A
By Murray N. Rothbard
For well over a century, the Left has generally been
conceded to have morality, justice, and “idealism” on its side; the
Conservative opposition to the Left has largely been confined to the
“impracticality” of its ideals. A common view, for example, is that socialism
is splendid “in theory,” but that it cannot “work” in practical life. What the
Conservatives failed to see is that while short-run gains can indeed be made by
appealing to the impracticality of radical departures from the status quo,
that by conceding the ethical and the “ideal” to the Left they were doomed to
long-run defeat. For if one side is granted ethics and the “ideal” from the
start, then that side will be able to effect gradual but sure changes in its
own direction; and as these changes accumulate, the stigma of “impracticality”
becomes less and less directly relevant. The Conservative opposition, having
staked its all on the seemingly firm ground of the “practical” (that is,
the status quo) is doomed to lose as the status quo moves further
in the left direction. The fact that the unreconstructed Stalinists are
universally considered to be the “Conservatives” in the Soviet Union is a happy
logical joke upon conservatism; for in Russia the unrepentant statists are
indeed the repositories of at least a superficial “practicality” and of a
clinging to the existing status quo.
Never has the virus of “practicality” been more
widespread than in the United States, for Americans consider themselves a
“practical” people, and hence, the opposition to the Left, while originally
stronger than elsewhere, has been perhaps the least firm at its foundation. It
is now the advocates of the free market and the free society who have to meet
the common charge of “impracticality.”
In no area has the Left been granted justice and
morality as extensively and almost universally as in its espousal of massive
equality. It is rare indeed in the United States to find anyone, especially any
intellectual, challenging the beauty and goodness of the egalitarian ideal. So
committed is everyone to this ideal that “impracticality” – that is, the
weakening of economic incentives – has been virtually the only criticism
against even the most bizarre egalitarian programs. The inexorable march of
egalitarianism is indication enough of the impossibility of avoiding ethical
commitments; the fiercely “practical” Americans, in attempting to avoid ethical
doctrines, cannot help setting forth such doctrines, but they can now only do
so in unconscious, ad hoc, and unsystematic fashion. Keynes’s famous
insight that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” – is
true all the more of ethical judgments and ethical theory. 1
The unquestioned ethical status of “equality” may be
seen in the common practice of economists. Economists are often caught in a
value-judgment bind – eager to make political pronouncements. How can they do
so while remaining “scientific” and value-free? In the area of egalitarianism,
they have been able to make a flat value judgment on behalf of equality with
remarkable impunity. Sometimes this judgment has been frankly personal; at
other times, the economist has pretended to be the surrogate of “society” in
the course of making its value judgment. The result, however, is the same.
Consider, for example, the late Henry C. Simons. After properly criticizing
various “scientific” arguments for progressive taxation, he came out flatly for
progression as follows:
The case for drastic progression in taxation must be rested on the case against inequality – on the ethical or aesthetic judgment that the prevailing distribution of wealth and income reveals a degree (and/or kind) of inequality which is distinctly evil or unlovely. 2
Another typical tactic may be culled from a standard
text on public finance. According to Professor John F. Due, “[t]he strongest
argument for progression is the fact that the consensus of opinion in society
today regards progression as necessary for equity. This is, in turn, based on
the principle that the pattern of income distribution, before taxes, involves
excessive inequality.” The latter “can be condemned on the basis of inherent
unfairness in terms of the standards accepted by society.” 3
Whether the economist boldly advances his own value
judgments or whether he presumes to reflect the values of “society,” his
immunity from criticism has been remarkable nonetheless. While candor in
proclaiming one’s values may be admirable, it is surely not enough; in the
quest for truth it is scarcely sufficient to proclaim one’s value judgments as
if they must be accepted as tablets from above that are not themselves subject
to intellectual criticism and evaluation. Is there no requirement that these
value judgments be in some sense valid, meaningful, cogent, true? To raise
such considerations, of course, is to flout the modern canons of
pure wertfreiheit in social science from Max Weber onward, as well as
the still older philosophic tradition of the stern separation of “fact and
value,” but perhaps it is high time to raise such fundamental questions.
Suppose, for example, that Professor Simons’s ethical or aesthetic judgment was
not on behalf of equality but of a very different social ideal. Suppose, for
example, he had been in favor of the murder of all short people, of all adults
under five feet, six inches in height. And suppose he had then written: “The
case for the liquidation of all short people must be rested on the case against
the existence of short people – on the ethical or aesthetic judgment that the
prevailing number of short adults is distinctly evil or unlovely.” One wonders
if the reception accorded to Professor Simons’s remarks by his fellow
economists or social scientists would have been quite the same. Or, we can
ponder Professor Due writing similarly on behalf of the “opinion of society
today” in the Germany of the 1930s with regard to the social treatment of Jews.
