I’ve had enough of it. Egalitarianism and liberty are 100% incompatible. That’s a fact. And, for some reason, there’s a large group of folks out there that just can’t come to terms with it. Those folks are called “left-libertarians” and organizations like the Libertarian Party (LP) are chock-full of them.
And I know it’s cliché to say that they’re “not real libertarians,” but they aren’t. To say they are would make the word meaningless… if it isn’t already.
These people don’t realize that there’s no conceivable way that free individuals all end up with exactly the same outcomes or even have exactly the same opportunities.
Of course, not everyone knows what an “egalitarian” even is. So, before I go further, let me define some terms for the sake of clarity.
By liberty, I mean the absence of offensive force and fraud, or aggression. This would require that the State is non-existent, considering its very presence is aggressive in nature. It would also require that no one steal from, enslave or kill one another, or, at the very least, that it be understood that when someone does do these things, others are warranted in using force and fraud defensively.
Liberty depends wholly on the widespread respect of self-ownership and property rights, which I discussed in last week’s blog. We each own ourselves individually. Our ownership extends to our labor. And we rightfully own what we use our labor to create, provided that we didn’t steal what was necessary to create it. We can also exchange what we own for things that other people own, as long as they agree to it.
A libertarian, as the word should be defined, is someone who accepts liberty as the most important political goal. This means a libertarian must be anti-aggression because aggression, as stated above, is the antithesis of liberty.
By equality I mean similarity. For example, people can be equal in their income – they both make $100,000 per year – or they could be equal in a possession – they both have the same model car. Both are examples of people being equal in those respects.
The opposite of equality is diversity, which means dissimilarity. Two people are diverse in respect to the clothes they wear if they both are wearing clothes of different brands, colors, sizes and material.
An egalitarian is someone who, as opposed to liberty, sees equality as the ultimate political goal. Just as the libertarian must be opposed to aggression, the egalitarian must be opposed to diversity, for any diversity must diminish equality.
People are Equally Human, but Diverse Individuals
We are all called humans for a reason. We all have similar characteristics that make us classifiable as Homo Sapiens, i.e., man. In respect to these characteristics, we are equal.
But in respect to most things, we are not equal. We are all autonomous individuals with unique bodies, unique minds and, most importantly, unique actions. None of us are faced with exactly the same circumstances and none of choose exactly the same actions, even if the circumstances are similar.
That being said, we can only say we’re equal in respect to our humanity. To say we are equal in any other regard is opposed to undeniable facts about human nature.
Our self-ownership, which could accurately be said to be our right to liberty, is rooted in our being human. Since we are all human, we all have self-ownership. No one, no matter how strong or intelligent they are, is justified in stealing from, enslaving or murdering anyone else. No class of people is exempt from this, including the government class.
Diversity is an imperative part of being human. It is through our differences and individuality that we can specialize labor, become professed in certain practices according to our interests, skills and abilities.
In turn, each individual typically focuses his resources on becoming an expert in one area rather than distributing his recourses out generally among many areas. As a result, he becomes more proficient in the one area.
As other individuals, due to their diverse characteristics, specialize in different areas, he is free to exchange the fruits of his labor with the fruits of theirs.
Without specialized labor, we’d all be poor. I mean, just imagine having to produce everything that you use day-to-day yourself. It would be impossible!
To eliminate diversity, then, would not only be to eliminate what makes us, us. It would also be to damn us to inescapable poverty. Contrary to popular belief, the egalitarian world would not be all roses and sunshine. It would be a bleak world conformity, economic destitute and, ultimately, totalitarian rule.
Liberty Perpetuates Inequality, Even in Opportunity
Egalitarians are anti-human. They are also anti-libertarian. Let me explain.
Since we're all different people with different motivations, capabilities, circumstances, potentials and wills, leaving us free to exercise those differences will result in, of course, differences in outcomes.
Differences in outcomes, further, will perpetuate differences in opportunity. For example, someone whose parents made $500,000 last year would likely be better off than someone who has a single parent making less than $30,000.
If the parents who made $500,000 want to use the money they rightfully own to provide the best opportunities for their children, the principles of self-ownership and property rights would contend that they be allowed to do so.
There are only two ways that the “equality of opportunity” or the so-called “level playing field” could be achieved in this scenario: The parents who made $500,000 either voluntarily give up precisely $235,000 or that amount is forcibly taken from them and given to the other family. Either way, each family ends up with $265,000.
Can we expect even the most benevolent family to give up almost 50% of their income on their own volition? That’s preposterous! The second option is the only one that would conceivably be possible.
Now we’ve resorted to force, which is undoubtedly aggressive force because the wealthy family obtained the money peacefully and truthfully. Aggressive force is what liberty seeks to delegitimize. Since a libertarian subscribes to a belief in liberty, he can’t see it justified for the wealthy family to be robbed, or else he’s not a libertarian at all. He’s a criminal apologist.
