Unknown Author with a Powerful Though
We are not Equal in a free society and that is
Good!
Free people are not equal, and equal people are not
free.
First, I should clarify the kind
of "equalness" to which I refer in this statement. I am not referring to
equality before the law-the notion that you should be judged innocent or guilty
of an offense based upon whether or not you did it, and your race, sex, wealth,
creed, gender or religion should have nothing to do with it. That's an important
foundation of Western Civilization and though we often fall somewhat short of
it, I doubt that anyone here would quarrel with the concept.
No, the "equalness" to which I refer is
all about income and material wealth-what we earn and acquire in the marketplace
of commerce, work, and exchange. I'm speaking of economic equality. Let's take
this first principle and break it into its two halves.
Free people are not equal. When people
are free to be themselves, to be masters of their own destinies, to apply
themselves in an effort to improve their well-being and that of their families,
the result in the marketplace will not be an equality of outcomes. People will
earn vastly different levels of income; they will accumulate vastly different
levels of wealth. While some lament that fact and speak dolefully of "the gap
between rich and poor," I think people being themselves in a free society is a
wonderful thing. Each of us is a unique being, different in endless ways from
any other single being living or dead. Why on earth should we expect our
interactions in the marketplace to produce the same results?
We are different in terms of our
talents. Some have more than others, or more valuable talents. Some don't
discover their highest talents until late in life, or not at all. Magic Johnson
is a talented basketball player. Should it surprise anyone that he makes
infinitely more money at basketball than I ever could?
We are different in terms of our
industriousness, our willingness to work. Some work harder, longer, and smarter
than others. That makes for vast differences in how others value what we do and
in how much they're willing to pay for it.
We are different also in terms of our
savings. I would argue that if the President could somehow snap his fingers and
equalize us all in terms of income and wealth tonight, we would be unequal again
by this time tomorrow because some of us would save it and some of us would
spend it. These are three, but by no means the only three, reasons why free
people are simply not going to be equal economically.
Equal people are not free, the second
half of my first principle, really gets down to brass tacks. Show me a people
anywhere on the planet who are indeed equal economically, and I'll show you a
very unfree people. Why?
The only way
in which you could have even the remotest chance of equalizing income and wealth
across society is to put a gun to everyone's head. You would literally have to
employ force to make people equal. You would have to give orders, backed up by
the guillotine, the hangman's noose, the bullet, or the electric chair, that
would go like this: Don't excel. Don't work harder or smarter than the next guy.
Don't save more wisely than anyone else. Don't be there first with a new
product. Don't provide a good or service that people might want more than
anything your competitor is offering.
Believe me, you wouldn't want a society where these were the orders. Khmer Rouge
Cambodia in the late 1970s came close to it, and the result was that upwards of
2 million out of 8 million people died in less than four years. Except for the
elite at the top who wielded power, the people of that sad land who survived
that period lived at something not much above the Stone Age.
What's the message of this first
principle? Don't get hung up on differences in income when they result from
people being themselves. If they result from artificial political barriers, then
get rid of those barriers. But don't try to take unequal people and compress
them into some homogenous heap. You'll never get there, and you'll wreak a lot
of havoc trying.
Confiscatory tax
rates, for example, don't make people any more equal; they just drive the
industrious and the entrepreneurial to other places or into other endeavors
while impoverishing the many who would otherwise benefit from their
resourcefulness. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, "You cannot pull a man
up by dragging another man down."
Posted: Sun - October 16, 2005 at 12:39 AM