Equal Opportunity, Unequal Results and Why That Difference Is Freedom

In 1961 the writer Kurt Vonnegut published a short story called "Harrison Bergeron," set in a future America where everyone is finally, perfectly equal.

How did they do it? Not by lifting anybody up. A government official called the Handicapper General made sure that nobody was better than anybody else at anything. The beautiful wore hideous masks. The strong carried weights around their necks. The intelligent wore a radio in the ear that blasted a sharp noise every few seconds to scramble their thoughts. The ballerinas were weighted down and the singers forced to croak. Equality was total, and so was the misery.

Now, it is a satire, and satire exaggerates. I have no intention of telling you that anybody in Washington is secretly drafting a Handicapper General's job description. But Vonnegut, who was no conservative, had spotted something that belongs at the centre of the political argument, and that gets lost in the shouting. There are two things people mean when they say "equality," and you cannot have both of them at the same time without force.

One is equality before the law and equality of opportunity: the same rules for everybody, and a fair shot at the starting line. The other is equality of outcome: everyone ending up in roughly the same place. The first is the American promise. The second is a very different thing, and the difference between them is, in the end, the difference between a free country and a managed one.

The two kinds of equal

Let me define the terms, because the whole debate turns on them.

Equality before the law means the same legal rights and duties for every person. A judge cannot treat the mayor and the mechanic differently. The Declaration of Independence states the principle in a sentence everyone knows: "all men are created equal." It does not say all men are equal in talent, strength, ambition, luck or wealth. It says they are equal in the one respect that matters for government: each has the same standing in the eyes of the law, and the same unalienable rights. Where Rights Come From, and Why the Declaration Says So First traces where that idea came from.

Equality of opportunity means that no one should be shut out of the contest by law, prejudice or privilege. The starting line should be fair. The runner who is faster should not be held back by his birth, and the runner who is slower should not be able to block him.

Equality of outcome means that the results are meant to come out roughly equal: the same income, the same wealth, the same position. It is a goal about where the race ends, not about how it begins.

Notice that these are different questions, and the answer to one tells you nothing about the answer to the other. A race can be perfectly fair and still have one winner. A world where everyone gets the same prize has to be arranged, and someone has to do the arranging.

Tocqueville saw it coming

In 1835, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America, a study of a young country by a visitor who was fascinated and a little alarmed. He saw that the American passion for equality was powerful, and that it could take two forms.

There is, he wrote, a manly and legitimate passion for equality that makes every man want to be strong and respected. And there is a degraded taste for equality that leads the weak to want to bring the strong down to their own level, and persuades men to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. In other words: a society can be equal because everyone is free, or equal because everyone is under the same boot. Tocqueville saw both possibilities in the American future, and he warned about the second.

I would not call that a prophecy of any specific policy. It is a diagnostic tool. When you hear a proposal described as promoting equality, ask which kind. Does it widen the chance to compete, or does it pull down the competitors?

The argument in numbered form

Let me lay out the case as a debater would.

1. People differ. In ability, effort, health, temperament, family background, choices and plain luck. This is the most obvious fact about human beings, and it is a good thing: a world of identical people would have no music, no business, no invention and no conversation.
2. Free people using their differences will end up in different places. Let people choose their work, their savings, their risks and their partners, and the results will vary. Nobody has to intend this; it follows from freedom and from point one.
3. To make outcomes equal, someone must override the choices. The state would need to take from the one who does well and give to the one who does less, repeatedly, and keep doing so, because any new difference reopens the gap. Someone must decide how much and for whom.
4. Therefore equality of outcome and individual freedom pull in opposite directions. The more of one, the less of the other.
5. Equality of opportunity does not have that problem. It asks the state to remove barriers, not to rearrange results. It treats each person as an adult who can use a fair chance.

The philosopher Robert Nozick made a famous version of the third point in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Imagine, he said, a society that has just arranged its wealth in exactly the pattern you think is fair. Then a million people each pay a quarter to watch a famous basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain, and he ends up far richer than anyone else. Nobody has been cheated. Everyone chose freely. And yet the pattern is gone. To keep it, you would have to stop people from making free exchanges. Liberty, Nozick concluded, upsets patterns. You may or may not agree with his whole system, but the thought experiment captures why outcome equality needs constant intervention.

Friedman's version

Milton Friedman, with his wife Rose, put the same argument to a mass audience in Free to Choose, the book and television series of 1980. Friedman distinguished three meanings of equality: equality before God, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. He argued that a society that puts equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither, because the force required to impose equality will be used by people who then take a larger share for themselves. And a society that puts freedom first will, as a by-product, end up with a good deal more of both. Milton Friedman Took Free Markets Out of the Classroom and Into the Kitchen explains his wider approach.

He was not asserting that all inequality is just. He was saying that the proper question is whether a difference came about through free exchange and honest work, or through force and fraud and privilege. In the first case he called it fair. In the second case it deserves a remedy.

