Equality kills
Equality is not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing either. It’s morally neutral. Less inequality is not a good thing, and neither is more inequality.
For example: The reason living standards are better than they have ever been before is the creation of wealth. What will improve people’s lives most in the future is the creation of more wealth. Inequality doesn’t matter: if someone’s real income doubles over ten years, it just doesn’t matter if someone else’s income quadruples. Except, of course, in the extremely unusual case of the second person’s income quadrupling hindering the growth of the first person’s income. The opposite is much more likely to be the case.
We should also be wary of redistributing wealth, because while it will cause a short-term increase in the incomes of the less-well-off, it will reduce long-term increase.
As Andrew Perraut says,
“if markets are as massively productive as we libertarians believe and compounding returns to growth in the long term are taken into account, you could probably justify no more than very basic safety nets, for fear of distorting the economy and dramatically lowering everyone’s goods in the future.”
So equality may not be a bad thing, but promoting equality is a bad thing for two reasons. Here’s a third: promoting equality kills. The promotion of equality, for no other reason than ideology, is leading directly to many deaths.
I’m talking about the NHS, and the cases of Colette Mills and Linda O’Boyle.
Both were suffering from cancer. The NHS does not have enough money to pay for certain extra drugs. The patients wanted to pay for the extra drugs themselves, but were told that if they did, they would have to pay for their entire treatment: any treatment they were currently receiving for free would be withdrawn. The patients could afford the extra drugs if they continued to receive the treatment they were already getting for free. But they couldn’t afford the whole lot.
The Department of Health said: “Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS.”
Yes, it would. Rather, there is already a two-tier health service in this country. There is the NHS, and there is (better) private healthcare. (It must be better, otherwise people wouldn’t pay for it.) Private healthcare still exists, even though the Labour Party would like to ban it. (They can’t afford to, of course, because patients going private save the NHS money).
Yes, patients paying for extra treatment would promote the private sector. This would be a good thing. It wouldn’t harm anyone who couldn’t afford to. Indeed, it would help the NHS, because even people who don’t go completely private might start increasing the use they make of the private sector, thus saving the NHS money and allowing it to spend it on those who need it more.
The problem is the people who think that inequality is always at someone’s expense. It isn’t, as these cases show.
The “principles and values” of the NHS are clearly stupid, and lead to entirely preventable deaths.
“It wasn’t going to cost them. I was going to pay for it. How can they say this policy is far more important than somebody’s life?”
Will the Conservatives fix this?
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said in a statement that it was “tempting” to allow patients to pay for extra cancer treatments that were not funded by the NHS.
The party has been reluctant to express an opinion on the issue, fearing that it could be portrayed as favouring middle-class patients who can afford to buy themselves extra treatment.
I guess not, then.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I think the main problem is that people hear words like “equality” and all of sudden a hundred unexamined assumptions leap to mind about what this concept actually entails. It is necessary to scrutinise what one means by “equality” if one is to make progress. Unfortunately, the majority of the electorate, and most journalists, are unable to think in such precise terms; observing one person enjoy a higher standard of living than another smacks of a vague thing called “inequality”, but no-one really knows why. A popular option today is to profess belief in “equality of opportunity” rather than equality of outcome, but the only realistic way in which to achieve this is to introduce something like 100% inheritance tax so every child starts life from scratch. A more accurate and thorough solution would be to confiscate every child at birth in order to eradicate parental inequalities and raise them all in collective camps.
Given the undesiribility of such a regime, one must conclude that inequality of opportunity and of outcome are inevitable. What one can do is to introduce channels through which those who are able may advance into the upper eschelons of society and the economy, such as state-funded, academically selective schools (the abolition of which is a bugbear of mine, in my opinion a travesty equalled in devastating effect only by the dissolution of the monasteries). Of course, the Left complain that middle-class pupils from middle-class families will dominate grammar schools, since they will have taught their children to read at an early age, surrounded them with books, ensured they did their homework, helped them with maths problems and thoroughly prepared them for the 11+ exam. Well, none of this should come as a surprise, but neither should any of it be viewed as problematic: there is no underlying substratum called “raw intelligence” which may be accessed by secondary school and university admissions tutors if only every environmental factor could be stripped away - our upbringing and family culture is (almost) everything. However, what grammar schools cater for is the presence of high levels of ability without huge levels of wealth (something entirely possible in a world in which money is not linked inextricably to intelligence, take for example the comparatively low pay of university academics and teachers).
Returning to the core issue, I do believe that all people are created equal. By this I don’t mean that everyone is born with the same amount of money, the same opportunities, the same parental standards, the same intelligence, or the same physical size and strength. What I do mean is that every human individual has the right to life, liberty and property, the right to safety from threat of attack by criminals or foreign aggressors, the right to be treated as an end in their own right rather than as a means to an end, and even the right to to have a doctor attempt to save their lives regardless of the cost. I even believe (controversially) in the universal right to be born. However, when governments adopt their own vision of what equality means, it has much the same effect as when governments adopt their own understanding of the meaning of any moral principle (tolerance and freedom leap to mind) - utter disaster. I shall finish with a quote from an unexpected source, the author and Oxford academic Professor JRR Tolkien:
“I am not a ‘democrat’, if only because ‘humility’ and ‘equality’ are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery.”
August 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” (my light summer reading) is very good on this. See Chapter Three, “The Common Sense of Progress”, particularly the section “Progress and Inequality”.
He quotes H. C. Wallich, “Conservative Economic Policy”, Yale Review XLVI (1956). 67: “From a dollars-and-cents point of view, it is quite obvious that over a period of years, even those who find themselves at the short end of inequality have more to gain from faster growth than from any conceivable income redistribution. A speedup in real output of only one extra per-cent per year will soon lift even the economically weakest into income brackets to which no amount of redistribution could promote them… For the economist, economic inequality acquires a functional justification thanks to the growth concept. Its ultimate results benefit even those who at first seem to be losers.”
There are three kinds of equality I can think of. Equality of outcome, equality of opportunity, and equality before the law.
Equality of outcome (material equality) is incompatible with equality before the law (treating everyone equally). You can’t make people materially equal without treating them unequally.
Equality of opportunity is a reasonable argument for a limited amount of state intervention, to increase opportunity for those without, not to decrease it for those with, and it must be done carefully to avoid unintended consequences like the poverty trap.
Your Tolkien quote reminded me of this one, from F.D. Wormuth’s “The Origins Of Modern Constitutionalism”:
“It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized.”