The point is that in all these cases the logical status of Simons’s or Due’s
remarks would have been precisely the same, even though their reception by the
American intellectual community would have been strikingly different.
My point so far has been twofold: (1) that it is not
enough for an intellectual or social scientist to proclaim his value judgments
– that these judgments must be rationally defensible and must be demonstrable
to be valid, cogent, and correct: in short, that they must no longer be treated
as above intellectual criticism; and (2) that the goal of equality has for too
long been treated uncritically and axiomatically as the ethical ideal. Thus,
economists in favor of egalitarian programs have typically counterbalanced
their uncriticized “ideal” against possible disincentive effects on economic
productivity; but rarely has the ideal itself been questioned. 4
Let us proceed, then, to a critique of the egalitarian
ideal itself – should equality be granted its current status as an unquestioned
ethical ideal? In the first place, we must challenge the very idea of a radical
separation between something that is “true in theory” but “not valid in
practice.” If a theory is correct, then it does work in practice; if
it does not work in practice, then it is a bad theory. The common separation
between theory and practice is an artificial and fallacious one. But this is
true in ethics as well as anything else. If an ethical ideal is inherently
“impractical,” that is, if it cannot work in practice, then it is a
poor ideal and should be discarded forthwith. To put it more precisely, if an
ethical goal violates the nature of man and/or the universe and,
therefore, cannot work in practice, then it is a bad ideal and should
be dismissed as a goal. If the goal itself violates the nature of man, then it
is also a poor idea to work in the direction of that goal.
Suppose, for example, that it has come to be adopted
as a universal ethical goal that all men be able to fly by flapping their arms.
Let us assume that “pro-flappers” have been generally conceded the beauty and
goodness of their goal, but have been criticized as “impractical.” But the result
is unending social misery as society tries continually to move in the direction
of arm-flying, and the preachers of arm-flapping make everyone’s lives
miserable for being either lax or sinful enough not to live up to the common
ideal. The proper critique here is to challenge the “ideal” goal itself; to
point out that the goal itself is impossible in view of the physical nature of
man and the universe; and, therefore, to free mankind from its enslavement to
an inherently impossible and, hence, evil goal. But this liberation could never
occur so long as the anti-armfliers continued to be solely in the realm of the
“practical” and to concede ethics and “idealism” to the high priests of
arm-flying. The challenge must take place at the core – at the presumed ethical
superiority of a nonsensical goal. The same, I hold, is true of the egalitarian
ideal, except that its social consequences are far more pernicious than an
endless quest for man’s flying unaided. For the condition of equality would
wreak far more damage upon mankind.
What, in fact, is “equality”? The term has been much
invoked but little analyzed. A and B are “equal” if they are identical to each
other with respect to a given attribute. Thus, if Smith and Jones are both
exactly six feet in height, then they may be said to be “equal” in height. If
two sticks are identical in length, then their lengths are “equal,” etc. There
is one and only one way, then, in which any two people can really be “equal” in
the fullest sense: they must be identical in all of their attributes. This
means, of course, that equality of all men – the egalitarian ideal –
can only be achieved if all men are precisely uniform, precisely identical with
respect to all of their attributes. The egalitarian world would necessarily be
a world of horror fiction – a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid
of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.
Indeed, it is precisely in horror fiction where the
logical implications of an egalitarian world have been fully drawn. Professor
Schoeck has resurrected for us the depiction of such a world in the British
anti-Utopian novel Facial Justice, by L.P.
Hartley, in which envy is institutionalized by the State’s making sure that all
girls’ faces are equally pretty, with medical operations being performed on
both beautiful and ugly girls to bring all of their faces up or down to the
general common denominator. 5 A short story by
Kurt Vonnegut provides an even more comprehensive description of a fully
egalitarian society. Thus, Vonnegut begins his story, “Harrison Bergeron”:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody 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.
The “handicapping” worked partly 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. 6
The horror we all instinctively feel at these stories
is the intuitive recognition that men are not uniform, that the
species, mankind, is uniquely characterized by a high degree of variety,
diversity, differentiation; in short, inequality. An egalitarian society can
only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion; and, even
here, we all believe and hope the human spirit of individual man will rise up
and thwart any such attempts to achieve an ant-heap world. In short, the portrayal
of an egalitarian society is horror fiction 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 evil as well.
