Equal But Not the Same (Timeless Values)
In a world of change, the fundamental principles of The Northwood Idea are timeless. Under any circumstances, personal freedom and individual responsibility are essential for a free society. So it is illustrative to examine some of the most compelling expressions of The Northwood Idea that great thinkers have contributed through the years. We call them Timeless Values.
The following piece authored by Edmund Opitz originally appeared in The Freeman in April 1988. Opitz (1914-2006) was a minister, author, speaker, and editor who advocated for a free enterprise society.
An excerpt of the following was featured as a Timeless Values piece in the September 2024 edition of When Free to Choose, Northwood’s signature publication dedicated to promoting the global, diverse, and multicultural nature of enterprise, freedom, and liberty. You can subscribe to this publication at no cost here.
Equal But Not the Same
By Edmund Opitz
The real American revolution of two hundred years ago took place in the minds of people; it was a philosophical revolution which evolved a new temper and state of mind. There were some dating assumptions about the nature of the human person, with his Creator-endowed rights, as set forth in the catalog of self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. The acceptance of these novel truths about the human person led logically to a new conception of government, a theory of right political action radically different from all previous theories of the purposes of government in human affairs.
Government, according to the Declaration, is instituted for one purpose only—to secure every person in his God-given rights. Period. No longer was the State to exercise the positive function of ordering, regulating, controlling, directing, or dominating the citizens. The new idea was to limit government to a negative role in society; government’s task is to protect life, liberty, and property by using lawful force against aggressive and criminal actions. Government would discipline the anti-social, but otherwise let people alone. The law was to apply equally to all; justice was to be impartial and even-handed.
Along with the words Life, Liberty, and Property, the word Equality has a prominent place in the political vocabulary of American thought.
Our Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Note well that the men who prepared this document did not say that all men are equal; they did not say that all men are born equal or should be equal or are becoming equal. These several propositions are obviously untrue. The Declaration said: “created equal.” Now, the created part of a man is his soul or mind or psyche. Man’s body is compounded of the same chemical and physical elements which go into the makeup of the earth’s crust, but there is a mental and spiritual essence in man which sets him apart from the natural order. Man alone among the creatures of earth is created in God’s image—meaning that man has free will, the capacity to order his own actions, and so become the kind of persons God intends them to be.
It takes a while, centuries sometimes, for a new idea about humanity to seep into the habits, laws, and institutions of a people and shape their culture. It was not until the eighteenth century that Adam Smith came along and spelled out a system of economics premised on the freely choosing man. Smith referred to his system as “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” The European society of Smith’s day was, by contrast, a system of privilege; it was an aristocratic order.
The Rise of Aristocracy
England’s aristocratic order did not rise by accident; it was imposed by a conqueror. England’s social structure may be traced back to the battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Norman invasion of England. William of Normandy had a claim, of sorts, to the British throne, a claim which he validated by conquering the island. Having established his overlordship of England he parceled out pieces of the island to his followers as payment for their services. In the words of historian Arthur Bryant, “William the Conqueror kept a fifth of the land for himself and gave one-quarter to the Church. The remainder, save for an insignificant fraction, was given to 170 Norman and French followers—nearly half to ten men.” The new owners of England from William on down were the rulers of England; ownership was the complement of their rulership, and the wealth they accumulated sprang from their power and their feudal privileges and dues.
Norman overlordship was a system of privilege. That is to say, the Norman rulers did not obtain their wealth by satisfying consumer demand. In a system of privilege, political power is a means of obtaining economic advantage. Under the system of liberty, by contrast, where the economic arrangements are free market or capitalistic, the only way to make money is to please the customers.
When our forebears wrote that “all men are created equal,” they threw down a challenge to all systems of privilege. They believed that the law should keep the peace—as peacekeeping is spelled out in the old-fashioned Whig-Classical Liberal tradition, as liberty and justice for all. This preserves a free field and no favor—which is the real meaning of laissez faire—within which peaceful economic competition will occur. The term laissez faire never meant the absence of rules; it doesn’t imply a free-for-all. Government, under laissez faire, does not intervene positively to manage the affairs of men; it merely acts to deter and redress injury—as injury is spelled out in the laws. This is the system of liberty championed by present-day exponents of the freedom philosophy—whether they call themselves Libertarians, or Conservatives, or Whigs, or whatever.
When people are free politically and legally equal, there will still be economic inequalities. There will continue to be rich and poor, as there have been wealth differentials in every society since history began. But now there’s this difference: in the free economy the wealthy will be chosen by the daily balloting of their peers in the marketplace, and the wealthy won’t necessarily be the powerful, nor will the poor necessarily be the weak.
Variation is a fact of life; individuals differ one from another. Some are tall and some are short; some are swift and some are slow; some are bright and others are not so bright. The talents of some lie along musical lines, others are athletes, a few are mathematical wizards. Some people in every age are highly endowed with a knack for making money; whatever the circumstances, these people have more worldly goods than others.
Rich and poor are relative terms, but every society reveals a population distribution ranging from opulence to indigence. This occurs under monarchies, and it occurs in primitive tribes which measure a man’s wealth by cattle and wives; it occurs in communist states where, as Milovan Djilas pointed out in a famous book, a “new class” emerges out of the classless society, and the “new class” enjoys privileges denied the masses.
Under the system of liberty, the free market will reward men in differing degrees so that some men will make a great deal of money while others, such as teachers and preachers, have to get by on a very modest income. But under the system of liberty even those in lower income brackets enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and, furthermore, the practice of the Rule of Law guarantees that there’ll be no persecution for deviant intellectual and religious beliefs. The government does not try to manage the economy or control the lives of the citizens; it keeps out of people’s way—unless rights are violated.
