Divided over Liberty and Equality
They used to go together
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The biggest contradiction in liberalism is between its main two values: liberty and equality. Liberalism’s goal is to achieve a utopia where all people have complete equality combined with wholly unfettered liberty.
Of course, we often can’t have both full liberty and equality. If liberty is unlimited, we will have inequality. Because of course you will: People are different. They have different upbringings, different genes, different dispositions, and thus, different outcomes.
When I read this, I asked myself why this issue seems so salient now. Why wasn’t the trade-off between liberty and equality more obvious two hundred years ago?
Historically, there was inequality of status. A serf had to obey a lord. A wife was expected to obey her husband. A Jew could not leave the ghetto or engage in occupations reserved for Christians. A slave could not defy the master.
In the United States as of 1789, according to Wikipedia, some states limited voting rights to white males who either owned property or paid taxes. Perhaps over 90 percent of adults were not eligible.
Starting from such status distinctions, increases in liberty went hand in hand with movements toward equality. Freeing slaves made them more equal. Giving Jews their liberty made them more equal. Giving men who lacked property the liberty to vote made them more equal. Giving women the right to vote made them more equal. Civil Rights legislation gave blacks more liberty and more equality. Feminism gave women more liberty and more equality. The gay rights movement gave homosexuals more liberty and more equality.
Only recently has tension appeared in the relationship between liberty and equality. The Civil Rights movement took away the liberty of private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race. Treating gay couples equally conflicts with the liberty of businesses whose owners object to gay marriage on religious grounds. There are various liberty-equality conflicts emerging in the realm of gender transition.
Torenberg emphasizes the most important arena where liberty and equality are now difficult to reconcile: outcomes in earnings and education.
Progressives see differences in outcomes by race or gender as evidence that the movement toward liberty is not complete. If blacks are not at statistical parity with whites, then this shows that there is still systemic racism. If women are not at statistical parity with men, then this is evidence of the patriarchy. Poverty exists because capitalism keeps some people down.
But in reality, these inequalities cannot be eradicated by giving people more liberty. Torenberg writes,
It’s a lot easier to bring someone down than to bring someone up. It’s easier to restrict someone from achieving by dropping gifted programs than somehow magically raise the grades or IQ of non performing students. One you can do in a day, and is entirely in your control. The other might take years, if it’s even possible, and is outside of your control.
To effectively reduce inequality in income and education, we cannot simply add to liberty of people at the bottom. We would have to take away liberty from people at the top. That is the conundrum that we face today.
Given all of this, I think that we need to be careful not to go too far with the crusade against inequality. We should hesitate about proposals that reduce liberty in the name of equality.
This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.
Substacks mentioned above:
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Murray noted two things on inequality:
1) As returns to IQ increase, meritocracy (liberty) will increase inequality.
2) The most important form of equality today is the breakdown of social norms. Belmont vs Fishtown. Giving wage subsidies to FIshtown will not in and of itself solve the fact that Fishtowners don't get married for instance.
Hollebecque called this "the extension of the domain of struggle". Basically, the applying of meritocracy to the family and sexual relations (which naturally causes huge inequality, Christian marriage is not biologically natural but a form of sexual socialism).
Extending liberty to the social realm has mostly made things more unequal. When you tell people they can have all the drugs, sex, and implicitly violence and crime that they want it turns out Fishtown is a hellhole. This gets worse and worse the more you try to liberate the aberrant.
This is something that libertarians* can't quite come to grips with. The answer seems to be "well, if they implode that's their own problem. This never really works out (when they implode it affects everyone around them, and its empirically inevitable that the government ends up getting involved.)
*Murray is more a conservative that respects libertarian solutions in many cases. He may or may not favor legalized pot, but he would probably scold rather than encourage people in Fishtown to smoke pot.
There are of course many reforms to laws we could make on these issues, but fundamentally I think that the current divide between the Upper/Middle/Lower makes a kind of sense. The Upper wants relaxation of the old standards so they can indulge, but generally this doesn't destroy them (I'd argue it lessens them, but the effect is more in opportunity cost than gutter). The middle would prefer the old standards. The lower wants no standards even if it destroys them because they can't plan ahead and they see little hope anyway. Government and cultural outcomes therefore tends to favor the upper (that can manipulate it) and the lower (which can ignore it and get paid off), though not always to long term benefit.
"Why wasn’t the trade-off between liberty and equality more obvious two hundred years ago?"
It was obvious two hundred years ago. Tocqueville wrote a great deal about this and predicted equality would eventually triumph over liberty.