The great fact of individual difference and
variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human
experience; hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world
of coerced uniformity. Socially and economically, this variability manifests
itself in the universal division of labor, and in the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” –
the insight that, in every organization or activity, a few (generally the most
able and/or the most interested) will end up as leaders, with the mass of the
membership filling the ranks of the followers. In both cases, the same
phenomenon is at work – outstanding success or leadership in any given activity
is attained by what Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy” – those who are
best attuned to that activity.
The age-old
record of inequality seems to indicate that this variability and diversity is
rooted in the biological nature of man. But it is precisely such a conclusion
about biology and human nature that is the most galling of all possible
irritants to our egalitarians. Even egalitarians would be hard put to deny the
historical record, but their answer is that “culture” has been to blame; and
since they obviously hold that culture is a pure act of the will, then the goal
of changing the culture and inculcating society with equality seems to be
attainable. In this area, the egalitarians slough off any pretense to
scientific caution; they are scarcely content with acknowledging biology and
culture as mutually interacting influences. Biology must be read out of court
quickly and totally.
Let us ponder an example that is deliberately semi-frivolous.
Suppose that we observe our culture and find a common dictum to be: “Redheads
are excitable.” Here is a judgment of inequality, a conclusion that redheads as
a group tend to differ from the nonredhead population. Suppose, then, that
egalitarian sociologists investigate the problem, and they find that redheads
do, indeed, tend to be more excitable than nonredheads by a statistically
significant amount. Instead of admitting the possibility of some sort of
biological difference, the egalitarian will quickly add that the “culture” is
responsible for the phenomenon: the generally accepted “stereotype” that
redheads are excitable had been instilled into every redheaded child from an
early age, and he or she has simply been internalizing these judgments and
acting in the way society was expecting him to act. Redheads, in brief, had
been “brainwashed” by the predominant nonredhead culture.
While not denying the possibility of such a process
occurring, this common complaint seems decidedly unlikely on rational analysis.
For the egalitarian culture-bugaboo implicitly assumes that the “culture”
arrives and accumulates haphazardly, with no reference to social facts. The
idea that “redheads are excitable” did not originate out of the thin air or as
a divine commandment; how, then, did the idea come into being and gain general
currency? One favorite egalitarian device is to attribute all such group-identifying
statements to obscure psychological drives. The public had a psychological need
to accuse some social group of excitability, and redheads were
fastened on as scapegoats. But why were redheads singled out? Why not blondes
or brunettes? The horrible suspicion begins to loom that perhaps redheads were
singled out because they were and are indeed more excitable and that,
therefore, society’s “stereotype” is simply a general insight into the facts of
reality. Certainly this explanation accounts for more of the data and the
processes at work and is a much simpler explanation besides. Regarded
objectively, it seems to be a far more sensible explanation than the idea of
the culture as an arbitrary and ad hoc bogeyman. If so, then we might
conclude that redheads are biologically more excitable and that propaganda
beamed at redheads by egalitarians urging them to be less excitable is an
attempt to induce redheads to violate their nature; therefore, it is this
latter propaganda that may more accurately be called “brainwashing.”
This is not to say, of course, that society can never
make a mistake and that its judgments of group-identity are always rooted in
fact. But it seems to me that the burden of proof is far more on the
egalitarians than on their supposedly “unenlightened” opponents.
Since egalitarians begin with the a
priori axiom that all people, and hence all groups of peoples, are uniform
and equal, it then follows for them that any and all group differences in
status, prestige, or authority in society must be the result of
unjust “oppression” and irrational “discrimination.” Statistical proof of the
“oppression” of redheads would proceed in a manner all too familiar in American
political life; it might be shown, for example, that the median redhead income
is lower than nonredheaded income, and further that the proportion of redheaded
business executives, university professors, or congressmen is below their
quotal representation in the population. The most recent and conspicuous
manifestation of this sort of quotal thinking was in the McGovern movement at
the 1972 Democratic Convention. A few groups are singled out as having been
“oppressed” by virtue of delegates to previous conventions falling below their
quotal proportion of the population as a whole. In particular, women, youth,
blacks, Chicanos (or the so-called Third World) were designated as having been
oppressed; as a result, the Democratic Party, under the guidance of
egalitarian-quota thinking, overrode the choices of the voters in order to compel
their due quotal representation of these particular groups.
