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Freedom Of Opportunity, Not Equality Of Opportunity
Submitted by George Reisman via Mises Canada,
This essay shows that the goal of equality of opportunity is both absurd and vicious. Achieving it would require that children all be raised in the same environment and have the same genetic inheritance. In contrast, the essay shows that what we should actually strive for is the freedom of opportunity.
Freedom of opportunity means the ability to exploit the opportunities afforded by reality, without being stopped by the initiation of physical force, in particular the initiation of physical force by the government or that takes place with the sanction of the government.
For example, people are unable to find work not because there is no work for them to do in physical reality, but because government and labor-union interference, based on the initiation of physical force, prices their labor beyond the reach of potential employers. The amount of work that is out there waiting to be done may be gauged by adding up all the goods and services people would like to have but presently can’t afford to buy. The total of such work far exceeds our ability ever to preform it. Physical force, or the threat of physical force, is what stops people from seizing such opportunities to the point of all who want jobs finding jobs. It creates unemployment in violating people’s freedom of opportunity.
The essay shows what opportunities actually are, how they are the product of human thought and effort, and why and how they require individual freedom for their exploitation. The essay upholds the idea of “the self-made man” and demonstrates how and why in later life—in a free society—children born to poor parents can, and again and again do, overtake and surpass the children of far wealthier parents.
The essay is essential reading for anyone who wants to defend not only individual freedom but also economic inequality and the institution of inheritance.
It is available for 99¢ as a Kindle book.
Now, of course, the real fact is that individuals are not born perfectly equal in all respects but the wealth of their parents, and they do not make the same choices in connection with developing their skills and abilities. Time and again, there are individuals born to poorer parents, to parents badly deficient not only in wealth, but in education, knowledge, and even character; individuals whose own endowment at birth or in childhood is not only not exceptional, but possibly deficient in some important respects. Yet, over the course of their lives, these individuals manage to far outstrip in their accomplishments practically everyone else, despite their having begun under such seemingly insuperable disadvantages.
What enables them to do this is making the choice and the effort to exploit as far as they can whatever opportunities present themselves for self-improvement. Once they begin to do this, they actually do begin to improve themselves. And now, when they face the world, they are better equipped than before. And because they are better equipped, there are more opportunities for self-improvement open to them than there were before. They seize these further opportunities, thereby further improving themselves and their subsequent ability to act and to seize opportunities. And so on, year after year.
What happens is that these individuals engage in a personal, internal process very similar to capital formation in the economy of a country. They use the means at their disposal to build the personal attributes—intellectual, psychological, moral, and physical—required for further success. And then they use the personal attributes they have constructed thus far to further construct such attributes. It is similar in principle to the process of a poor farmer scrimping and straining to obtain an additional supply of seed; of then using the larger supply of seed to produce a bigger crop the following year, from which a much greater supply of seed can be obtained for the year after that, and so on. Or to the economy of a whole country working very hard and saving very heavily to be able to make iron and steel available for the construction of the first railroads and steel mills, and then with the aid of those first railroads and steel mills being able to produce more of practically everything, including more and better railroads and steel mills.
Concentration on building up the means of further action, whether internal and personal or external and material, produces exponentially increasing results. Each success serves to increase the capabilities for further action, which makes possible still greater success. Those who concentrate heavily on these efforts rapidly improve, while those who neglect them stagnate or decline. It is on these principles that we can understand both such things as how Japan, so poor and backward a generation or two ago, can now [early 1990s] be within sight of economically overtaking the United States and how Demosthenes the ancient Athenian, who began as a stutterer, could become a great orator, and how, again and again, in a free society, poor boys grow up to become rich and famous.
The secret of the success of the poor boys is contained in that old but very accurate expression that is so seldom heard today: the self-made man. Those poor boys build themselves into the kind of men capable of achieving great success. (While custom and tradition apply the principle to “boys and men,” it should go without saying that the principle applies no less to girls and women. There are self-made women, as well as men.)
