Inequality is a Virtue

Inequality is inherent among human beings. It’s not a curse to be banished as many progressives would suggest. The people of the United States have historically been allowed to benefit from the unimpeded function of our unequal capabilities. When individuals are able to liberally function, capable and gifted people rise to the top. This is human inequality.

Diversity is responsible for human inequality. When our unequal characteristics function in a free society, vastly unequal outcomes are inevitable. 

Some will become billionaires and some will make the minimum wage. Some will succeed, craft, and create; others will hardly exist. How is this justice? What could be more just than someone receiving rewards equal to his labor? The tradition of reaping what is sown has been the foundation of the American way of life—well, until recently.

You might claim that this even-handedness is cruel. If by cruel you mean objective, you have no argument. It is true that in a diverse society, whose members have varying degrees of capacity, those who have inadequate abilities will collect limited rewards. It should be clear, however, that it would be truly cruel if rewards were assigned by any other test. Our system is not cruel. Pain and suffering do exist, but not because some individuals are more successful than others. It is not the market that is cruel. It is reality that is cruel.

While the blind justice of reality might cause pain, it must be distinguished from the synthetic misery brought on by progressives in their version of a fair society. The “justice” of the progressives is an empty notion for it lacks good and bad results. Justice, by its true definition, demands an appropriate response absent influence or interference.

You should feel sympathy for those less prosperous than you, but you should not feel guilty. Be aware; such a stance will bring shrieks of outrage. They will accuse you of not caring for the poor and remind you that your taxes are relatively insignificant when compared to your bottom line. However, you must keep your moral compass calibrated. No reason is correct if it rewards someone only for his need. And for this reason, while the taxpayer is not always injured, he is always wronged—while the recipient of taxes might be grateful, he is never deserving.

There are those who claim that the needy are deserving of your support. When they tell you this, ask them for an explanation. To be “deserving” implies the right to some sort of advantage. Anguish, discomfort, inequality, no matter how difficult, don’t entitle people to another’s time or property. Therefore, it should be evident that the woe of others does not require you to provide any sort of relief to those in distress. You may want to help, and that is fantastic! But you should not be forced to fund people or endeavors that you don’t wish to support.

If we assume that successful people must help the poor, we are saying that the less fortunate have a blank check on the resources of those who are better off. Children are born that cannot be afforded. Bad choices are made. And those with nothing are the only ones with a clear conscience! They can feel secure in the knowledge that there is no one less fortunate than them. Such a social result is depraved and disgusting.

All citizens must be prepared to pay a price for freedom. And a population is not free if its individual components aren’t free to choose whether or not they want to spend their money on a cause that others feel is good or necessary. Only when the individual is free can he exist as a truly ethical being. If ethical choices are not his to make, they stop being ethical, and ethics are supplanted by the state. The man becomes less than a man. He is reduced and becomes a lesser being of cynical reflexes and involuntary responses. He acclimates to an atmosphere which he is no longer capable of influencing. This is the price of the progressive’s “equality”. This is the price of the progressive’s “social justice”.

I suggested earlier that our innate inequality is a positive. The individual differences among us have been responsible not only for our tribulations but for our evolution. Where individual independence, prevails, we are free to realize our ambitions to the best of our abilities. We are free to create and produce. When this happens, everyone benefits.

Individual freedom always results in high yields, and it ends up benefiting everyone. There is a reason why the poor in the United States are better off than royalty were a few centuries ago. As long as we are allowed the liberty to practice our disparate aptitudes, and reap from them, all will continue to benefit. If we bring the exceptional down in an effort to lift up others, all will suffer as a result. Where would we be if we had torn the great innovators and inventors of our past down in a vain effort to shore up the paupers of their times?

If our incentives are reduced, we will have a reduced nation. We might be more “equal”, but we will disintegrate and devolve. If we pursue a nation of equal outcomes, our final chapter will be written sooner than later. The children of the future will read of our failures, and we will be forgotten in the long list of miscarried empires. “Ah, yes, the United States,” their teachers will muse. “They had everything, yet they made the same mistakes as all the others.”