In some cases, the badge of “oppression” was an almost
ludicrous construction. That youths of 18 to 25 years of age had been
“underrepresented” could easily have been placed in proper perspective by
areductio ad absurdum, surely some impassioned McGovernite reformer could have
risen to point out the grievous “underrepresentation” of five-year olds at the
convention and to urge that the five-year-old bloc receive its immediate due.
It is only commonsense biological and social insight to realize that youths win
their way into society through a process of apprenticeship; youths know less
and have less experience than mature adults, and so it should be clear why they
tend to have less status and authority than their elders. But to accept this
would be to cast the egalitarian creed into some substantial doubt; further, it
would fly into the face of the youth-worship that has long been a grave problem
of American culture. And so young people have been duly designated as an
“oppressed class,” and the coercing of their population quota is conceived as
only just reparation for their previously exploited condition. 7
Women are another recently discovered “oppressed
class,” and the fact that political delegates have habitually been far more
than 50 percent male is now held to be an evident sign of their oppression.
Delegates to political conventions come from the ranks of party activists, and
since women have not been nearly as politically active as men, their numbers
have understandably been low. But, faced with this argument, the widening
forces of “women’s liberation” in America again revert to the talismanic argument
about “brainwashing” by our “culture.” For the women’s liberationists can
hardly deny the fact that every culture and civilization in history, from the
simplest to the most complex, has been dominated by males. (In desperation, the
liberationists have lately been countering with fantasies about the mighty
Amazonian empire.) Their reply, once again, is that from time immemorial a
male-dominated culture has brainwashed oppressed females to confine themselves
to nurture, home, and the domestic hearth. The task of the liberationists is to
effect a revolution in the female condition by sheer will, by the “raising of
consciousness.” If most women continue to cleave to domestic concerns, this
only reveals the “false consciousness” that must be extirpated.
Of course, one neglected reply is that if, indeed, men
have succeeded in dominating every culture, then this in itself is a
demonstration of male “superiority”; for if all genders are equal, how is it
that male domination emerged in every case? But apart from this question,
biology itself is being angrily denied and cast aside. The cry is that there
are no, can be no, must be no biological differences between the sexes; all
historical or current differences must be due to cultural brainwashing. In his
brilliant refutation of the women’s liberationist Kate Millett, Irving Howe
outlines several important biological differences between the sexes,
differences important enough to have lasting social effects. They are: (1) “the
distinctive female experience of maternity” including what the anthropologist
Malinowski calls an “intimate and integral connection with the child . . .
associated with physiological effects and strong emotions”; (2) “the hormonic
components of our bodies as these vary not only between the sexes but at
different ages within the sexes”; (3) “the varying possibilities for work
created by varying amounts of musculature and physical controls”; and (4) “the
psychological consequences of different sexual postures and possibilities,” in
particular the “fundamental distinction between the active and passive sexual
roles” as biologically determined in men and women respectively. 8
Howe goes on to cite the admission by Dr. Eleanor
Maccoby in her study of female intelligence “that it is quite possible that
there are genetic factors that differentiate the two sexes and bear upon their
intellectual performance…. For example, there is good reason to believe that
boys are innately more aggressive than girls – and I mean aggressive in the
broader sense, not just as it implies fighting, but as it implies dominance and
initiative as well – and if this quality is one which underlies the later growth
of analytic thinking, then boys have an advantage which girls…will find
difficult to overcome.” Dr. Maccoby adds that “if you try to divide child
training among males and females, we might find out that females need to do it
and males don’t.” 9
The sociologist Arnold W. Green points to the repeated
emergence of what the egalitarians denounce as “stereotyped sex roles” even in
communities originally dedicated to absolute equality. Thus, he cites the
record of the Israeli kibbutzim:
The phenomenon is worldwide: women are concentrated in fields which
require, singly or in combination, housewifely skills, patience and routine,
manual dexterity, sex appeal, contact with children. The generalization holds
for the Israeli kibbutz, with its established ideal of sexual equality. A
“regression” to a separation of “women’s work” from “men’s work” occurred in
the division of labor, to a state of affairs which parallels that elsewhere.
