The egalitarian passion

The central problem of freedom is that some people use it more responsibly than others, meaning that some experience success in life and others failure (even accounting for good and bad fortune). Such consequences also extend over generations to give the offspring of success advantages vis-à-vis the offspring of failure.

No reasonable person denies that the rich pass on more opportunity to their children than the poor, even in a land that cherishes formal equality.

It is precisely to combat such entrenched “advantage” that the political left, whether called “communist,” “socialist,” or “progressive,” enters the picture, for a passion for equality in all of its manifestations is what unites its followers. The left, reduced to its essence, wishes to use the power of government to redistribute wealth and opportunity from the rich to the poor in order to satisfy an abstract conception of justice. As long as anyone has more of something than others and can pass that something along to their progeny, the left’s egalitarian passion will be unsatisfied.

And because the achievement of precise equality in all aspects of life is ultimately also impossible, the leftist project is also an open-ended endeavor that will always generate new grievances and causes.

The latest manifestation of this egalitarian zeal is the idea of “socialized law,” as proposed by liberal pundit Noam Scheiber in a recent article in New Republic. Claiming that inequality “has bent American justice” because the rich can purchase better legal representation than the poor, Scheiber proposes a radical solution-to cap the amount of money anyone can use for purposes of legal defense. The underlying assumption is that “vast injustice arises from the way the law is applied to different classes of citizens,” with the rich literally getting away with murder and the poor convicted of crimes even if innocent.

Apart from the actual merits of such an approach, or even an assessment of its underlying claims regarding pervasive injustice within our justice system, the more interesting aspect is how Scheiber’s scheme for equalizing legal access further reveals the inability of the leftist project to embrace any reasonable “stopping point.” For just as one can say that being rich confers certain advantages (and being poor certain disadvantages) in the legal realm, a similar argument can be made with equal force regarding the consequences of human diversity and differences in all walks of life.

The handsome man or the beautiful woman will, for example, tend to have more advantages in the pursuit of society’s rewards than will their less handsome and beautiful counterparts. The intelligent will get into better colleges than their less intelligent classmates. And those with natural athletic (or musical or artistic) talent will be more likely to succeed in professional sports or the art or music worlds than those without such abilities.

Not all of life’s inequities flow from the unequal rewards that capitalism bestows, or that the defining capitalist principle of private property allows to be transmitted to subsequent generations through inheritance. The complete equalization of wealth (and thus the eradication of advantage) can never be achieved in practice, even with a monstrous state willing to crush liberty in order to iron out inequalities, because we cannot eradicate fundamental differences in ability, intelligence, appearance, character, ambition or the myriad other qualities which conspire to produce unequal outcomes in any social setting.

So yes, we can, in the interests of “fairness,” accept Scheiber’s proposal that we make it more difficult for the rich to hire better lawyers, but the hunch is that the egalitarian passion won’t be satisfied by such a partial victory, and that he and others of a like mind will simply have the appetite whetted for further demands to “socialize” other dimensions of life; perhaps by next seeking to limit the capacity of the rich to purchase luxury automobiles or by making their mansions less mansion-like by regulating the amount of square feet of housing they can buy.

There is, in the end, again, no reason by such logic to not keep going until every nook and cranny in which inequality might rear its head is somehow addressed. And the further hunch is that as the more significant inequalities are eradicated or somehow reduced by state action (as, for instance, in the legal system), the greater the passion that will be generated to go after the less significant and eventually the trivial.

After all, the more equality we achieve at any point in time, the more we highlight and find offensive those inequalities that invariably remain.The pursuit of equality is all-consuming because it’s never-ending.

Ultimately, we could take this to absurd extremes, resurrecting, for instance, Aristophanes’ proposal that the beautiful should be forced to marry the ugly or the intelligent the stupid. For only by such totalitarian means can the state ever hope to ensure that minimal advantage is passed along to progeny in the interest of equality. A passion for equality of income logically thus and always leads to the eradication of liberty.

The left’s real war in all this isn’t with capitalism, or even the inequalities that flow from it; it is with nature itself.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 02/17/2014

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