The following example, perhaps, can help in understanding how by building themselves into the right kind of men they outstrip even those with the greatest advantages at birth. Thus, imagine two boys—one the newborn son of a highly educated millionaire; the other, the newborn son of a poor, uneducated coal miner. To most people, it seems that the millionaire’s son has such great advantages that he can never be overtaken. But this is not so. And the reason why not can be seen in terms of a few conceptual snapshots, as it were, of the two boys at different stages of their development.
At birth, neither of them is capable of very much of anything. All of their capabilities remain to be developed. The millionaire’s son is not capable of jumping out of his crib and using his father’s millions to make more millions. If he is ever to have that ability, he will first have to develop it.
By age six or seven, say, the two boys have developed certain attitudes toward acquiring knowledge, and other important attributes, too, of course. But, for simplicity’s sake, we will focus just on this aspect and its possible ramifications. If the poorer boy recognizes the value of knowledge and the necessity of making his best effort to acquire it, while the richer boy does not, the poorer boy has gained an advantage that can become of growing significance over the years. By age fourteen or fifteen, perhaps, the poorer boy has acquired an important body of knowledge that the richer boy has not. He understands algebra, trigonometry, and something of physics and chemistry. The richer boy has no real understanding of these subjects. By age twenty or twenty-two, the poorer boy is capable of working as an engineer, say, and making a significant contribution to the profits of anyone who employs him. The richer boy, on the other hand can only be employed either in a menial capacity or at the expense of his father, who must continue to support him under the guise of giving him a salary, or who must provide for some associate to pay a fictitious salary, and compensate that associate in some form.
By age thirty, if he is really talented, the poorer boy has developed some significant ideas which have earned him some significant sums of money and have enabled him to start his own business. He now possesses a capacity for earning money which exceeds the richer boy’s.
The richer boy may still have vastly more money and earn a larger absolute amount, but the poorer boy is in a position to earn it now at a much faster rate. For the poorer boy’s money is under his own, intelligent control and can earn a high rate of profit. The richer boy’s money is either in his own, incompetent hands, in which case he can rapidly lose it, or it is in the hands of others who are more competent but who pay him only a relatively modest rate of interest or dividends. As the years go by, with the poorer boy earning a 50, 75, or 100 percent annual rate of profit, and plowing back almost all of it, while the richer boy earns a 3, 4, or 5 percent rate of interest or dividends and consumes almost all of it, the poorer boy becomes the richer man.
This, in briefest essence, is how it actually happens that in a free society penniless newcomers are able, again and again, to overtake and surpass even those with the greatest inherited wealth.
It cannot be stressed too strongly in this connection how critical is the element of freedom of opportunity. In order to succeed, the poorer boys must have the freedom to earn the highest rates of profit they can and to keep those profits. They must also be free of government controls and regulations, which can easily prevent them from ever getting started, by placing innumerable bureaucratic obstacles in their way—such as causing unnecessary delays, requiring unnecessary staffs of lawyers, accountants, and clerks that they are unable to afford, and by diverting their valuable time and efforts from serious work to contending with the arbitrary power and sheltered incompetence of government officials.
Education and the Freedom of Opportunity
Now it is also true that the success of the poorer boys depends on their being able to obtain education. But this certainly does not mean that a case is made for public education of any kind. The kind of men and boys I have described grasp very early the value of acquiring knowledge and make it their business to find opportunities for acquiring it. Public education, on the other hand, by removing all incentives of profit and loss and all possibility of genuine competition in education, and by thus sheltering inefficiency and incompetence while making improvement almost impossible, creates a system of instruction so poor that compulsion is the only means of keeping most of the students in attendance. And because people, including children, are not automatons programmed by a combination of genes and their environment, the system of forcing books and lectures on unwilling minds simply does not work.