The kibbutz is dominated by males and traditional male attitudes, on balance to
the content of both sexes.10
Irving Howe unerringly perceives that at the root of
the women’s liberation movement is resentment against the very existence of
women as a distinctive entity:
For what seems to trouble Miss Millett isn’t merely the injustices women
have suffered or the discriminations to which they continue to be subject. What
troubles her most of all…is the sheer existence of women. Miss Millett dislikes
the psychobiological distinctiveness of women, and she will go no further than
to recognize – what choice is there, alas? – the inescapable differences of
anatomy. She hates the perverse refusal of most women to recognize the
magnitude of their humiliation, the shameful dependence they show in regard to
(not very independent) men, the maddening pleasures they even take in cooking
dinners for the “master group” and wiping the noses of their snotty brats.
Raging against the notion that such roles and attitudes are biologically determined,
since the very thought of the biological seems to her a way of forever reducing
women to subordinate status, she nevertheless attributes to “culture” so
staggering a range of customs, outrages, and evils that this culture comes to
seem a force more immovable and ominous than biology itself.11
In a perceptive critique of the women’s liberation
movement, Joan Didion perceives its root to be a rebellion not only against
biology but also against the “very organization of nature” itself:
If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair
to women, then let us transcend, via technology, “the very organization of
nature,” the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, “that goes back through
recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” I accept the Universe, Margaret
Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not.12
To which one is tempted to paraphrase Carlyle’s
admonition: “Egad, madam, you’d better.”
Another widening rebellion against biological sex
norms, as well as against natural diversity, has been the recently growing call
for bisexuality by Left intellectuals. The avoidance of “rigid, stereotyped”
heterosexuality and the adoption of indiscriminate bisexuality is supposed to
expand consciousness, to eliminate “artificial” distinctions between the sexes
and to make all persons simply and unisexually “human.” Once again,
brainwashing by a dominant culture (in this case, heterosexual) has supposedly
oppressed a homosexual minority and blocked off the uniformity and equality
inherent in bisexuality. For then every individual could reach his or her
fullest “humanity” in the “polymorphous perversity” so dear to the hearts of
such leading New Left social philosophers as Norman O. Brown and Herbert
Marcuse.
That biology stands like a rock in the face of
egalitarian fantasies has been made increasingly clear in recent years. The
researches of biochemist Roger J. Williams have repeatedly emphasized the great
range of individual diversity throughout the entire human organism. Thus:
Individuals differ from each other even in the minutest details of anatomy
and body chemistry and physics; finger and toe prints; microscopic texture of
hair; hair pattern on the body, ridges and “moons” on the finger and toenails;
thickness of skin, its color, its tendency to blister; distribution of nerve
endings on the surface of the body; size and shape of ears, of ear canals, or
semi-circular canals; length of fingers; character of brain waves (tiny
electrical impulses given off by the brain); exact number of muscles in the
body; heart action; strength of blood vessels; blood groups; rate of clotting
of blood – and so on almost ad infinitum.
We now know a great deal about how inheritance works
and how it is not only possible but certain that every human being possesses by
inheritance an exceedingly complex mosaic, composed of thousands of items,
which is distinctive for him alone.13
The genetic basis for inequality of intelligence has
also become increasingly evident, despite the emotional abuse heaped upon such
studies by fellow scientists as well as the lay public. Studies of identical
twins raised in contrasting environments have been among the ways that this
conclusion has been reached; and Professor Richard Herrnstein has recently
estimated that 80 percent of the variability in human intelligence is genetic
in origin. Herrnstein concludes that any political attempts to provide
environmental equality for all citizens will only intensify the degree of
socioeconomic differences caused by genetic variability.14
The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as
significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the
ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of
nature”; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is
the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the
world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any
desired direction by the mere exercise of human will – in short, that reality
can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings. Surely
this sort of infantile thinking is at the heart of Herbert Marcuse’s passionate
call for the comprehensive negation of the existing structure of reality and
for its transformation into what he divines to be its true potential.
Nowhere is the Left Wing attack on ontological reality
more apparent than in the Utopian dreams of what the future socialist society
will look like. In the socialist future of Charles Fourier, according to Ludwig
von Mises:
all harmful beasts will have disappeared, and in their places will be
animals which will assist man in his labors – or even do his work for him. An
antibeaver will see to the fishing; an antiwhale will move sailing ships in a
calm; an antihippopotamus will tow the river boats. Instead of the lion there
will be an antilion, a steed of wonderful swiftness, upon whose back the rider
will sit as comfortably as in a well-sprung carriage. “It will be a pleasure to
live in a world with such servants.”15
Similarly absurd fantasies are at the root of the
Marxian utopia of communism. Freed from the supposed confines of specialization
and the division of labor (the heart of any production above the most primitive
level and hence of any civilized society), each person in the communist utopia
would fully develop all of his powers in every direction.17 As Engels wrote in his Anti-Dühring,
communism would give “each individual the opportunity to develop and exercise
all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions.”18 And Lenin looked forward in 1920 to the “abolition
of the division of labor among people…the education, schooling, and training of
people with an all-around development and an all-around
training, people able to do everything. Communism is marching and must
march toward this goal, and will reach it.”19
In his trenchant critique of the communist vision,
Alexander Gray charges:
That each individual should have the opportunity of developing all his
faculties, physical and mental, in all directions, is a dream which will cheer
the vision only of the simple-minded, oblivious of the restrictions imposed by
the narrow limits of human life. For life is a series of acts of choice, and
each choice is at the same time a renunciation.
