Equality

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 4: Equality – To ensure the future of this American Idea, we should:

• Embrace God as the only legitimate source of equality.  We can depend on the flimsy hope of government-initiated equality, or we can depend on the rock-solid truth of God-created equality.  If equality isn’t a gift from a higher place, an endowment, then we’re in deep trouble.  We’re dependent on powerful people – very unequal to the rest of us – to define it properly and implement it justly.

The truth is that we can’t have real equality in important things if we’re expecting controlling, ambitious people to make it so.  They have too many incentives to play favorites, to reward some at the expense of others, to put their enemies and non-supporters on an uneven playing field.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad – it just means that they aren’t God.

• Accept equality as a given rather than as a right.   Equality in America predates rights.  Because of our common origin and shared humanity, we’re all equal – period.  The first American truth is that all of us are created equal.

The key word in the phrase “created equal” is “created.”  There is no equal unless we’re created that way.  We’re either all made equal in the image of God, or we’re all products of inexorable, meaningless processes that put the strongest at the top of the food chain.  We can’t have it both ways.

The American Idea of Equality declares for the former – for the shared humanity that derives from that common beginning, and for the equal footing that derives from that common starting point. In America, the great given is that we are created equal.

• Give up the unsustainable notion of human rights detached from God.  Some people today talk of there being no truth or reality, but only constructs – our own version of reality that we construct in our imaginations.  The fact is that there is an either-or here:  There is either truth and reality on the one hand or a made-up world on the other.

If it’s a made-up world, then we can define equality one way this year and a different way next year.  We can declare equality good until we declare it bad, grant rights and take them away, and give more rights to some than to others.

Without God, human rights are just a made-up list, something that anyone with a word processor can construct and claim to be universally applicable.  But if someone claims a human right of all people living together in harmony, can’t someone else claim a human right of only having to live with people of my own kind?  If someone creates a right that the weak should be protected, what prevents someone else from creating a right that only the strong should survive?  Who gets to make up the list?  Who gets to decide what stays and what goes?

People have claimed rights to exterminate racial, ethnic and religious minorities, to keep women legally inferior to men, to give death with dignity to the unwanted unborn and malformed and terminally ill, to have sex with children, and to a host of other repugnant activities.  If we can’t anchor our rights in God, there’s nothing to prevent the lofty rights from disappearing and being replaced by whatever rights people can conjure up to satisfy their desires and ambitions.

• Abandon the growing favoritism of one group over another.  Can rights ever be a threat to freedom?  Indeed.  How?  Instead of recognizing and defending rights that are essential to all human beings, regardless of types or categories, people can create “rights” that pit

• group against group (like the “right” of the poor to soak the rich, or the rich to take advantage of the poor)
• race against race (like the “right” of a less-qualified person of one race to steal the opportunity of a more-qualified person of another race)
• gender against gender (less-qualified men taking women’s jobs after World War II, less-qualified women taking men’s jobs today so women can be better represented in the workforce)
• parents against children (like a woman’s right to choose vs. an unborn girl’s right to life)
• generation against generation (like the “right” of the elderly to be supported by the young)
• individual against individual (like an incompetent businessperson’s right to be bailed out by a competent one)

These multiplying advantages – given to select or favored groups – limit and injure the individual rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  They are created with the notion that groups are somehow homogeneous, that everyone in the group has the same disadvantages, same problems, and same needs – all of which is untrue.

These groups become an easy way to manipulate the society.  They also offer unlimited opportunities for people to use their group membership to get unfair advantage, and for lawyers to litigate the society to death.

• Stop offering reverence and awe to fellow human beings.   The old question in Irish circles was, “Would you bow down to the British queen?”  The expected answer wasn’t “no” – it was “Hell no,” supported by a vigorous bout of derisive laughter.

That was part of the American Idea of Equality – no special deference given to the high and mighty – no recognition that there even are any high and mighty.  Politicians, celebrities, actors, sports stars, musicians, artists, the rich – why should they get more respect than anyone else?  Who died and left them boss?  Why do we care what they think?  What do they know about life that any intelligent 5th-grader doesn’t know as well (or better)?

We’ve lost much of this delightful American disregard for our “betters.”  We would do well to get it back.  We’re now inundated with advice from people who have notoriety, even if they know much less than the average American, even if their own personal lives are disasters, even if their values are repugnant to the American Ideas.

Americans have always had a lot of skepticism and no small measure of cynicism.  We would do well to apply all of that to these people with feet of clay – and often, brains to match.

• Be unafraid to call bad bad and evil evil.  Some lifestyles are terrific and some are toxic.  All cultures are different – and some of them just plain reek.

Russian culture and its satellites have been degrading people for half a millennium, regardless of who’s in charge or what their form of government is.  Chinese culture has sunk 800 million people into the Yangtze River of hopeless poverty, with their feet encased in the concrete of Communist dictatorship.  India has created a middle class for everyone, except for the vast majority locked into a fatalistic, class-dominated, wretched oblivion.

Venezuela and the rest of South America are still trying to find the Enlightenment, while Mexico and the rest of Central America are still searching for the Renaissance.  The Arab world needs to escape the Dark Ages, Iran and Pakistan and Indonesia try to live in the 21st century with religious beliefs stuck in the 12th century, and sub-Saharan Africa – with its unique hold on misery – struggles to find the Iron Age, and even food.

Is all of this badness because America is exploiting them, or because Europe used to claim most of these places as colonies?  Or is it rather because these cultures are riddled with bad values, bad notions, and bad leaders?  The old saying is, “Pretty is as pretty does.”  Ugly works the same way.

