equal distribution of wealth, and then everyone rushes out to
watch Chamberlain play basketball. Many thousands of people willingly hand
over a portion of their money to Chamberlain, who now becomes much wealthier
than everyone else.
In other words, the pattern of wealth distribution is
disturbed as soon as anyone engages in any exchange at all. Are we to cancel
the results of all these exchanges and return everyone’s money to the
original owners? Is Chamberlain to be deprived of the money people freely
chose to gave him in exchange for the entertainment he provided?
But the reason the state holds up equality as a moral
ideal is precisely that it is unattainable. We may forever strive for it, but
we can never reach it. What ideology could be better, from the state’s point
of view? The state can portray itself as the indispensable agent of justice,
while at the same time drawing ever more power and resources to itself – over
education, employment, wealth redistribution, and practically any area of
social life or the economy you can name – in the course of pursuing the
unattainable egalitarian program. “Equality cannot be imagined outside of
tyranny,” said Montalembert. It was, he said, “nothing but the canonization
of envy, [and it] was never anything but a mask which could not become
reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue.”
In the course of working toward equality, the state
expands its power at the expense of other forms of human association,
including the family itself. The family has always been the primary obstacle
to the egalitarian program. The very fact that parents differ in their
knowledge, skill levels, and devotion to their offspring means that children
in no two households can ever be raised “equally.”
Robert Nisbet, the Columbia University sociologist, openly wondered if Rawls
would be honest enough to admit that his system, if followed to its logical
conclusion, had to lead to the abolition of the family. “I have always found
treatment of the family to be an excellent indicator of the degree of zeal
and authoritarianism, overt or latent, in a moral philosopher or political
theorist,” Nisbet said. He identified two traditions of thought in Western
history. One he traced from Plato to Rousseau, that identified the family as
a wicked barrier to the realization of true virtue and justice. The other,
which viewed the family as a central ingredient in both liberty and order, he
followed from Aristotle through Burke and Tocqueville.
Rawls himself appeared to admit that the logic of his
argument tended in the direction of the Plato/Rousseau strain of thought,
though he ultimately – and unpersuasively – drew back. Here are Rawls’ own
words:
It seems that when fair opportunity (as it has been
defined) is satisfied, the family will lead to unequal chances between
individuals. Is the family to be abolished then? Taken by itself and given a
certain primacy, the idea of equal opportunity inclines in this direction.
But within the context of the theory of justice as a whole there is much less
urgency to take this course.
Nisbet took little comfort in Rawls’s pathetic
assurances. Can Rawls, he wondered,
long neglect the family, given its demonstrable relation
to inequality? Rousseau was bold and consistent where Rawls is diffident. If
the young are to be brought up in the bosom of equality, “early accustomed to
regard their own individuality only in its relation to the body of the State,
to be aware, so to speak, of their own existence merely as part of that of
the State,” then they must be saved from what Rousseau refers to as “the intelligence
and prejudices of fathers.”
The obsession with equality, in short, undermines every
indicator of health we might look for in a civilization. It involves a
madness so complete that although it flirts with the destruction of the
family, it never stops to consider whether this conclusion might mean the
whole line of thought may have been deranged to begin with. It leads to the
destruction of standards – scholarly, cultural, and behavioral. It is based
on assertion rather than evidence, and it attempts to gain ground not through
rational argument but by intimidating opponents into silence. There is
nothing honorable or admirable about any aspect of the egalitarian program.
Murray noted that pointing out the lunacy of
egalitarianism was a good start, but not nearly enough. We need to show that
the so-called struggle for equality is in fact all about state power, not
helping the downtrodden. He wrote:
To mount an effective response to the reigning
egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient
to demonstrate the absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the
self-contradictory nature, of the
egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the
egalitarian program. All this is well and good. But it misses the essential
nature of, as well as the most effective rebuttal to, the egalitarian
program: to expose it as a mask for the drive to power of the now ruling
left-liberal intellectual and media elites. Since these elites are also the
hitherto unchallenged opinion-molding class in society, their rule cannot be
dislodged until the oppressed public, instinctively but inchoately opposed to
these elites, are shown the true nature of the increasingly hated forces who
are ruling over them. To use the phrases of the New Left of the late 1960s,
the ruling elite must be “demystified,” “delegitimated,” and “desanctified.”
Nothing can advance their desanctification more than the public realization
of the true nature of their egalitarian slogans.
The only Rothbardian word missing from that stirring
conclusion is one of Murray’s favorites: “de-bamboozle.” It is that, above
all, that needs to be done. The Mises Institute has accomplished many things
over the years: advancing scholarship through our academic conferences and
scholarly journals, educating students in the economics of the Austrian
School, and reaching out to the public to give them a free education worth
vastly more than what many people spend six figures for. But put it all
together, and it amounts to perhaps the greatest de-bamboozling effort of all
time. Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the
philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at
anything – not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class,
nothing – the same way again.
Help us carry on our great de-bamboozling mission, as we
devise more and more programs and outreach to the public, and provide a new
generation of brilliant young scholars with the tools they need to resist and
defy a regime that would intimidate us into silence. Their way is violence,
envy, and destruction. Ours is peace, liberty, and creation. With your help,
we can tear down the state’s benign facade, which has bamboozled so many, and
reveal for all to see that the only winner in the state’s crusades is the
state itself.
This talk was delivered at the Ft. Worth Mises
Circle, “Against PC,” on October 3,
2015.