Even the inhabitant of Engels’s future fairyland will
have to decide sooner or later whether he wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury
or First Sea Lord, whether he should seek to excel as a violinist or as a
pugilist, whether he should elect to know all about Chinese literature or about
the hidden pages in the life of a mackerel.20
Of course one way to try to resolve this dilemma is to
fantasize that the New Communist Man of the future will be a superman,
superhuman in his abilities to transcend nature. William Godwin thought that,
once private property was abolished, man would become immortal. The Marxist
theoretician Karl Kautsky asserted that in the future communist society, “a new
type of man will arise…a superman…an exalted man.” And Leon Trotsky prophesied
that under communism:
man 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. Above these other heights new peaks will
arise.21
We began by considering the common view that the
egalitarians, despite a modicum of impracticality, have ethics and moral
idealism on their side. We end with the conclusion that egalitarians, however
intelligent as individuals, deny the very basis of human intelligence and of
human reason: the identification of the ontological structure of reality, of
the laws of human nature, and the universe. In so doing, the egalitarians are
acting as terribly spoiled children, denying the structure of reality on behalf
of the rapid materialization of their own absurd fantasies. Not only spoiled
but also highly dangerous; for the power of ideas is such that the egalitarians
have a fair chance of destroying the very universe that they wish to deny and
transcend, and to bring that universe crashing around all of our ears. Since
their methodology and their goals deny the very structure of humanity and of
the universe, the egalitarians are profoundly antihuman; and, therefore, their
ideology and their activities may be set down as profoundly evil as well.
Egalitarians do not have ethics on their side unless one can maintain
that the destruction of civilization, and even of the human race itself, may be
crowned with the laurel wreath of a high and laudable morality.
References
1 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 383.
2 Henry C. Simons, Personal Income
Taxation (1938), pp. 18-19, quoted in Walter J. Blum and
Harry Kalven, Jr., The Uneasy Case for
Progressive Taxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p.
72.
4 Thus: A third line of objection to progression, and
undoubtedly the one which has received the most attention, is that it lessens
the economic productivity of the society. Virtually everyone who has advocated
progression in an income tax has recognized this as a counterbalancing
consideration. (Blum and Kalven, The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation,
p. 21) The “ideal” vs. the “practical” once again!
6 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Harrison Bergeron,” in Welcome to the Monkey
House (New York: Dell, 1970), p. 7.
7 Egalitarians have, among their other activities, been
busily at work “correcting” the English language. The use of the word “girl,”
for example, is now held to grievously demean and degrade female youth and to
imply their natural subservience to adults. As a result, Left egalitarians now
refer to girls of virtually any age as “women,” and we may confidently look
forward to reading about the activities of “a five-year-old woman.”
10 Arnold W.
Green, Sociology (6th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 305. Green cites
the study by A.I. Rabin, “The Sexes: Ideology and Reality in the Israeli
Kibbutz,” in G.H. Seward and R.G. Williamson, eds., Sex Roles in Changing
Society (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 285–307.
13 Roger J.
Williams, Free and Unequal (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1953), pp. 17, 23. See also by Williams Biochemical
Individuality (New York: John Wiley, 1963) and You are Extraordinary (New York:
Random House, 1967).
15 Ludwig von
Mises, Socialism: An Economic
and Sociological Analysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1951), pp. 163–64.
16 Ludwig von
Mises, Human Action (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 71. Mises cites the first and
fourth volumes of Fourier’s Oeuvres Complètes.
17 For more
on the communist utopia and the division of labor, see Murray N. Rothbard, Freedom, Inequality,
Primitivism, and the Division of Labor (chap. 16,
present volume).
19 Italics
are Lenin’s. V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An
Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 1940), p.
34.
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