Liberty vs. Equality: Place Your Bets

There are certain questions which have vexed the generations, all the way back to the first. Questions which engage the minds and imaginations of all who bother to ask them, despite the fact that their answers are pretty much irrelevant. Why are we here? Where did we come from? What comes after this? Is this all there is? What the hell happened to white people? The answers to these questions and others like them have eluded the world's finest minds since the dawn of time. But they didn't have Guinness. I do.

So with a fresh pint settling itself in front of me (drinkers of pussy American beers will wonder what that means), and having answered all of the above four already (after about 7 pints, you realize "who gives a shit?" is actually the answer to all of them), I will now tackle an equally vexing, if less contemplated, matter: liberty, or equality? Which do we need more?

Both liberty and equality are laudable goals. They are the most basic foundation of American society. The Declaration of Independence lists one as an "unalienable right" with which all men are endowed by their Creator, the other the manner in which all men are created, and that's all in the same sentence. Problem is, they're both mutually exclusive. They don't get along well. In most cases, one must be sacrificed for the sake of the other.

So which one do you dump? Nine times out of ten, I'd say equality.

The root of the word "equality" is, of course, "equal", and "equal" means "exactly the same". 7 plus 3=10, because "7 plus 3" is exactly the same as "10". But people aren't numbers, and no two of us are exactly the same. Some are smarter than others. Some are prettier. Some are lazier. Some are stronger of mind, others of body, still others of both. Some are more contemptible. Some are less valuable. No matter how you cut it, the truth is we simply are not equal.

The cool part is, that for the most part we ourselves determine these variables of difference by the choices we make. The man who goes to work every morning and pays his bills chooses to be more responsible than the man who sits at home on his ass all day and has a pile of shut-off notices from the power company. The woman who helps her kids with their homework at night even though she's dead tired from working all day chooses to be a better mother than the public uterus living on welfare who has five kids to seventeen daddies, none of whom she could pick out of a lineup (though the police have occasionally asked her to), and can't help her fourth grader with his math homework because she herself can't do long division. The 180 lb. athlete who runs 3 miles every morning and drinks lots of protien shakes chooses to be in better shape than the 300 lb. trucker who posts internet blogs and drinks lots of Guinness. You get the idea. All men are created equal. They don't stay that way for long.

Somewhere along the line though, some Group of idiots decided that it just wasn't fair that some people are simply living better than others. The thought of people being left alone to make their own choices distresses these idiots to no end, because some people will surely fail to make the right choices, and suffer the consequences (worse still, they might make choices the idiots don't approve of, but that's for another essay). It also means that some will come out fantastically successful, and it's just not right that some people should be loving life while others are miserable.

These are the Relativists, the wierdos suffering from an insane notion that life is a zero-sum game. The idea is that if one person has something that another does not, then he must have acquired it unfairly, since the fact that only he has it is inherently unfair to begin with. Steps must be taken to insure equality of outcome, since that's the only way things will be fair.

At some point, the Relativist idiots began acquiring political power. Indeed, they've all but engulfed America's oldest political party. They've become an overwhelming force in the fields of academia, as well as the news and entertainment media. A whole industry has sprung up around pursuing equal outcomes despite unequal input in virtually all areas of life. Since, of course, this end is unattainable, its pursuit is endlessly profitable.

The problem is this: we can't actually make the people at the bottom of the spectrum more productive if they don't want to be. If they are content to live in abject squalor and slide by on minimal effort, we can't make them do otherwise. So, the only way to ensure equality is to bring everyone down to their level. Success cannot be mandated, but it can sure as hell be punished.

If we are to maintain equality, than no one must be allowed to excel. Success must be taxed, and failure subsidized. All standards of education, language, art and culture must be brought down to the lowest common denominator, so that the shiftless, the stupid, and the incapable appear to be just like their betters. The values of the underclass must be embraced and touted; those of the elite ridiculed and scorned. Complacency must be encouraged, and achievement must be portrayed as a four-letter-word.

In the process, liberty is quashed. The idea of equality has been the basis for the failed experiments in socialism and communism around the world. Invariably, these have either been totalitarian police states where the government controls all aspects of one's life (China, Cuba, the old Soviet Union) or totalitarian welfare states where the government controls all aspects of one's life (France, Scandanavia, Germany, and America is working on it). Phinneus Taylor Barnum once said that what made America exceptional was that it is "the land where every man is free to do his best". He was right, and this in and of itself flies in the face of equalibrium. Not everyone can or will do as well as everyone else and some will do better. Can't have that.

Of course, most of the "equal" results touted by the Relativist idiots are works of pure fiction to begin with. For instance, when a failing school system lowers its grading criteria so that it's students are showing the same grades as a better, neighboring school system, the reults aren't really equal. They just look that way on paper. Think that doesn't happen everyday? When a school system's test scores factor in determining how much of the total budget they will get next year, all kinds of creative math takes place. Naturally, the ones who get fucked are the students in the failing school.

As for me, I'll take liberty over equality any day. I'd rather take my best shot and fail than never be able to take the shot at all. Ben Franklin once said "He who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither". I would add that he who would sacrifice liberty for equality, deserves to be bitch-slapped, stuffed onto a short bus and hauled off to a room with padded walls.