Wednesday, August 13, 2014

The Equality Illusion

In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell raises questions concerning “equality” scarcely considered in our time: How is “equality” defined, and what are the costs of pursuing it?

“Equality” may be easy to define for concepts like numbers, as they have “only one dimension, magnitude (2 + 3 = 5),” Sowell notes. The same is not true for people. A confluence of various and often unquantifiable factors—intelligence, ability, beauty, geographic location, economic status, luck, among many others—forms multidimensional human beings.  Striving to level one human dimension—say, the economic—invariably results in the inequality of another dimension—the political—by transferring political power into the hands of those anointed to pursue economic equalizing. Determining how much economic inequality to trade for political inequality is arbitrary. “Equality,” it turns out, is an illusion.