Sunday, April 23, 2017

The Myth of Equal Opportunity

The idea of equal opportunity is in many ways a myth. In ways we are all the same, however we also all have our differences as human beings. Some are taller, faster, smarter, better looking, whatever. The three hundred pound athlete has a better chance to become a Professional Football Player, the 100 pound person has a better chance to become a Jockey. Should we give the tall child drugs that stunt their growth so that their classmates will have an “equal” advantage to play basketball? Should we refuse an education to the smart child, which happens in government schools, so that the other students will have an “equal” chance to succeed in the academic setting? Maybe we should disfigure the good looking?
Every individual has an advantage over most other individuals in some way or another. There are exceptional athletes who aren’t that bright, people of genius intelligence who can’t walk straight and people born to incredibly wealthy parents who become afflicted with physical or mental disabilities. You can create equal opportunity by taking freedom away. The problem is that everyone can only be equal at the lowest level. You must break the legs of the talented athlete so that their opportunity is equal to the person born with a disability, you must lobotomize the genius so that they have equal opportunity to the person who is mentally slow, and everyone must live in poverty, so that nobody has more than the person who does not manage money properly or decides that sitting on a beach is preferable to working.
That is why freedom is so important. Only in a free society does everybody have a chance to use what talents they have to choose the life they wish to live. Some will be wiser, some will have more money, some will have better health, some will be better looking and some will be more athletic. Some will have more successful relationships and some will be happier. Some will enjoy sitting on a beach. It’s a little messy but it beats squandering all the world’s talent so that we all have an “equal” opportunity. The only way we all have an “equal” opportunity is if we all have no opportunity.


1 comment:

  1. Unfortunately, in any society, there is a sort of "conservation of freedom law:" Once you allow for the freedom enhancing effects of wealth, there is a maximum amount of freedom any society can support. Once this maximum is attained, one person's freedom is only increased at the expense of the freedom of others. This is not linear: A rich person's freedom is increased at a greater cost in the liberties of the people who labor to support him. An unequal society has less total freedom than an equal one. Until one figures the enormous cost of enforcing equality. For this reason, although enforcing equality would in fact be destructive, one should potentiate it. One necessary part of doing this is by discouraging excess concentrations of wealth and power. Another is to indeed spend a certain amount of resources keeping the playing field more or less level. Granted,keeping it perfectly level would be prohibitively expensive, and thus at too great a cost to *everybody's* freedom.

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