The Story
Socialism Undermines Equality before the Law
Americans fancy themselves heir to the Roman tradition: in its practicality, its imperial dominance, its emotional stolidity, and its lusty crassness we find our historical mirror-image. But this sense of kinship rarely grows into analysis; if it did, we might discover some more chilling parallels that bear witness to the interior decay and collapse of empires.
Centralization and expansion of the United States federal government has a variety of implications; increased taxation and loss of freedom, however, are salient. New programs are frequently funded by raising the tax rates on society’s most industrious members. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks the economic data of its high-income, democratic member states, we have the second-highest capital gains tax and most progressive income tax scheme of any OECD country.
As the government absorbs ever-larger shares of the economy, personal freedom necessarily decreases. Choice is diminished as government becomes the monopoly provider of such services as school, retirement funding and health care, and enacts a plethora of regulations and laws (the Federal Registry, which records merely the regulations imposed on businesses, exceeds 75,000 pages).
Loss of freedom and penalization of the most productive members of society are, obviously, negative trends. Yet these are exactly the trends perpetuated by our current government. They are also the trends promoted by Roman leaders 2,000 years ago, precipitating the decline of that empire.
Consider the words of Roman statesman Marcus Cicero: “Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions... Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’”
Cicero defines precisely that tendency which informs so much of our current welfare state: “living fatly at the expense of the industrious.” Social Security, welfare, Medicare, agricultural subsidies, the progressive income tax, public housing: all these are wealth redistribution schemes which oppress the productive in order to reward the less productive. If these programs did not involve wealth redistribution, there would be no reason for the government, rather than the free market, to provide them.
The current health care scheme provides a case in point. Health care is not, as many have claimed, a public good, nor is it a right. In a free nation, it is a private service acquired by an individual who freely contracts with a private provider. The debate, alas, has been framed in deceptive terms: as Robert Nozick, who won a National Book Award in the '70s for his treatise on political philosophy, points out, there is not even any such thing as an “overall social good.”
Nozick said, “there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall good covers this up.”
The guiding goal in the massive wealth redistribution programs of the welfare state is equality of condition, or equality of outcome. Viewed through the lens of this paradigm, the goal of government is to redistribute wealth to the point that each individual has more or less the same amount of material wealth. What few people realize is that equality of condition entails sacrificing equality under the law.
In the Unites States most people pay lip service to the idea of equality before the law. It is taken for granted, superficially and without analysis, that the law should treat all individuals equally: black or white, male or female, Muslim or Christian, all deserve equal treatment. However unfaithfully we may have abided by this ideal, it has nevertheless been a guiding light in the evolution of our legal system.
But wealth redistribution in order to achieve material equality demands a renunciation of equality before the law. People are endowed with different natural talents and opportunities, which will result in their accruing different levels of wealth. To “remedy” this situation requires treating people differently.
The income tax illustrates this case perfectly. The highest income tax bracket in the U.S. is 36 percent. However, 41 percent of Americans pay no income tax whatsoever. This is merely one of the more obvious examples of inequality before the law, of government favoring certain groups over others-there are of course many more. In order “to live fatly at the expense of the industrious” we have sacrificed a core ideal of the American republic.
Wealth redistribution isn’t the end of the story, of course. There are other parallels to our Roman forebears; as Will Durant said, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of the Roman decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggles and failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, and consuming wars.” Although he was diagnosing Rome’s collapse, unfortunately, Durant might just as well have been describing our own situation.
Austin Raynor is a staff columnist for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.