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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.
A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.
Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?
An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.
When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.
But exactly how does one do this without trespassing on the rights of others? A single mother who works three jobs to send her two children to private school, both of whom work hard and graduate with honors, will have increased opportunities to attend Ivy league colleges, more so than the parent who sends his child to a mediocre public school. The single mother’s children who graduate from Wharton Business School and Harvard Law school respectively will have more employment opportunities than Mary Joe, whose children opted not to go to college or even trade school, but to occasionally send resumes and applications for jobs for which they are not remotely qualified. The father who, after hours of tedious work in a job he dislikes, reads to his daughter every night before she falls asleep and engenders a passion for books in his young daughter who later goes on to become a successful book publisher has, through his efforts, generated more opportunities for his child than a parent for whom reading to her child before bedtime seems pointless.
Are black NBA players who dominate the sport of basketball to be penalized because they have more opportunities for playing the sport than Asian men?
Equality of rights is what ought to be prized in a free society. The freedom to take advantage of opportunities as they avail themselves to each of us ought to be our goal.
Equality of opportunity is predicated on the notion that circumstances that are often the result of value-generated actions of others should be controlled by the state. This is a recipe for totalitarianism. And further, even under a totalitarian state it is empirically untenable. One cannot control the multiplicity of variables that are generated from human creative agency that produce opportunities for oneself and for others.
Belief in equality of opportunities is a form of magical thinking because its advocates purport to master the existence of phenomena that do not yet exist. Opportunities arise as human beings are left free to pursue their values and exercise efforts on behalf of their lives. Values, as Aristotle demonstrated, result from attributes of character people possess. And those values cannot be redistributed. They may be emulated and adopted by others who see their efficacy in the lives of successful people. What the advocates of both equality of opportunity and equality of results wish to do then is to deprive people of the consequences of their actions. The attempt to redistribute the products of a person’s values indiscriminately is a form of appropriation that is impossible and irrational, and therefore unethical.
There is no zero-sum game here. Opportunities one creates lead to further opportunities for others to properly take advantage of and benefit from. But freedom, rather than abstract legislation mandating equal results, is what makes the possibility of equality even possible.
Equality of results advocates rely less on magical thinking than advocates of equality of opportunity resort to. The appropriators take the aggregate of wealth that exists in a country and speak as if it were national wealth that was meant to be distributed. Wealth is not a cake that belongs to a nation. Wealth is the concrete application and manifestation of values that humans hold in a material world. It belongs to those individuals who created it, and it ought not be seized by society from its creators.
The appropriators fail to realize that inequality, simpliciter, is the inevitable result of the fact that human beings are not born equal; but they also avoid the fact that the United States was founded not upon the principle of economic equality, but political equality. Wealth that is privately created by individual effort is not created on the assumption that the creator of that wealth will end up with an equal share of his wealth. Quite the opposite: as Yaron Brook and Don Watkins point out in their book Equal is Unfair, if I plant ten apple trees on an island, and Jack plants five, one cannot say I have grabbed a bigger part of the island’s apple pie, so to speak. I have created more wealth than Jack, and I have left him no worse off. It would be absurd to say that I have stolen fifty percent of the island’s wealth. If Jack specially made a choice not to plant extra trees, having rather spent his time relaxing under a coconut tree, there is no reason why I should be penalized for the extra initiative I have taken in planting the extra apple trees and cultivating them.
Anyone whose actions in a situation such as the one mentioned above are applied over a lifespan will have more opportunities available to them. If such persons have families, then by default they will create more opportunities for their children than the person who decided against planting any trees at all. The logical extension of this type of value-oriented lifestyle does lead to inequality and, not surprisingly, a meritocratic society in which each person is the beneficiary of his or her value-imbued actions.
Short of living in a hermetically sealed society, such persons who have created opportunities for themselves will create value in the world from which others will derive opportunities. There is, however, no literal manner in which equal opportunities for all can be created by government fiat or edict. Liberty and freedom and the uncertainties and inconveniences that come with them are rationally prioritized over the untenability of equality of opportunity. Without liberty and freedom, opportunity—the condition and realm in which goals are achieved—has little to no chance of materializing in the world.
“… a meritocratic society in which each person is the beneficiary of his or her value-imbued actions.”
Laissez-Faire Capitalism is NOT a meritocracy, it’s simply freedom and liberty. America is not supposed to be a meritocracy but simply a free country, that’s all.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, even for the most talented, intelligent, hard-working, dedicated, diligent, disciplined, rational, handsome or beautiful, wealthy scion of a child.
