Sisyphean economics: The painful, futile pursuit of material equality 

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal
Aristotle 

A claim for equality of Material position can be met only by a Government with totalitarian powers
Hayek  

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

Although humans are equal in some things we are not equal in everything. Such a truism should hardly need to be stated – and yet it seems it does. 

We are of course not all of equal height, equal weight or equal age. None but the most absurd socialists and/or academics would ever claim that we are all equal when it comes to intelligence, character, creativity or innovation, willingness to work hard or take risks, determination, vision or the contribution we have made to the world. 

We are however ultimately all equal on the most important point – our status as humans. We are thus equal before the law and equal before God.  

From this fundamental equality arises the imperative to respect each person’s sphere of individual freedoms and liberties which are properly referred to as rights. From it also arises the ultimate rebuttal of the misuse of the term rights to cover claims.  

The arguments in favour of democracy – largely as a self-defence mechanism against the state to which everyone should be entitled also arise from this fundamental equality qua human. 

From the second set of inequalities listed derive further inevitable inequalities – inequalities born of the fact that people with more of these can succeed more, achieve more of value and provide more things to other people which they want. As such we get inequalities of income and inequalities of wealth – as such material inequalities. 

There is absolutely no reason why the very fact of material inequality should be considered a bad thing in and of itself. Indeed it is surely that most Conservative of things – a fact of life. 

Yet there are still those who seek to present material inequality as a blight on a society and something which Government should be committed to reducing or eliminating.  

There are some vaguely plausible claims people make about some of the consequences of material inequality but even these do not stand up to much scrutiny. Some claim that people who all have similar incomes and wealth are likely to live more similar lives and therefore to show more community spirit, solidarity and support towards one another than those in a more stratified society. Yet almost all the examples of this which are cited depend on other societal factors which bound those communities together – and also ignore many great examples of volunteerism, philanthropy and charity in less materially equal societies. 

Some proponents of Material Equality thought that they were on to a winning argument about a decade ago when a certain vastly overrated philosopher called Picketty brought out his warped, selective and flawed data on the subject – all of which has long since been discredited anyway. Ultimately this only added to the case against that he was arguing – by joining the long line of socialists attempting to find data to prove this claim and failing they are inadvertently running a massive scientific experiment to bolster the opposite case to that they believe in.  

So committed are proponents of material equality to their cause that they have engaged in yet another of their authoritarian socialist language grabs – and sought to redefine “poverty” to mean “inequality.” In the UK and in most Western democracies – where free trade and free enterprise has pretty much eliminated absolute poverty socialists have sought to fill the space with a mindbogglingly wrong concept – “relative poverty.” This term refers to people who earn 60% less than the median income in the country. Crucially this ignores what their actual income would buy or what level it is – no real life affordability of the necessities of life enters into the equation – all that matters is that they are earning less than someone else. Whether or not this is a useful thing to measure we can debate – but it is nothing less than a lie to call this a measure of poverty. Yet this is what we do – all in service of its proponents true goal – the Quixotic pursuit of material equality.  

Of course even if material equality was a desirable goal (and it isn’t) there are still good reasons to avoid it becoming Government policy anyway – namely its consequences and the fact that it could never be achieved for long, not even by the most despotic regime in the history of humanity. 

The consequences are well documented. Every time a state chooses to penalise people who produce more, who benefit society, who innovate, work hard or take risks it ends up disincentivising such activity. It starts – as we have done already in the UK – with low growth, low productivity, people unwilling to work or invest. The Government usually accompanies this with measures to increase the incomes of those who don’t work through extensive benefits or other handouts – thereby making it easier to avoid working at all. Eventually of course such socialist economics always end up surprisingly quickly in anarchy and starvation. 

And even in such states inequality is still not achieved – people still get far wealthier than others – it is just that they get there not by making or doing things of value which other people will pay for (ie the market) but by graft, corruption and through having friends in the right places – usually at the top of Government in socialist/communist parties. 

To truly achieve material equality has been an aim of socialists and their allies for generations. Theorists such as Rawls have come up with justifications for it – claiming that if we were to design a society behind a “veil of ignorance” without knowing who we would be in it that we would absolutely choose on without material inequalities. Of course such claims are dubious at best and have been attacked by those who are further down the socialist spectrum as failing to go far enough with material redistribution to rectify other forms of inequality. 

Yet as Robert Nozick demonstrated – in a dynamic society every spending decision by every person can and will lead to inequality. Immediately upon redistributing all wealth one especially talented person can become immediately wealthy by providing others with a service they want. 

To devise a system to rectify this would involve taking on a Sisyphean task of constantly redistributing, equalising, penalising, squashing, subsidising and restarting – doing this every day, being constantly vigilante for any signs of inequality seeping inside the system anywhere – and somehow doing so with a perfect and massive bureaucracy in which corruption, graft and greed did not exist.  

The only way to really stop anything like this happening is to eliminate free will, free enterprise and free exchange entirely – in effect an absolute totalitarian state the likes of which would make North Korea, the Soviet Union or any other socialist utopia pale into insignificance. 

Or we could just accept the facts of life instead?