Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
Sometimes falsely attributed to Jordan B. Peterson (even though he credits Solzhenitsyn).
We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.
The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible - the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.
Now, as a nation, we don't promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That's an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.
In The Federalist, James Madison called the rage for equality 'a wicked project.' People differ and rewards differ-that's the essence of both liberty and justice. No nation that rewards effort, talent, inventiveness and luck can even pretend to cherish equal outcomes. In an inventive and dynamic society, equal (even relatively equal) incomes can be achieved only by abandoning liberty for tyranny.
No two things are equal. No two people are equal. Nobody can guarantee equal outcomes unless everybody's poor.
We were a land of opportunity. You can never have equal outcomes, but you can have equal opportunity.
Some are born with knowledge, some derive it from study, and some acquire it only after a painful realization of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some study with a natural ease, some from a desire for advantages, and some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing.
There is one other error in the Gondsman's line of resoning, I believe, on ap urely emotional level. If machines replace achievement, then to what will people aspire? And who are we, truly, without such goals? Beware the engineers of society, I say, who would make everyone in all the world equal. Opportunity should be equal, must be equal, but achievement must remain individual.