By Adam B. Coleman
Within politics, much of the discussion today surrounds wanting to strive towards equality for everyone. Whether it be equality of treatment or equality economically, there’s a growing sentiment that people feel unequal to others. Clearly, this must be a problem; or is it?
I believe most Americans want others to do well, they just differ in the approach on how to help each other. What I’m becoming more aware of is that it’s no longer just about the approach but the goal itself.
The goal for some is about pure equality, no matter what it takes. The well-intentioned people who believe this is something to strive towards completely skip over many aspects of human nature and in some cases, history.
Advocating for humans to be treated equally 100% of the time is much like asking for the eradication of hatred. We’re designed to treat people differently for a variety of reasons and treating people arbitrarily the same could result in negative outcomes.
For one, we’re tribal creatures, and built to be at least mildly suspicious of people we don’t know or people from different cultures we aren’t familiar with. While we’ve made progress in this department, there’s no feasible way of viewing all people the same. Nor should you.
You shouldn’t treat a stranger like you treat your sibling; that would be reckless. However, once you build comfort with that stranger, then you’ll become more familiar with who they are and what their intentions are. Before you know it, that stranger could be much like a surrogate family member.
The point I’m making is that when we get more familiar with different cultures, we build a better comfort with each other, but we’ll never treat each other equally. Asking for pure equal treatment shouldn’t be the goal because it’s utopian. Asking for fairness in treatment is different & more reasonable.
Tellingly, the same advocates believe any disparities economically between people of different races or cultures is simply due to the tribalism I referred to earlier. They view the differences of outcome in the most simplistic fashion and make the leap to claim a group’s success is actually theft.
They want you to believe that for a group to succeed, they need to take from everyone else.
Truthfully, the discussion about economic disparities based on racial treatment is a distraction from economic disparities based on class treatment. Even more so, it’s a distraction from understanding the elite utilize the government to bend society in their favor. Discussing economics purely based on race assumes everyone or most people within that race are succeeding or failing.
White people aren’t stealing from black people and it’s not as simple as wealthy people taking from poor people. There are people who are wealthy for good reason. They provide a great product, service, or skill people willingly pay for.
The issue, however, is when the wealthy use their economics to interfere with other Americans’ progress; that’s when they become the elite class.
The elite class uses their money to flood the political system, so you have no voice. They’re the people sponsoring wars, so your children die while making a killing on a weapons manufacturer’s stock. They’re the people broadcasting narratives on television, so you don’t mind the man behind the curtain.
Lastly, they’re the reason you believe inequality is always a bad thing.
Inequality isn’t necessarily a sign of unfairness; unfairness is. Meritocracy creates gaps between the best and the worst of us and as long as we have a somewhat free market in opportunities, there will always be inequality. Living in a country that rewards the best and dis-incentivizes the worst is inequality at its best.
Now that inequality has been used to signal something negative, advocates against inequality are using the one mechanism that actually creates unfair disparities to fix the problem for them: the government.
The very government entity that has no problem with accepting money from the elite is now supposed to close a gap for the average man. The same government with clearly corrupt political actors is now supposed to be champions of the common man, or more specifically, the minority American.
The government can’t get rid of inequality unless you’re asking for them to remove your freedom. More so, the government doesn’t grant you rights, it can only choose to restrict it. Your ability to fail in your endeavors is a sign you’re free.
When the government gets in the game of forcing social cohesion or parallel economics for everyone, it never turns out the way you believe it should. Are we to think there weren’t rich elitists during communist Soviet Union’s reign?
Who do you think decides how the country runs? The knees you believe are being cut are not theirs, it’s yours.
Remove the word inequality and replace it with ‘obstruction.’ You should be worried about wealth obstruction. You should be worried about government obstruction when it comes to your economic prosperity. You should be worried that state governments were allowing Amazon, Walmart, and Target to operate during the pandemic, but your mom & pop shops couldn’t.
You should be worried about the largest transfer of wealth to the top 1% during a time when the government forced millions of Americans to stay at home because of a virus with a 99% survival rate.
There was governmental wealth obstruction for you, but politicians never stopped working and neither did the top earning corporations. They asked you to sacrifice as they lied to you about how long you’ll suffer. Worst of all, they did this while their bellies were full, and their pockets only grew deeper.
The government is not your savior when it comes to fixing disparities and nor should they be. There’s no such thing as equality in nature, whether it be treatment or outcomes. Forcing that is tentative to communism and even during communism that didn’t occur.
Communism puts the vast majority in poverty and only increases the wealth of the elite. Even during communism, there were groups that were treated better or worse than others.
Ultimately, it’s the illusion of equality that entices the struggling individual to accept mediocrity as long as everyone else appears to be too.
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