Let's take taxes for an example. Whenever a new graduated tax is proposed, progressives take the moral high ground, saying things like "The people who have benefited from America's prosperity the most refuse to help those who are struggling!" But the moral high ground should actually be claimed by the very people who are being targeted. Everyone believes in equal treatment under the law at an abstract individual level. We all think that a rich person should do the same amount of jail time as a poor person for the same crime but why doesn't equal treatment apply when it comes to a new social program? Why is it okay to tell a wealthier person that they will pay a 10% tax, while others pay nothing?
It may not be advertised this way, but economic equality doesn't really work without the rich funding it through tax rates that are anything but equal. As Hayek said, it's impossible to demand equality without treating people different.
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Tocqueville
It may not be advertised this way, but economic equality doesn't really work without the rich funding it through tax rates that are anything but equal. As Hayek said, it's impossible to demand equality without treating people different.
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Tocqueville
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