For the kind of men and boys I have described, public education is unnecessary. What is necessary, or, more correctly, would be extremely helpful to them, and would be far more efficient and effective for everyone, is the freedom of education, combined with the availability of private, voluntarily supported merit scholarships and also the freedom of working and earning money to pay for education. People do not generally realize the extent to which the present system of public education destroys the freedom of opportunity with respect to education. By making educational innovations virtually impossible through government controls on curricula, faculty qualifications, and teaching methods, and requiring that competition take place against a subsidized competitor who does not charge, countless educational innovations that might have been made have not been made. People have been prohibited or prevented from exploiting the opportunities they perceive for improvement in education. The further opportunities that those improvements would have constituted for students have thus been prevented from coming into being. We have a situation today where the law both prevents better, more economical forms of education from being offered and prevents students from earning the means of paying for education, by making it almost impossible for anyone under the age of eighteen to obtain any kind of meaningful job. Our present system is one of systematic opposition to the freedom of opportunity with respect to education.
Everyone’s Interest in the Freedom of Opportunity
In general, on an increasing scale, people are prevented from exploiting the opportunities open to them, and thereby prevented from creating further opportunities that would be available not only to them but to those with whom they dealt. I have just shown how this is the case in education. On the basis of what we have seen earlier in this chapter, it is also obvious that in preventing the acquisition of fortunes, our present system prevents the opportunities from coming into being that those fortunes would have afforded to workers and suppliers in the form of a demand for labor and capital goods, and to customers, in the form of more and better products produced.
These observations bring out a further important principle pertaining to opportunities that is consistent with our wider, previous discussions both of economic inequality under capitalism and with the synergistic nature of a division-of-labor society in general, especially of private ownership of the means of production: namely, each person’s successful exploitation of the opportunities open to him creates further opportunities not only for himself, but also for those with whom he deals. In other words, with respect to opportunities too, one man’s gain is the gain of others. The losses caused by the violation of freedom of opportunity represent losses to everyone. This is true ranging from the consequences of aborting the earning of great fortunes and the development of major industries all the way down to the level of licensing laws aborting one man’s opportunity to be a cab driver and another’s opportunity to find a cab, or immigration laws aborting one person’s opportunity to be a gardener or a maid and other people’s opportunity of obtaining such services. *
The notion of “equality of opportunity,” however innocent it may sound at first, is actually vicious and absurd. In its logically consistent form, it implies the destruction of the institution of the family, the implementation of a governmental program of eugenics, and the elimination or destruction of every personal attribute that represents an advantage of one person over others.
In a positive vein, what has been shown is that what is actually important in connection with opportunities is the establishment of a free society and its corollary the freedom of opportunity. In such a society, the individual is free to exploit the virtually limitless opportunities offered by the combination of his nature and the nature of the world. He must pick and choose among them. And he progressively creates better and better opportunities for himself by successfully exploiting the best of the opportunities available to him at any given time.
In such a society, the notion of equality of opportunity reveals itself as absurdly irrelevant, as nothing more than an excuse for not taking advantage of the opportunities one has and for not creating better ones. In such a society, everyone can rise no matter what his starting point or present position, and again and again people of the most humble origins overtake and surpass those who began with seemingly insuperable advantages.
What is required for everyone to be able to succeed and, at the same time, represents full justice, is not equality of opportunity, but freedom of opportunity. The successful exploitation of opportunities that freedom makes possible is the basis of each individual being able to rise and create better opportunities not only for himself, but also for those with whom he deals.
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All our children will get much moar equal soon enough- and equally shitty public school education as the govt get more involved in education. And too that off with equally shitty "free" college for all. Coming soon ...
"free" but paid for by all the equal slaves.. all at minimum wage
God created all to be equal.
Slightly off topic, but enjoyable. David Homeschoolers team versus slightly upscale Goliath Okemos team in Quizbusters.
Lansing Homeschoolers Chargers vs. Okemos Chiefs. Grand Championship. Episode #2663
http://video.wkar.org/video/2365391890/
That is actually a great discinction, freedom of opp, not equal opp.
This actually hits at the fake central tenet that all humans are equal, which we decidedly are not.
In a nicely trans-humanized world, with a wire plugged into our brain, we might become equal, but right now, diversity, difference and constant chage are the very stuff and spice of life.
