A natural equal right to the creative pursuit of happiness can only be secured by equal law which results in natural unequal outcome. Some individuals will attain superior achievement through greater creativity or greater labor, while others work less or with lesser creativity which naturally leads to unequal outcome.
Related: Unalienable Rights Come from God, not Government
When individuals are free, as in athletic competition with equal rules, outcomes are naturally unequal; there will be the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Individuals with equal rights under equal law possess maximum human liberty - individuals who are free to labor creatively in their pursuit of happiness - free to reap the sweet fruit of labor and also free to reap the bitter fruit of laziness. Unequal outcome means equal rights - the essence of justice.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Thomas Jefferson
Tyranny is obstructed action (suppression of liberty) according to someone else’s will within limits drawn around us by the superior (unequal) rights of others. Equal outcome means the inequity of unequal rights – equal outcome is tyranny.
Equal outcome requires the tyranny, for example, of forced suppression of property rights for some, and corresponding enhancement of property rights for others - through unequal tax law – in order to reduce the gap which naturally occurs under equal rights between rich and poor.
Government which enforces equal property outcome must do so through despotic inroads on the rights of property – i.e.: government expropriation of middle class labored-for property which is “re-distributed” – first to themselves - and then to the so-called proletariat class in return for votes. Marxists call such economic social engineering “Social Equity” - Orwellian Newspeak for unequal property rights and unequal tax law - or it is called “Social Justice” - Orwellian Newspeak for social injustice. Karl Marx understood that the tyranny of equal outcome required the tyranny of unequal rights – together the labor-challenged, tax-eating Marxist and proletariat classes have superior rights to property compared to the laboring, tax-paying middle class.
“The proletariat [non-disabled poor] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist ruling class]…. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic [unequal] inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx
Aside from economics, government-forced equal outcome now permeates American culture. Government that enforces equalization of graduate school admission based on race, ethnicity or gender must do so through despotic inroads on the rights of school admission to individuals who studiously labored for that right. Government unjustly and unnaturally forces this type of equal outcome through unequal admission standards - affirmative action. Imagine the NBA forced by government to provide for equal numbers of white and non-white basketball players – equal outcome in basketball - affirmative action in basketball. Similarly, government which unnaturally forces equal numbers of men’s and women’s collegiate athletic teams must do so through despotic inroads on the rights of students to freely create athletic teams – the “Gender Equity” of Title IX. When college students are free, with equal rights and opportunity to form teams; it follows that there will be, within a fixed budget, a natural inequality between the numbers of men’s and women’s teams.
C.S. Lewis perceived the tyranny of equal rights perverted into equal outcome:
“Democracy the word with which you must lead them by the nose… You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated [equality before law which secures equal rights]. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal [in outcome – regardless of creativity and labor]… You remember how one of the Greek Dictators… sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.” C.S. Lewis – Screwtape Proposes a Toast
From an even more ominous angle, George Orwell understood that equal outcome not only requires unequal rights – equal outcome is an Orwellian lie. Equal outcome is only rhetoric because Marxism - through forceful, unnatural collectivization of property - results in unnatural, self-serving property superiority for the non-to-be-equalized Marxist equalizers. Like the Pigs of Animal Farm, Marxists possess and control other people’s labored-for property – property they control “communally” - they become the commune-ists. Marxist “equal outcome” leads to unequal (superior) outcome for the Marxists – an Orwellian contradiction – an oxymoron requiring us to exercise the insanity of Orwellian Doublethink.
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called "abolition of private property" (Communist Manifesto)... meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before... It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
In truth Mother Nature will never allow any such thing as “equal outcome.” The only equality which is natural and unforced is that of equal rights and equal law – American Equality. Those who would enforce equal outcome through unequal rights and unequal law are tyrants – a self-serving class “more equal than others” – superior in rights – superior before law – superior in property. Americans agitating for equal outcome are agitating for Marxist Equality – which turns out to be equal serfdom for us and unequal (superior) ruling class status for them. To get a feel for the criminal tyranny of “equal outcome” envision the forced figure skating equality that Tonya Harding attempted to engineer between herself and Nancy Kerrigan. Consider also the inequitable equality of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” That’s the Marxist idea - attain “equality” through force - bring down the studious, hard-laboring, successful person to the level of the lazy. Never consider for a moment the “bourgeois” idea of laborious and creative self-improvement as a means to equal or, Marx-forbid, naturally superior outcome via equal rights. Equal rights vs. equal outcome is a summation of the American Revolution vs. the Marxist counter-revolution.
Ronald R. Cherry