Friedman also had a practical streak that people forget. In Capitalism and Freedom in 1962 he proposed replacing the welter of welfare programs with a single cash payment, which he called a negative income tax, so that the poor would get help without a bureaucracy telling them how to live. The Earned Income Tax Credit, enacted in 1975 and expanded by presidents of both parties since, is its descendant, and it ties the help to work. A conservative can support that kind of safety net and still hold that the safety net is no substitute for a fair race.

The strongest case for redistribution

Now the part where I owe my opponents their best argument.

The most serious defence of redistribution is the one the philosopher John Rawls made in A Theory of Justice in 1971. Rawls asked us to imagine choosing the rules of society from behind a "veil of ignorance," not knowing what family we would be born into, what talents we would have, or what position we would occupy. Under those conditions, he argued, we would agree to rules that benefit the worst-off, because any of us might end up there. Inequalities, in his view, are justified only if they work to the advantage of the least well-off.

That is a deep argument, and it deserves a deep reply. Here is mine.

First, the veil of ignorance is a good test of fairness, but it does not tell you what to do about the unfair starting line. Parents do not choose the families their children are born into, and a country that lets a child's chances be fixed by the postcode of his birth is failing its promise. I agree with that. What I dispute is the conclusion that the remedy is to equalise results after the fact.

Second, the practical record of taking from the successful to give to everyone is mixed, and conservatives are not alone in noticing. High marginal rates reduce the incentive to work and invest; many economists argue that mandatory leveling has depressed growth in the countries that tried it; and growth is what lifts the poor, as The Best Antipoverty Program Ever Tried Was Letting People Trade argues.

Third, a society is not just a market. The family, the church and the neighbourhood do much of the work of giving a child a start, and they work by love, not by mandate. Policies that treat all inequality as a problem for the state to solve tend to crowd out these things.

I will concede what has to be conceded. A fair starting line is not automatic, and the poorest child in a failing school does not have the same chance as a child in a good one. Conservatives who pretend otherwise are not being honest. The difference between us and the left is about the remedy.

What a fair starting line looks like

So let me answer the question in the title: what does a fair starting line require? I'd argue for four things.

1. A school that teaches, whatever the family's income. A child's chances depend heavily on the education he gets, and when the local school fails, a wealthy family can move or pay for a private one, while a poor family cannot. School choice is the conservative answer: let the money follow the child, so that the family without means has the options the family with means already has. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which began in 1990, was an early example of a modern voucher program, and in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002 the Supreme Court held that Ohio's Cleveland program did not violate the Establishment Clause. Four Families, One Education Savings Account, and the Math of Choice works through the arithmetic for four hypothetical families, and Vouchers, ESAs, Tax Credits and Charters Sorted Out in One Table sorts out the terms.
2. No licence, zoning rule or permit that locks the newcomer out. An aspiring hair-braider told she needs a long course of paid training before she may touch a customer's hair, or a family priced out of a neighbourhood by rules that forbid anything but expensive houses, is having the starting line moved. the license you need to braid hair and the jobs it quietly kills and zoning may be the biggest price control you never got to vote on give examples.
3. A real safety net that rewards work. The EITC model: help that rises as a person earns, so that work always pays.
4. The rule of law, equally applied. The oldest requirement, and the one that makes the others possible.

None of this guarantees equal results. It aims at something better: that the fastest runner can win, the slowest can still run, and nobody has had the track tilted against him by law.

The verdict

The question for every proposal is not "does it reduce inequality?" It is "how does it do so, and what does it cost in freedom?" Reducing a gap by lifting the bottom is one thing. Reducing it by dragging down the top is something else. A tax that funds a school voucher for a poor child expands the field. A mandate that caps what the successful can keep, or sorts people by outcome to equalise representation, shrinks it.

I put it this way to my own side as well. Conservatives who defend inequality of result must be willing to defend the fairness of the starting line, and to say so when it fails. If we shrug at a rigged field, we hand the argument to the other side and deserve to lose it. If we insist on a fair field, and then cheer the runners who win and help the ones who fall, we have a message no Handicapper General can answer.

Thomas Sowell Asks What Happens After the Policy Passes says it better than I can: every policy is a trade-off, and the person who claims otherwise is selling something. And Answering the Charge That Conservatives Only Care About the Rich takes on the accusation head-on.

The bottom line

• Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are the American promise. Equality of outcome is a different goal that needs continuous force to maintain.
• Tocqueville warned of equality in servitude, Nozick showed that liberty upsets patterns, and Friedman argued that a society which puts outcome first gets neither equality nor freedom.
• The best case for redistribution, Rawls's veil of ignorance, deserves respect. The conservative reply is to fix the starting line, with schools, open licensing and housing, and work-linked help like the EITC, not to level the finish.
• Judge any proposal by two questions: does it widen the chance to compete, and what does it cost in freedom?
• If your state is debating school choice or licensing reform, show up and speak for the family that has no other options.