"The Utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable, as those which vest all property in the Crown..."
Founding Quote of the Week
This week marks the start of true spring in Northeast Pennsylvania. It’s unusually warm outside which means gardening and the start of my kids running club. Now that I’m on the board of this running club, my involvement is naturally increased. So I’m blaming my zeal for gardening and running on being a day late with my weekly quote. I hope everyone has a great weekend!
A distrust of equity is planted deep in the bones of our nation’s ideals. It’s not some new push against efforts to simply be fair to those who have less. I purposefully use the word ‘equity’ as compared to ‘equality’ because the manner in which they are used in popular discourse is not the same.
Equity is used as a measure of results, usually in economic terms. How much material stuff do you have?
Equality is used as a measure of natural conditions. What is the nature of humanity?
Regardless of which you prefer, or if you think that having one means having the other, the Founders expected equality, not equity. And this is an important distinction.
“…The Utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable, as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government unconstitutional.” - House of Representatives of Massachusetts (1768, to agent in London for the Colonies)
This weekly quote nicely outlines why the two are so different and why equity isn’t simply a difference of opinions, but a dangerous concept.
Visionary and impracticable - It imagines a world that cannot be achieved as it is not practically feasible
Vest all property in the Crown - The reason to confiscate property and distribute it violates the same principles that the Crown does when confiscating property for itself.
Arbitrary - Who decides and by what means do you measure equity?
Despotic - In order to achieve equity (equal results) you must have severe government power to force humans into equitable results. The schemes to do so never develop from the bottom up, lifting people up. They often however keep people down.
Unconstitutional - It requires actions by government that go against the nature of constitutional government. (Written prior to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, this was in reference to the British Constitution.)
The American principle is specific to the nature of mankind being equal in nature, not in results. We are free to pursue happiness but there is no fundamental guarantee that you must be provided with happiness. It is the pursuit of it that gives us meaning, and providing it would steal that right of pursuit from us anyways.
It can be frustrating to see that equality in nature does not lead to equality in results. Carl Jung said something to the effect that every ideal is a judge. The concept being that anytime we see someone closer to the ideal than we are, that it turns our gaze inward, asking ourselves why we have failed to attain the same. And I think that is what happens when we start looking to equity instead of equality. We don’t want to people to feel inadequate.
But smothering their pursuit of happiness by artificially propping them up will do nothing but crush their potential and disincentivize expression of the ideal.
A few decades after the above quote was written, Friedrich Nietzsche addressed the same issue, but in much more stark terms.
“Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots. The earth is large enough and man still sufficiently unexhausted; hence such a practical instruction and demonstrate ad absurdum would not strike me as undesirable, even if it were gained and paid for with a tremendous expenditure of human lives” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Not long after Nietzsche stated this, one of the “Utopian schemes of leveling” our Founders were weary of went into effect. Twenty million people were killed in the Soviet Union alone.
Equity versus equality is not simply a matter of wordplay and economic opinions. It strikes at the very definition of humanity itself, so we had better get it right.