But say we do accept egalitarianism. What about the people responsible for forcibly seizing money from the wealthy for redistribution? Do we expect them to act benevolently? Would they not take for themselves as much as they could get away with?
Being that this business is the business of aggression, it seems to me that the people attracted to it naturally – the most skilled and dedicated aggressors – are going to be morally deficient individuals. And especially if we allow them to use their aggression to secure a monopoly, i.e., form the State, they will be inclined to loot as much as they possibly can to fill their own pockets.
In turn, the aggressors become a class of their own, a government class, that holds considerably more power and wealth than their citizenry. This has been the result of every communist (which is beyond a doubt an egalitarian idea) experiment in history. Mao, Stalin and Castro all enjoyed luxury while their people suffered inexplicable poverty.
That unveils a paradox of egalitarianism. No matter how hard egalitarians try to “level the playing field,” the “playing field” is always made unequal.
Of course, so far, I’ve only factored in money. When all other factors are considered, it becomes all the more complicated. True equality becomes even less likely to ever be achieved.
For instance, it’s a well-known fact that children of single-parent households are more likely to end up in poverty than children in two-parent households. In order to “level the playing field,” should the father of the two-parent household be expected to split his time and parenting efforts between his own family and the single-parent household?
And what if we consider the factors having to do with location – the cost of living and the availability of goods and services? Afterall, money is only as good as what it can buy. Maybe where the wealthy family lives, there are readily available quality goods and services for a low price.
The poor family lives where goods and services are more expensive. Does this require the wealthy family to give up even more of their income? How would the amount they should be expected to give up even be calculable?
And, as anyone working in any sort of business knows, networking plays a considerable role in finding employment opportunities. Do we expect to equalize the number and status of friends that the children have, despite the fact that the two likely have different personalities and social skills?
I could go on and on about various factors that only complicate egalitarianism further, but I think I’ve shown enough to show that it’s utterly impossible, on top of detrimental to humanity.
Character Hierarchy and Natural Order
We’ve established that egalitarianism is not desirable, nor accomplishable. What, then, does the alternative look like?
The alternative to egalitarianism is hierarchy. This hierarchy could be State-imposed, or it could be natural.
The State-imposed hierarchies, of course, such as those resulting from cronyism and fascism, are just as contradictory to self-ownership and private property as egalitarianism and they should be equally rejected as vile and anti-human.
The natural hierarchy, or “natural order” as some say, would be what naturally arises out of a free society. This hierarchy would be based on character (how we act) rather than on the grounds that the State-imposed hierarchy might be based on, such as race, friendliness to the State or ability to manipulate the masses.
When left free to exercise our diversity, leaders will arise. Those leaders will be defined by their personability, their ability to motivate and their ability to produce goods and services of value to other people rather than by their skill as aggressors. These leaders will be the most moral people in society and if they cease to be so, they will inevitably lose their status as leaders.
The leaders will receive more wealth and more praise than others in society, but that wealth and praise will be warranted. Those who aspire to wealth and praise, must then aspire to be moral and productive individuals.
Since productivity is guided purely by supply and demand and encouraged, the society would become more prosperous.
That prosperity would eventually extend to all levels of the hierarchy to the point where even the lowest classes would be extensively better off.
Since egalitarianism has no method of encouraging the production of wealth, the only way they can even think to attempt to achieve their desired state of equality must be to take from those who produce, i.e., to make everyone equally poor.
And the poor in the egalitarian society only become poorer whereas the poor in a charactered hierarchy become wealthier over time, as goods and services are produced more efficiently and made increasingly readily available to them.
Reject the Left-Libs Once and For All
This all being said, no amount of egalitarianism should be tolerated within the liberty movement. Egalitarianism is completely incompatible with liberty and shouldn’t be sympathized with, no matter how manipulated the public has been into doing so.
The “left-libertarians,” “libertarian socialist” and “libertarian communists” should all be explicitly rejected as libertarians on account that they, by its definition, are not.
If we don’t care to do so, a new name will be necessary to define the movement that was once defined by libertarianism because so as long as those people are welcomed under that name, that name has no meaning at all. Further, I don’t care to be associated with those people. I share with them no common ground whatsoever.
There’s a good essay by Murray Rothbard called “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” You can find it for free here. I’ll finish this week’s blog with a quote from it:
“An egalitarian society can only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion; and, even here, we all believe and hope the human spirit of individual man will rise up and thwart any such attempts to achieve an ant-heap world. In short, the portrayal of an egalitarian society is horror fiction because, when the implications of such a world are fully spelled out, we recognize that such a world and such attempts are profoundly antihuman.”