• Define equality in a way that strengthens individualism, not governmentalism.  We can define equality around the grand concepts of citizenship, justice, opportunity and responsibility, all based on the unique value and position of the individual.  Or we can round up the usual historical suspects and define equality in terms of incomes and outcomes, all based on the unique value and position of the government and the power mongers who populate it.

The choice in America was clear for 350 years.  Equality of individuals before God is an uplifting, honoring, enhancing concept.  Equality of individuals before government is none of those things – but it is a sure path to crimes against individuals, all of which are committed in the name of the (supposedly equal) people.

Many Western “progressives” don’t want true equality, equality the American way.  They want the kind driven by government-dictated outcomes.  They don’t want every individual under God – they want one nation under government.

They like to write about the glories of political systems that cut the productive down to size and that have the important attribute of being not American.  They did this for many years with the Soviet Union, in the face of a mountain of facts to the contrary.   They’re still doing it today, from the mild (“If we could only be more like Canada or Norway”) to the grotesque (“Look at what autocratic socialism is doing for China!” or “Why can’t we have national healthcare like Cuba?”).

In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Democracy seeks equality in liberty, Socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”[i]

No word has meaning without definition, and that includes equality.  There’s a state-inspired version, and there’s an individual-inspired version.  The default choice is state.  The rare choice is the American one.

• Expect equal access to, treatment by, and responsibility for the government.  No special classes, categories, or groupings.  No most-favored-citizens designations.  No justice for some at the expense of others.  No opportunity for some that isn’t open to all.  No responsibility for some to pay exorbitant taxes while others pay none, for some to be burdened by government regulation while others get the benefits.

President Andrew Jackson noted, “The mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes – from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeds in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.”[ii]   And we have a lot to fear today.  As summarized in The New Yorker,

There’s a much wider-ranging anger out there, a sense that everyone except the ordinary middle-class person is getting some sort of handout.  Big Business, Big Government, Big Labor: voters don’t seem to like any of them.[iii]

What can we as citizens do to make a difference?  We can think clearly, without illusions.  We can reject arguments made from self-interest – politicians who argue against term limits and campaign finance reform, judges who argue for lifetime terms, presidents (commanders-in-chief) who argue for the right to start wars.

We can commit, as free people in a society that we want to remain free, to commit one hour a month to some activity in the public sphere.  We can write letters, make calls, assemble, picket, preach, teach, vote and get out the vote.  We can be seriously annoying to those who have an un-American plan for America.

If just 25 million people made this commitment, it would be the equivalent of 100,000 full-time people working to preserve freedom.  One of our challenges has been to get people to look up from their self-interest in order to keep the public sphere free of crooked interest.  We don’t have to look up very long to make a huge difference.

We either have to accept the challenge, or accept the ugliness of people manipulating, abusing and draining the public arena.  Those power brokers will claim that their efforts are in support of a demand for equality – but it will really be for power and force, just as it’s always been.

• Institute the Equal Tax, the “Citizenship Tax.”  There’s no basis in the American Ideas of Equality or Justice for the notion of a progressive tax.

Nowhere has the word “progressive” been abused more than here.  It is progressive in a mathematical sense – the more your income progresses, the more you pay.  In fact, it isn’t just an arithmetic progression where the amount keeps going up.  It’s a geometric progression, where the more you make the greater the portion that gets taken by government.

But this form of taxation is regressive in every moral sense.  It brutally penalizes some while giving others a free ride.  It treats citizens unequally in the fundamental areas both of their duty to pay for government and of their rights to property and equal justice.  It demands a portion of income that at times has approached 90 percent and right now is over a third.

This concept has been discussed in the past as a flat tax, but the moral goal isn’t flatness.  The moral goal is equality and truer citizenship.

What should that Equal Tax, that Citizenship Tax, be?  There’s no better guideline than the principle of the tithe discussed in this chapter in the book.  Why not 10 percent as a maximum and as a minimum?  That is a lot of revenue to the government.  Is it enough to do everything our government is now doing or would like to do?  No.  But the solution there is to box government in with a small and moral Equal Tax rather than to have a tax of 30 or 40 percent that’s equal but destructive.

What would government have to give up doing?  It would have to reduce its role in, or get out of, several businesses – like entitlements, subsidies, bailouts, and handouts.  What would this mean?  Millions of citizens would have a lot more money to do their own entitlements, subsidies, bailouts, and handouts.  And they would have enough to help out those who really can’t help themselves – without all of the high-priced government middlemen taking their cut.

• Recognize the wondrous and unique American dance of liberty and equality.  British philosopher Charles Handy declared that “liberty and equality are two desiderata that are mutually incompatible.”[iv]   The renowned historians Will and Ariel Durant said that “freedom and equality are sworn enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”[v]

But separately, freedom and equality are much weaker than they need to be.  Alone they can also become quite twisted.  Liberty without equality can tend toward aristocracy and the concentration of individual wealth and power.  Equality without liberty can tend toward socialism and the concentration of government wealth and power.

If we’re wise, we want these two grand American Ideas to dance together:

• equality leading toward more freedom, justice and opportunity for all
• freedom leading toward merited differences in incomes and outcomes
• equality ensuring that these differences in incomes and outcomes not become frozen by law, force or manipulation
• freedom ensuring that equality remains an enhancer rather than a leveler of human beings

There is special danger in emphasizing equality over freedom.  As British Lord Acton noted, “The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.”[vi]