EGALITARIANISM VERSUS HUMAN REALITY
The pervasive rallying cry of socialists is “equality.” Capitalism creates too many inequities, they say. But they ignore the fact that all human beings are unique, and inequality is thus inevitable.
The relentless socialist crusade for “equality” is not just a revolt against reality; it is nothing less than a recipe for the destruction of normal human society, as the Russian and Chinese socialists of the twentieth century, among others, proved. In the name of socialist equality they destroyed their economies, condemned hundreds of millions to poverty, and executed millions of dissenters.1 And even after all that, they never created anything remotely like an egalitarian society.
Democratic-socialist countries that have not gone to these murderous extremes have nevertheless been content to live off of the capital accumulated from limited or previous free markets in their countries.
Socialists are less concerned about equality before the law, or equal rights to liberty, than they are with material equality, which, of necessity, has to be forced upon society by the state. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a clergyman who is also an economic writer and speaker,2 points out that anything made by God, whether it be humans or stones (which can range from small pebbles to glittering diamonds of infinite variety) is unique; while things made by man, like bricks, can be made uniform. The essence of the socialist enterprise is to use the coercive powers of government to turn us all into identical bricks.
The desire to turn unique human beings into identical socialist bricks explains why socialist regimes are often totalitarian—because it is the only way they can make a serious attempt to achieve their aims.
The socialist obsession with equality has always been at war with the division of labor and knowledge that comes naturally in a market or capitalist economy. Ludwig von Mises noted that “The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart, human cooperation,”3 which, in turn, is what leads to economic progress and development.
The uniqueness of every human being—our differing physical abilities, mental abilities and interests, different aptitudes, preferences ad infinitum—mean that we naturally tend to specialize in something, to focus on what we do best.
In a market economy, this allows us to specialize in what we do best, and get paid for it, and then trade with other “specialists” for the goods and services we desire. An obvious consequence of this is that a capitalist economy creates an interconnected community that constantly strives to supply all of us with the best goods and services at the lowest price; it provides employment for people of all imaginable talents and abilities; it blows past subsistence economies (where one individual or family or village has to do everything itself); it creates wealth (which can support charity); and it encourages international trade, because not only are human beings unique, but so are their material and geographical resources. No government program, for instance, can ever change the fact that Saudi Arabia is a vast desert with huge supplies of oil, or that the American Midwest contains millions of acres of some of the most fertile farmland on earth. The Saudis specialize in oil and sell it to Americans; Americans specialize in agriculture and sell food to the Saudis whose irrigation systems, as sophisticated as they are, still render agricultural production several times more expensive than what can be achieved by American farmers. The international division of labor, as much as a domestic division of labor, results in everyone becoming more prosperous. Another point is that the division of labor (and knowledge) has always spawned a different kind of human cooperation in the form of teamwork, for many tasks cannot be performed by single individuals. Hence, people tend to become specialists not only in some skill or trade, but also as members of a team that produces goods and services. The division of labor and the pursuit of profit encourage human cooperation.
In a market economy people are paid, and businesses earn profits (or incur losses) strictly according to how good a job they do in meeting consumer demand. A good definition of capitalism in this regard would be: “Give me that which I want, and I will give you that which you want.”
Inequalities of income are inevitable because of competition—some businesses and entrepreneurs do better than others. The key point, though, is that the market is fluid. Businesses can change or improve; workers can find more profitable enterprises or better ways to apply their skills.
To socialists, it is not just generic “inequality” that is wrong and has to be eliminated by government, there is also the so-called “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” This is the insight that in every organization or activity, a few people will typically emerge as the leaders or top producers. Thomas Jefferson called this the phenomenon of a “natural aristocracy.” We see it with “elite” athletes in professional sports; “top-of-the-chart” musicians and entertainers; Fortune 500 companies; lists of the top one hundred doctors, lawyers, or schools; and so forth. In a market economy, such “elite” individuals and institutions can demand higher wages or tuitions or whatever than the average. To most of us, there is nothing wrong with this. But socialists, and sometimes mere bureaucrats, often think differently.
The great H. L. Mencken noted that all governments, not just explicitly socialist ones, are enemies of the most energetic, productive, and motivated. In his words:
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among men. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.4
This is because government justifies itself by regulations, and regulations seek to impose uniformity and government control. Almost every government intervention in the economic sphere is, in reality, an attack on the natural division of labor and knowledge—the glue that holds human civilization together—in favor of a bureaucratic diktat. Every minimum wage/maximum hour law, “progressive” income tax, welfare state program, labor regulation, employment quota, tax on dividend income, special corporation income tax, and on and on, whittles away at the societal benefits of the division of labor in the forever-failing attempts to use governmental force to achieve the holy grail of material equality.