Under conditions of political equality—which is the system of liberty, with the Rule of Law and the market economy—income depends upon pleasing consumers, at which game some people are much more successful than others. A certain American entertainer earned millions of dollars last year by gyrating and howling in public places. He didn’t get any of my money, and except for the fact that I believe in liberty, I might have paid a substantial sum to keep him permanently tranquilized! On a somewhat higher level, there are talented people who are sensitive to consumer demand, and so they produce the kinds of goods or render the kinds of services that people will be able and willing to buy. They’ll make a bundle, in virtue of their ability to attract customers in free market competition.
Our own country’s past affords the best example of the enormous multiplication of wealth—broadly shared—which results from the release of human creativity under a system of liberty. But reintroduce a system of privilege, and dreams of prosperity fade.
Helping the Poor
The big domestic issue is poverty. Ever since New Deal days in the 1930s, governments have legislated various welfare schemes designed ostensibly to help “the poor,” spending trillions of dollars in these efforts. And the big issue is still poverty! It’s only the relative prosperity of the private sector, working against politically imposed obstructions, which has provided the funds to fuel the futile political programs touted as the remedy for economic distress. These are false remedies. The truth of the matter is that only economic action can produce the goods and services whose lack is indigence and destitution. Misguided political programs actually manufacture poverty by hampering productivity. Should we trust further government interventions to correct the very conditions government has caused by its earlier interventions?
Poverty may be measured in various ways, but whatever else it is, poverty means a lack of the things which sustain Fife at the basic level, or not enough of the things which make life pleasant and enjoyable. A genuinely poor person in the United States lives in a shabby room, dresses in hand-me-down clothing, and eats meals running heavily to starchy food, with little meat and fruit. A person who is this poor would be better off if he enjoyed a larger and finer house, had several extra suits, and ate tastier and more nourishing food. After improving the situation at the level of necessities he’d move ahead to the amenities: to recreation, a second car, air conditioning, and so on. The point to note is that people move away from poverty and toward prosperity only as they command more economic goods, more of the things which are manufactured, grown, transported, or otherwise produced.
Poverty is overcome by production, and in no other way. Therefore, if we are seriously concerned with the alleviation of poverty, our concern for increased production must be equally serious. This is simple logic. But look around us in this great land today and try to find anyone for whom increased productivity is a major goal. There are some able production men in industry, but many established businesses have learned to live comfortably with restrictive legislation, government contracts, the foreign aid program, and our international commitments. The competitive instinct burns low, and the entrepreneur who is willing to submit to the uncertainties of the market is a rare bird. And then there are the farmers.
Agricultural production has taken a great leap forward in recent years, but no thanks to those farmers who latch onto the government’s farm program and accept payment for keeping land and equipment idle. Union leaders claim to work for the betterment of the membership, but no one has ever accused unions of a burning desire to be more productive on the job. Politicians are not interested in increased industrial or agricultural production, which is why government welfare programs manufacture poverty, and the economic well-being of the nation as a whole sinks below the level of prosperity a free-market economy would achieve.
Confirmation of this point comes from a New York Times Magazine article by the celebrated economist, Thomas Sowell:
“To be blunt, the poor are a gold mine. By the time they are studied, advised, experimented with and administered, the poor have helped many a middle-class liberal to achieve affluence with government money. The total amount of money the government spends on its anti-poverty efforts is three times what would be required to lift every man, woman, and child in America above the poverty line by simply sending money to the poor.”
An overall increase in the output of goods and services is the only way to upgrade the general welfare, but there is no clamor on behalf of increased productivity. The clamor is for redistribution, for political interventions which exact tribute from the haves and bestow largesse on the have-nots. Present-day politics is based on the redistributionist principle: taxes for all, subsidies for the few.
I’m arguing on behalf of a philosophy of government which understands the primary function of the Law as the defense of the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike. Such a political establishment leads to the kind of society in which bread and butter issues are handled by the market.
The market is not some entity; the market is only a word describing people freely ex-changing goods and services in the absence of force and fraud. The market is the only device available for serving our creaturely needs while conserving scarce resources. But the market is no gauge of the validity of ideas. The market measures the popularity of an idea or a book or a system of thought, but not its truth or worth. The market is simply a mirror of popular preferences and public taste; but if we don’t like what the mirror reveals we won’t improve the situation by throwing rocks at the glass! There is a great deal more to life than pleasing the customer, but if the integrity of the market is not respected, consumer choice is impaired, and some people are given a license to foist their values on others. Permit this kind of poison to infect economic relationships and our ability to resist it elsewhere is seriously weakened.
We are throwing rocks at the mirror whenever we undertake programs of social leveling, aimed at economic equality. The government promises to aid the poor by redistributing the wealth. This, of course, is a power play, and it is the poor—generally the weakest members of a society—who are hurt first and most in any power struggle. Furthermore—and this is an important point—economic inequalities cannot be overcome by coercive redistribution without increasing political inequalities. Every form of political redistribution widens power differentials in society; officeholders have more power, citizens have less; political contests become more intense, because the control and dispersal of great amounts of wealth are at stake.
Every alternative to the market economy—call it socialism or communism or fascism or whatever—concentrates power over the life and livelihood of the many into the hands of the few who constitute the State. The principle of equality before the law is discarded—the Rule of Law is incompatible with any form of the planned economy—and, as in the George Orwell satire, some people become more equal than others. We head back toward the Old Regime—the system of privilege.
The alternative to the free economy is a servile state, where a ruling class enforces an equality of poverty on the masses, and lives at the expense of the producers. To embark on a program of economic leveling, then, is like trying to repeal the law of gravity; it’ll never work, and the energy we waste trying to make it work defeats our efforts to attain the reasonable goals which are within our capacity to achieve.