Egalitarianism is the favorite religion of the left. The idea of equality has always been cherished, from the French revolutionary cry ofegalite, liberte, fraternite, to the modern obsession with income inequality being the source of all the world’s evils. It has gotten to the point that no one even bothers to question whether equality is in fact a desirable goal for society. It is taken as given.
The problem is that ‘equality’ is a very, very broad term, with myriad meanings and interpretations. When conservatives and libertarians talk about equality, they usually mean equality of rights, of treatment under the law, and to a certain extent, of opportunity. By contrast, when progressives talk about equality, they mean it in a much more sweeping sense. Everyone should be given equal medical care, men and women should be paid the same amounts, and the fact that CEOs make more than factory workers is somehow to be decried.
Both of these approaches have their problems, the most important being that it only makes sense to treat things as equals if they actually are equal, a condition that is rarely met in the real world. A perfect example is the continual harping on ‘equal pay for equal work’ when it comes to women’s wages. Defenders of the idea claim that women make 70 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men. This is a flat out lie. The statistic being cited comes from the Bureau of Labot Statistics, and is calculated by averaging all wages of women across the entire economy, and then comparing them to all wages of men. Nowhere in this number is anything said about ‘equal work’ and the assumption that the average woman is performing exactly the same job as the average man is pure fantasy,
This post was published at Mises Canada on November 27th, 2014.
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