Last August, a guest column appeared in the New Jersey Star-Ledger by Demelza Baer of the Economic Mobility Initiative at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. The article focussed on equality, and most of it I agree with. In N.J. social justice group: After Charlottesville, you must speak out!, Baer observes:
People of color, religious and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities have not yet achieved full equality in the United States. And, every time that people of color achieve significant progress towards equality, it's met with an inevitable backlash and period of retrenchment.
She goes on to give a brief history of America since the Civil War. She focuses on blacks’ drive for political equality, and the frequent reactionary backlashes that rolled back progress. But the article ended badly, undercutting Baer’s case for equality.
Whenever I read an article about equality, I suspect a bait-and-switch. The bait is to advocate for political equality, a worthy goal. That’s where Baer starts out. But, sure enough, the switch rears its ugly head, in point three—the push for economic equality.
But political and economic equality cannot coexist in any society. They are antipodes. Political equality means legal protection of inalienable individual rights of everyone, equally and at all times. Rights are guarantees to freedom of action based on personal judgement in pursuit of self-chosen goals, not an automatic guarantee that one’s actions will result in achieving the same economic results as others or any automatic claim on material goods that others must be forced to provide. Rights include the result of one’s actions, including the earning, keeping, and use of property. Properly understood, political equality means equal protection of earned property—for everyone, regardless of differences in the quantity of property. Given the rich individual diversity of human life, economic inequality is a healthy and natural result of a just society in which each is free to rise, by work and trade, as far as her personal attributes, virtues, values, and personal circumstances will carry her.
You can’t have both political and economic equality, because any attempt to use government coercion to equalize economic outcomes destroys political equality. To the extent that a government tries to impose economic equality, it must cut people down by violating their rights—each to the extent that they achieve success. How else do you equalize economic outcomes except by trampling rights—taking wealth by force or regulating private choices, which violates equal protection of rights before the law?
In a sense, economic equality is worse than welfare statism. The welfare statist seeks to redistribute wealth in order to fulfill some alleged need of people classified as poor or disadvantaged. Economic egalitarianism doesn’t even care about need. It seeks to stifle upward mobility and human flourishing for the sake of equality—equality as an end in itself. It seeks economic destruction. Welfare statism, bad as it is, at least has superficial appeal to some semblance of compassion, if not greed. Economic egalitarianism appeals only to envy and hatred of personal achievement.
I suspect that the communistic principle of economic equality is the real goal of the “social justice” warriors, with political equality being window dressing to bait people into swallowing the injustice of forced economic equality. But keep in mind that communism is largely based on economic equality, and that the crimes of communism exceed even those of Nazism, theocracy, and the Confederacy. If one cares about advancing social justice, one should embrace political equality and reject the misguided and hateful war on economic inequality.
In response to another respondent's reply “rebutting” (ridiculing) my comment, I posted:
We must distinguish between fortunes by work and trade, and fortunes by government favor and theft. To earn money is to create a value that others are willing to pay you for. To make a lot of money is to create a lot of value for lots of people. Keep in mind that the very rich in America get so by creating wealth and spreading the value throughout society, bettering the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Capitalist fortunes are not like the aristocratic fortunes of old, which were gained by looting the peasant “masses”. The fortunes from John D. Rockefeller to Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, et al were earned by trade, and the benefits to consumers far exceed their fortunes. Capitalist fortune-building is healthy and progressive. My Dell computer contributed in some miniscule way to the fortune of Michael Dell. Yet his fortune doesn’t concern me, or harm me. My Dell, upon which I am typing this comment, has enriched my life immensely more that whatever fraction of a cent Michael Dell gained from the sale. There are hundreds of millions more like me. Trade is win-win. If you look around, you’ll see that our ordinary lives are full of the benefits of companies built and run by rich entrepreneurs and CEOs. Good for them, I say. They earned it. Capitalist fortunes don’t concentrate wealth. They spread it.
We should not be concerned with “the widening gap between the very rich and the rest of Americans. . .” We should only be concerned with justice; that is, did the person, rich or poor, earn it by work and voluntary trade, or did he take it through force, deception, or fraud? If you really want to “help the middle class,” you’d want to eliminate barriers to upward mobility, like occupational licensing laws, minimum wage laws, progressive taxation, and government economic regulations (which favor large established companies and the rich over new companies and people struggling to start out).
Related Reading:
Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People--Randy E. Barnett
Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality--Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
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