There has been no greater Trojan Horse set against the ideals of high civilization than Equality - the basis for hundreds of failed social programs and bureaucratic measures and the wrecking ball against Liberty - an inroad crossing over contracts, trade, and property. Where Liberty was the absence of special privileges by coercion, Equality was coercion in the name of positive assertion of people.
The worst thing about Equality is that it has been considered a means to Liberty, and somehow even consistent with it - thus allowing Liberty to be even considered a statist concept, and creating the notion that only the State can bring Liberty.
So in this thread, we will all collectively create the case against all programs, policies, and measures made on the basis of Equality. While we normally don't expect to convince people about Liberty, we can, at least, show the common non-liberal about the erroneous nature of justifying the greater good through Equality.
Equality was something first proposed by hereditary elites of feudal society. While they were the ones who would seemingly appear to lose most from a levelling process across society, the roots of egalitarian thinking are actually in aristocracy.
While ancient medieval days showed powerful families gaining land and serfs through coercion and through gifts from kings they served, even feudalists never had much power in society. The rise of Christianity allowed for a moral base for homogenizing and uniting European peoples. The desire for civic order and peace and salvation was strong among peasants, and good moral values in a man made him superior to any man of high birth. A good Christian was more respectable to the common man than a feudal landlord. Just as important as morality and good values was arbitrating disputes and protecting people from crime. Specialised legal professionals and civil servants to maintain law-and-order took upon a wide range of responsibilities in cities. Businessmen started connecting cities and allowed people to specialise in non-agricultural fields, while goods could be sold to them quickly through navigable waterways to help them be fed and clothed. Businessmen were also needed to maintain private estates of nobility, who did not understand business. To keep cities thriving, men who saved money started lending, and helped finance the businesses, noble's private estates, and local governments.
In short, the noble found himself overrun by Christianity, law-and-order, healthy trade, and financial assistance becoming more important than he. The noble reasoned that a class of oppressors had come over the common peasants, and they must be protected from the tyranny of priests, businessmen, law enforcement, and banking. Thus, equality was to be introduced, whereby the wings of people who did service to society were to be clipped and special privileges given to peasants when they sided with the nobility (including making them nobles as well).
Equality thus was a redistribution of socio-economic power from the socially responsible to the small concentrated elite. Once the levelling of hardworking people was done, there would be nothing in the path of creating the absolute state.
To attack the horrible wrongs of businessmen and good Christians, zero-sum thinking became popular. Murray Rothbard once wrote an excellent article which was reposted recently on Mises.Org on Michel De Montaigne, the famous Skeptic who decided that you can never create anything, but steal from somebody else. The financier who funds the poor is the one who impoverishes them, the farmer profits from men's hunger, and the judge lives off from crime. It was thus decided that the only way to survive was to destroy and steal from everybody else, and enrich oneself. It would be for the greater good, since it was the state that would thrive.
Thus could the kings and aristocrats of Europe justify their wars, their crippling taxation, their controls over business, their protectionism, and their right to debase currency to enrich themselves. However, these things would only be their undoing, as wars finished off the estates of many rich nobles, and slowly left them more impoverished as time went by. High civilization can not survive under these destructive acts, and private property, division of labour, specialization, and modern capitalism accelerated in their removal of old order.
Certainly, with division of labour and specialization, intellectuals, civil servants, academics, and other such educated professionals could enjoy a better status in society. And yet, for many educated professionals, living was often made from university grants or public sector salaries, and their skills weren't as marketable as ordinary producing members of society. And so, despite their years of education, they would find people far more mean than them rising more rapidly than they.
Ludwig von Mises once wrote that Karl Marx had the habit of most Prussian intellectuals of hating businessmen. This hatred was for a good reason. When property rights are enforced, it is easier to lend money to the poor. For this reason, people who had once lived in worse poverty than anyone who lives on welfare today could quickly become big businessmen. The founders of Macy's, Woolworth's, Bloomingdale's, and many other famous businesses were virtually street vagrants. For the old upper class, these businessmen were seen as less noble creatures who quickly stole and accumulated wealth of society, and gained power over workers under them, because of their dreadful accumulation of capital.
The need for clipping the wings of businessmen and ensuring the redistribution of power back to the state and statesmen thus demanded stronger enforcement of an old policy.
Democracy.
Democracy would allow people to vote with other people's property, instead of their own, and thus create that inroad against private property. It would be a means of voting against other people's interests to advance their own, and the statesmen would be powerful by suppressing the creditors and proprietors ability to act as they would in the market by introducing the state's coercion into the mix.
Thus, the state's power could grow by punishing any new segment of society which worked too hard and produced too much, by using the policies of equality to level up those loyal to state and level down those who were not.
Thus we see much of the social democracy that pervades the western world post-WW2.
It is so that even modern policies of Equality are especially meant to empower the state and turn men back into serfs.
Even though terrible institutional racism was once dominant in the United States of America, once African Americans were seen as a useful voting population, policies of affirmative action in the Civil Rights Act came about.
Black Americans had been rising rapidly in socio-economic status from the early to mid 20th century, with proportion under poverty falling from 87% to 30%, but the post-Civil-Rights-Act period slowed it down to from 30% to 29% across the 1970s. Many new social engineering policies under Lyndon Johnson helped break the black family, and left too many black children growing up without parental guidance. The problem was that this strengthened the resolve for egalitarian pro-minority measures which have had such similar effects over and over.
Too many African Americans have a lower of standard of living than their grandparents did - many of whom once lived in stable families in crime-free neighbourhoods.
Many Conservatives in the Anglo-American world feel that there is discrimination against heterosexual straight Christian white men. Regardless of how over-the-top such a notion may be, it could have a basis. Just the way Equality proposed by aristocracy was meant to clip the wings of any intelligent dominant social class, the state must suppress any class that could get too empowered and result in the loss of power to the Establishment. Most white men in either Britain or United States aren't particularly rich or have anyone to pull strings for them (even though some do), but they are normally under a decent bourgeois family upbringing and have an emotional investment of their parents in their future that they are able to live a better life as grown ups. The state may well have needed to ensure that any dominant class be marginalised as far as possible to protect the state.
It is perhaps for this very reason that foreign immigration and special benefits to foreign immigrants to these countries get so much encouragement, and are used a strong voting bank. Recently revealed documents of the Labour Party indeed revealed that UK immigration policy was meant as social engineering, to get a new vote bank for the state. In the United States, Hispanics have the highest growth rate in the population and will soon be 50% of America by 2033, and it has been explicity said by American officials that natives of United States need to assimiliate to outsiders more than the outsiders have to.
However, much like the aristocracy collapsed, so might this scheme of democratic equality. Alexis de Tocqueville once said that as each new century brings a new class of peoples that rise above the old elites, because just the way aristocracy collapsed in trying to save itself, so might democracy collapse and give way to the eternally surgent private property capitalism that has been usurping the old classes since medieval times.
What do you think?