Is Equality of Opportunity Even Realistic in a Free Society? It’s time to rethink the concept. by Jason D. Hill
https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/
There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.
A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.
Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?
An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.
When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.
But exactly how does one do this without trespassing on the rights of others? A single mother who works three jobs to send her two children to private school, both of whom work hard and graduate with honors, will have increased opportunities to attend Ivy league colleges, more so than the parent who sends his child to a mediocre public school. The single mother’s children who graduate from Wharton Business School and Harvard Law school respectively will have more employment opportunities than Mary Joe, whose children opted not to go to college or even trade school, but to occasionally send resumes and applications for jobs for which they are not remotely qualified. The father who, after hours of tedious work in a job he dislikes, reads to his daughter every night before she falls asleep and engenders a passion for books in his young daughter who later goes on to become a successful book publisher has, through his efforts, generated more opportunities for his child than a parent for whom reading to her child before bedtime seems pointless.
Are black NBA players who dominate the sport of basketball to be penalized because they have more opportunities for playing the sport than Asian men?
Equality of rights is what ought to be prized in a free society. The freedom to take advantage of opportunities as they avail themselves to each of us ought to be our goal.
Equality of opportunity is predicated on the notion that circumstances that are often the result of value-generated actions of others should be controlled by the state. This is a recipe for totalitarianism. And further, even under a totalitarian state it is empirically untenable. One cannot control the multiplicity of variables that are generated from human creative agency that produce opportunities for oneself and for others.
Belief in equality of opportunities is a form of magical thinking because its advocates purport to master the existence of phenomena that do not yet exist. Opportunities arise as human beings are left free to pursue their values and exercise efforts on behalf of their lives. Values, as Aristotle demonstrated, result from attributes of character people possess. And those values cannot be redistributed. They may be emulated and adopted by others who see their efficacy in the lives of successful people. What the advocates of both equality of opportunity and equality of results wish to do then is to deprive people of the consequences of their actions. The attempt to redistribute the products of a person’s values indiscriminately is a form of appropriation that is impossible and irrational, and therefore unethical.
There is no zero-sum game here. Opportunities one creates lead to further opportunities for others to properly take advantage of and benefit from. But freedom, rather than abstract legislation mandating equal results, is what makes the possibility of equality even possible.
Equality of results advocates rely less on magical thinking than advocates of equality of opportunity resort to. The appropriators take the aggregate of wealth that exists in a country and speak as if it were national wealth that was meant to be distributed. Wealth is not a cake that belongs to a nation. Wealth is the concrete application and manifestation of values that humans hold in a material world. It belongs to those individuals who created it, and it ought not be seized by society from its creators.
The appropriators fail to realize that inequality, simpliciter, is the inevitable result of the fact that human beings are not born equal; but they also avoid the fact that the United States was founded not upon the principle of economic equality, but political equality. Wealth that is privately created by individual effort is not created on the assumption that the creator of that wealth will end up with an equal share of his wealth. Quite the opposite: as Yaron Brook and Don Watkins point out in their book Equal is Unfair, if I plant ten apple trees on an island, and Jack plants five, one cannot say I have grabbed a bigger part of the island’s apple pie, so to speak. I have created more wealth than Jack, and I have left him no worse off. It would be absurd to say that I have stolen fifty percent of the island’s wealth. If Jack specially made a choice not to plant extra trees, having rather spent his time relaxing under a coconut tree, there is no reason why I should be penalized for the extra initiative I have taken in planting the extra apple trees and cultivating them.
Anyone whose actions in a situation such as the one mentioned above are applied over a lifespan will have more opportunities available to them. If such persons have families, then by default they will create more opportunities for their children than the person who decided against planting any trees at all. The logical extension of this type of value-oriented lifestyle does lead to inequality and, not surprisingly, a meritocratic society in which each person is the beneficiary of his or her value-imbued actions.
Short of living in a hermetically sealed society, such persons who have created opportunities for themselves will create value in the world from which others will derive opportunities. There is, however, no literal manner in which equal opportunities for all can be created by government fiat or edict. Liberty and freedom and the uncertainties and inconveniences that come with them are rationally prioritized over the untenability of equality of opportunity. Without liberty and freedom, opportunity—the condition and realm in which goals are achieved—has little to no chance of materializing in the world.
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