Karl Marx, the most famous of socialism’s founding fathers, harshly condemned the division of labor and the inequality it produced, and sought to eliminate it precisely in order to destroy existing societies so that they could be replaced by presumed Communist utopias. Marx and Marxian socialists sought (and seek) to use the coercive powers of government to stamp out all human differences, differences that Marx himself called a “contradiction” of the socialist ideal. In Marx’s own words, an ideal communist society is one:
. . . where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.5
Your author once asked a class of undergraduate economic students what they thought of this passage. A young man who was born and raised in Taiwan, in the shadow of Communist China, blurted out: “Only a child could believe such a thing!” This idea of Marx’s (and of many other prominent socialists) is the basis for the idea of communes, where everyone is supposedly equal. Such thinking is occasionally on display in the academic world, such as when a Marxian-minded segment of the Harvard faculty traded jobs for a day with the janitorial staff.
Socialist icon Leon Trotsky predicted that once socialism had destroyed the division of labor: “[M]an will become incomparably stronger, wiser, finer. His body more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical. . . . The human average will rise to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx.”6 Only a child (or infantile-minded adult) could believe such a thing.
One thing that fuels the socialist mindset—indeed, the thing that defines one as a socialist—is the overriding importance of envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Ludwig von Mises catalogued several reasons for socialists’ compulsive envy in his book The Anticapitalistic Mentality.7 First, there is the fact that so many people refuse to accept the reality that those who accumulate wealth in a capitalist society do so simply by pleasing large numbers of their fellow citizens with the products or services that they sell. In terms of making money, Mises wrote, “the movie star outstrips the philosopher.” This often creates a lifelong feeling of envy and hatred towards capitalism and capitalists in the mind of the “philosopher.” Many people also insist that they should be judged by some kind of absolute standard (defined by the government, of course) as opposed to the dollar “votes” of their fellow citizens. Consequently, they are frustrated and envious of the more successful among them. The less successful (including the lazy or incompetent) often express “hate and enmity against all those who superseded them,” wrote Mises. Political demagogues take advantage of such people by promising them something for nothing (“free” health care! “free” education! “free” you name it!) in the name of egalitarianism.
Some people face up to, deal with, and improve upon their inadequacies, while others search for scapegoats. Perhaps the most popular scapegoats of all are “greedy capitalists” who are often accused of doing well financially by some nefarious, unscrupulous, or illegal means. There are of course people like this, but it is not a general characteristic of markets. There are sinners in all walks of life, not just the business world; and in a market economy (as opposed to a socialist, government-monopoly economy, where bribes are often a fact of life), no one wants to do business with dishonest people, so the market penalizes the cheaters, and products with bad reputations don’t get purchased. Moreover, to preserve the integrity of markets, a market-friendly society always has laws against fraud. But envy is a powerful emotion, and so is fear, even among the wealthy and successful. Mises offered an intriguing analysis of why so many in the entertainment industry, for instance, are egalitarian socialists. Entertainers, he noted, serve consumers whose tastes can be “capricious and unaccountable.” Consequently, many actors, directors, and movie producers are “rich and famous one morning and may be forgotten the next day.”8 This inherent instability of fame and fortune is what makes so many in the entertainment industry so critical of capitalism and so embracing of socialism, even though it is the freedom of capitalism that makes them rich and famous in the first place.
A similar phenomenon exists in the literary world where “trash novels” outsell serious works of nonfiction by many orders of magnitude. “The tycoon of the book market is the author of fiction for the masses,” Mises observed.9 This breeds resentment among intellectuals who write nonfiction books that languish on university library shelves. They tend to blame this “inequity” on the “unfairness” of capitalism.
But it is not “inequity” and “unfairness” that are at the root of socialist envy, it is a desire to stamp out diversity, to enforce uniformity, to order society and the economy on “rationalist” lines as designated by allegedly smarter-than-thou bureaucrats. The result, as history has shown, is often tyranny of an almost unimaginable ferocity.
Numerous writers have understood this and written about it, sometimes very entertainingly. For example, in Facial Justice the British fiction writer L. P. Hartley wrote of an imaginary utopia where envy is institutionalized by a government program that makes sure that all female faces are equal, performing coerced surgery to detract from the more beautiful and uplift the less attractive until “facial justice” is finally realized.10
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote the short story “Harrison Bergeron” depicting a comprehensively egalitarian utopia:
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal in every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anyone else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.11
The “handicapping” worked as follows: “Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”12
Egalitarianism has been lampooned in horror fiction, wrote economist Murray Rothbard, because “when the implications of such a world are fully spelled out, we recognize that such a world and such attempts are profoundly antihuman; being antihuman in the deepest sense, the egalitarian goal is, therefore, evil and any attempts in the direction of such a goal must be considered as evil as well.”13