Why Egalitarianism Persists

This article was originally published by Wanjiru Njoya at The Mises Institute. 

As Lew Rockwell has observed, Murray Rothbard “had a passion for public persuasion.” He was interested not only in sound economics but also in ensuring that “the general public is aware of the vital importance of the market and the terrible consequences of statism.” To that end, Rothbard argued powerfully against egalitarianism, which is the ideology behind so many statist welfare schemes. It is worth asking, over 50 years since he published his famous essay “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature,” why egalitarianism persists.

Rothbard observed that “Americans consider themselves a ‘practical’ people,” who are more interested in ascertaining whether social welfare schemes will be cost-effective than in debating the underlying ideology. This practicality has led many to suppose that if Americans only knew the exorbitant cost of state interventions that yield very little practical benefit, and in some cases even make things worse, that should be enough to get them to oppose wasteful programs that are said to be necessary to eradicate inequality.

That expectation was shown to be woefully misconceived by events in Minnesota, where a group of mostly Somalian immigrants perpetrated brazen welfare fraud to the tune of over $9 billion. The objection, even now, is not to Minnesota having spent $9 billion on daycare centers, feeding programs, and support programs for homeless and “mentally challenged” immigrants, but to the fact that as many as half of the welfare claims turned out to be fraudulent—“roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018.”

A similar trend is seen in the private and non-profit sectors. For example, insurers reported that the Black Lives Matter riots—which they described as “mostly peaceful”—cost the industry up to two $2 billion in claims. Another example is the recent scandal involving SPLC, an anti-poverty organization that currently has $732 million in endowments, which worked closely with the FBI and the Biden administration to eradicate “hate” from society.

Many more examples of scandal-ridden, million-dollar egalitarian schemes could be cited. In these cases, most observers did not object to the welfare schemes in principle, based on a benefit-cost analysis. These schemes only came under public fire when fraud or corruption was exposed—the outrage was largely a response to that corruption, not to the welfare scheme itself.

In the case of SPLC, most of the outrage was sparked by the revelation that they spent millions of dollars paying anonymous informants to fabricate racism. Very few critics challenged the principle that an alleged “poverty law center” should be in the Orwellian business of helping the state to eradicate “hate” from society. Although their collaboration with Republicans has not been as extensive as that they enjoyed with the Biden administration, the SPLC has had previous information-sharing and priority-setting links with both Democrats and Republicans. For example, the FBI worked with the SPLC on the “Civil Rights-Era Cold Case Initiative” under the Bush administration. In court proceedings relating to the recent scandal, it is part of SPLC’s defense that they collaborate with law enforcement:

During the meeting, the court papers said, the lawyers showed prosecutors evidence that the work of an S.P.L.C. informant helped the Justice Department during President Trump’s first term to secure a six-month prison term for a member of [a white supremacist group].

Far from the premise of these anti-poverty schemes being questioned, they generally enjoy cross-party support and generous donations from the corporate sector. The ideal of equality, and the prospect of eradicating inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, is now a deeply entrenched and increasingly powerful propaganda tool. That explains why it has, so far, proved impossible to displace that ideal by highlighting the costs entailed in one wasteful scheme after another.

This was why Rothbard argued that a moral and ethical challenge to egalitarianism is necessary. It is not enough to hope that people will eventually abandon their egalitarian pipe dreams when they see how brazenly their tax dollars are being misspent. He argued that egalitarians should be challenged to defend their value judgments, instead of treating them as axiomatic:

. . .it is not enough for an intellectual or social scientist to proclaim his value judgments—these judgments must be rationally defensible, and must be demonstrable to be valid, cogent, and correct: in short, they must no longer be treated as above intellectual criticism. (emphasis added)

That challenge has not sufficiently been taken up. In public discourse, progressives treat it as so obviously correct that they should aim to reduce inequality that asking them to justify their position is met with confected bewilderment. A perusal of the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality will reveal that many economists still treat it as axiomatic that an important part of their work involves measuring inequality with a view to reducing or eradicating it. They make no attempt to question or justify that premise. Instead, their analysis merely concerns the size of the disparities, how best to measure the gaps, and how best to equalize the different groups.

Rothbard criticized progressives for treating the pronouncement of their values as “tablets from above that are not themselves subject to intellectual criticism and evaluation.” But matters are now even worse—it has become customary to treat egalitarian values as mere statements of fact.

Social scientists who see their discipline as value-free do not, by definition, devote their attention to questioning egalitarian or any other values. They believe they are involved in value-free science, so why would they get involved in debating values? Many of them do not see addressing inequality as a proclamation of egalitarian values. They insist that it is simply a fact that excessive inequality is evil—they see this as the same type of statement of fact as stating that man must eat to live. They have become accustomed to viewing egalitarianism as inherent in human nature—they would view asking them to justify egalitarianism as tantamount to asking them to justify reality itself.

Due in large part to the erosion of general reasoning and logic over several decades of educational decline, there is now precious little understanding of what is even meant by describing anything as a fact. We are said to live in a post-truth world. Nothing is true, or rather, we can each have our own personal preferred “truth.”

Rothbard’s insistence that we must question whether “value judgments [are] in some sense valid, meaningful, cogent, true” or “valid, cogent, and correct” would, therefore, be met with consternation. If nothing is true, or anything is true if you prefer it to be so, then the quest for truth is meaningless. As many intellectuals see it, “their truth” is that inequality is bad and must therefore be eradicated.

Further, one cannot be value-free without recognizing what constitutes a value judgment in the first place. Nor can one “distinguish fact from value judgment” if he does not know or care what a fact even is. To put it differently, if one declares his values to be “facts,” he can express his values while claiming to be value-free and claiming to be merely offering a statement of the facts—“it is a fact that inequality is harmful to society.”

What Rothbard described as “candor” in disclosing one’s value judgments is only candor if the speaker views his disclosure as one concerning his value judgments. But, in many cases, asking progressives to justify their egalitarian values is interpreted by them as a demand to prove the fact that inequality exists.

This explains why so many attempts to ask progressives to justify their egalitarian premises are met with the retort that “it is a fact that inequality exists.” For example, the work done by Walter E. Williams to show that discrimination does not explain economic outcomes was largely bypassed by arguing that so long as inequality exists, attempts must be made to close attainment gaps.

Egalitarian ideology thus persists in public discourse. In questioning the egalitarian premise itself, rather than preoccupying ourselves with the practicalities of exposing one outrageous welfare scam after another, we heed Rockwell’s call “to communicate truth more broadly.”