I have been thinking about the “equality” that we equate with the American dream – the one that we want our government to guarantee for us. This has lead me to consider the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. I don’t think that many people would openly argue for equality of outcomes if people see that argument as depicting that everybody should be earning $50,000 a year with no opportunity to earn more. As much as we may like equality we always want the chance to get ahead of the Joneses. This tells me that what we really want as a nation is equality of opportunity which leaves us with the issue of defining what that means.
We can easily see that an equality of outcomes would encompass legislation that the demographics of any profession must match the demographics of the population at large. Unfortunately, what gets argued by the discrimination chasers is that equality of opportunity requires enforced demographics in hiring or admissions processes. They ignore the fact that demography based approaches to equality lead exactly to the best possible outcomes that governments can guarantee. If we would like to see where that leads we need look no further than our public education system. For decades the system has become centrally controlled to greater and greater degrees and during that same time period we have fallen further in our educational outcomes whether compared to other nations or compared to objective standards such as literacy levels or percentage of graduates who have basic mathematical competency. Our public education system has shown unequivocally that legislating an equality of outcomes is tantamount to legislating a low quality outcome.
When we talk about guaranteeing an equality of opportunity we can look to the 14th amendment as an example of what such legislation would look like and how it would operate (specifically the first two sections). This amendment did not guarantee that every male would vote, nor did it specify that the number of white men voting would only be proportional to the number of white men in the voting population as a whole. Instead it specified that the right for men to vote should not be abridged and specified the penalty incurred by the state for violating that right. The key here is that the punishment – although aimed at ending racial discrimination at the voting booth – was completely colorblind. If a state were to become dominated by Latinos due to immigration – let’s say New Mexico for example – and the majority of citizens chose to implement a policy stating that voters must have ancestors from Central or South America in order to vote New Mexico would be subject to the punishment of only having representation in Congress proportional to the population which had Central or South American ancestry. In fact the state would be allowed to do that.
Equality of opportunity leaves the door wide open for unequal outcomes. An open door for unequal outcomes is an open door for incentive to promote outcomes that are above average – in other words, the opportunity to fail is the best motivation to succeed. Now we need to ensure that our government does not try to legislate the equality of outcomes, only of opportunity.