Nothing in life is guaranteed and not even an Almighty God or an Almighty State can make it so.
Nothing in life is guaranteed. I’m reminded of Rosemary Kennedy, I’m no fan of the family, but from the moment of birth that poor child was doomed.
Nothing in life is guaranteed. I’m reminded of a young medical student, son of a prominent surgeon, who by all accounts was more intelligent and more dexterously skilled than his father, everyone was sure he would become a greater surgeon than his father. One day working in lab a beaker of sulfuric acid broke in his hands destroying his hands and career forever.
Nothing in life is guaranteed and a meritocracy isn’t going to change that. Just leave people alone to their freedom and liberty.
“Meritocracy” is an old anti-concept and one of the most contemptible package deals. By means of nothing more than its last five letters, that word obliterates the difference between mind and force: it equates the men of ability with political rulers, and the power of their creative achievements with political power. There is no difference, the word suggests, between freedom and tyranny: an “aristocracy” is tyranny by a politically established elite, a “democracy” is tyranny by the majority—and when a government protects individual rights, the result is tyranny by talent or “merit” (and since “to merit” means “to deserve,” a free society is ruled by the tyranny of justice).” – Ayn Rand
Nothing in your life is guaranteed, because, other than whine about people being nice to each other, you do nothing to merit success and respect.
Posting more gibberish from Rand ain’t going to cut it either.
Nothing in life is guaranteed.
I’m reminded of American surgeon Paul Kalanathi who left us his wonderful book “When Breath Becomes Air”.
Never a smoker, at the age 0f 35, just beginning his career as a neurosurgeon, he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, and died two years later at the age of 37.
Nevertheless, he felt that life was so beautiful and precious that he and his wife decided to have a child.
Nothing in your life is guaranteed, because, other than whining about people being nice to each other, you do nothing to merit success and respect.
And when it finally comes to an end there will be one less Objectivist fool on the planet to lecture us about dead writers.
Well said!
The only way to “equalize opportunity” is to initiate force against those who are more competent.
For example, to “equalize opportunity” between a tone-deaf person and a gifted vocalist one would have to inflict damage on the latter’s vocal cords.
Promoters of “equalization of opportunity” profess a form of egalitarianism, but it is a thinly disguised form of the hatred of the good … for being good.
From the article (after which I read no further) “To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons.” This is absolutely false and JDH has clearly bought all the socialist poison. It is never the ‘job’ of the government to make sure that everyone has equal circumstances and conditions.. This is just another way of saying ‘From each according to ability to each according to need’ and if fully implemented, this leads directly to a socialist police state.
We all have equal opportunity to be anything… NBA basketball players, for instance… but it ain’t gonna happen if you aren’t good enough.
Please pity me !
I read virtually perfect arguments of two individuals.
My attempt to disagree with either argument fails ! ERGO
Both sides are correct !
I am help/hopeless
Eddie
“…in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated.”
I do not share Dr. Hill’s idea of “utopia,” which literally means “no place.” If everyone had “equal abilities,” then society could not function. I defining “ability” as physical or mental skill. Civilization needs all of us, even those of us who have unequal and lesser abilities.
When our federal government decided we should be the knowledge economy, that decision started the destruction of our manufacturing, destroying the opportunities of many Americans whose abilities were well-suited elsewhere.
We must restore a cultural appreciation for the dignity of all work. The waste disposal team, the plumber, electrician, barber, brick layer, musician etc. are necessary for happy civilization. Equality before the law is essential, but equality in God’s image is necessary for any utopian approximation. The most “reasonable and intelligent” among us must not be allowed to evaluate the worthiness of another’s life on the basis. All life is still worthy even it does not excel in those attributes our political elites might prefer.
We must also not penalize anyone who has strong ability / opportunity in any population simply because of that person’s skin color. I agree with Dr. Hill that ” [v]alues, as Aristotle demonstrated, result from attributes of character people possess.”
Although character is not monolithic among people or people groups, different people groups display different characteristic traits. In my fantasy utopia, I would have no one penalized for demonstrating strong abilities that are normally dominated by another people group, and no one would be celebrated for the same simply because of skin color.
I think Dr. Hill and I both fail in our utopian desires, but my utopia might be possible in a Christian nation – an unlikely scenario absent the return of the King.
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