Time for the butlerian jihad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP4NGb8HJbk
Equal before the law was metamorphosed into egalitarism, that's all there is to say. The cry of French revolutionaries was, after all, libres et égaux en droits, not libres et égaux. But somehow France is the country perhaps the most infected with the idea of egalitarism.
I'm beginning to believe the government must have a motto....
"Anything worth governing is worth ignoring..."
We may be equal in the eyes of God but a janitor has a lower IQ than a nuclear physicist and the value of his labor will and should be reflected in that.
Dats raycis.
I'm personally considering getting a lobotomy. At 52, I wish to enjoy my remaining years.
I'll get some tats. Never miss opening day. Get a new ride ( I deserve it). Get I facefuck page. Get with this DWTS and The Voice. And stop worrying about tomorrow, bills, taxes, collapse, hunger. I might even register Dem instead of independent, and think my vote counts. Get some flip- flops and march for equal rights.
Yeah, sounds like a plan.
What is required for everyone to succeed is to NOT have a world of money counterfeitters & jackbooted authority whores on their throats 24/7 telling them to straighten up & fly right.
The only way to bring about across the board equality (for the masses) is to make everyone destitute. Thus far their plan seems to be working.......
Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes.
The intellect, the effort, and even luck play into the outcome.
If the world was perfect leftists lies would be true and we would all have everything we want. The lies are not intended to provide for anyone anything except themselves. They are intended for manipulation and control.
Grow up people, life can suck even if you try hard. It can also be wonderful if you choose to see what is truly important.
"For example, people are unable to find work not because there is no work for them to do in physical reality, but because government and labor-union interference, based on the initiation of physical force, prices their labor beyond the reach of potential employers"
This is probably the dumbest thing I've read all day, maybe all week. For fuck's sake, Mises of Canada, do you ever come out of your cave?
How is that dumb when there is in fact people unemployed?
Well, there's LTER's beliefs and then there's reality, and never the twain shall meet.
The US cost of government day was July 6th. That's the equivalent of nine trillion dollars worth of broken windows each year.
You forgot to point out why it's dumb.
Don't worry all of those lazy politicks on the hill will shortly come up with a solution in a 5,000 page document that entails how you will work 3 times harder to pay for it all...
And your great grand children's grand kids too...
Focusing on the individual's efforts alone is misleading. While success in the modern world depends upon individual effort, forming networks or being born into families which are involved in business networks is of great importance. Being raised in an atmosphere that involves successful business and political strategies for success gives knowledge and confidence that others lack. Without such a background, a high IQ and university degree may be of little use for entrepreneurial endeavors, particularly so if the person is raised in a leftist political atmosphere that demonizes business.
Anyone who starts a business faces an enormous regulatory compliance load, particularly once that business reaches certain thresholds where taxes and regulations increase. For example, in Canada, a federally-regulated business with an increasing workforce will be descended upon by the Employment Equity Office once the workforce exceeds 100 people. The employment history of all employees will be audited to determine whether the required number of employees fall into gender, age, experience, and ethnicity quotas for workers and supervisors, for example. The business will be required to develop and implement plans to rectify any employment equity insufficiencies, so all future hiring must be made with a view to satisfying the Employment Equity Office, rather than filling the workforce with the best-qualified candidates. Much time that would have been devoted to business development must be spent on reporting on efforts to achieve employment equity. Meanwhile, there are examples known in the business world of members of certain ethnic minorities exploiting the employer by non-performance, drunkenness, drug use, and other misbehavior, knowing that the employer cannot dismiss them because the employment quota will not be met.
Not a lot, but sometimes I regret checking into ZH to see what's happening.
When you men of too many words wake up and understand that what's happening is Control, then you will be more worthy, in the context of things.
Equality of opportunity means somebody's loses some part of their freedom
The bloodsuckers are turning this into the age of raising Khan.
Most of the Asian (Chinese and Indian) students in the US on a Student Visa have poor roots back home.
Instead of electronic games and toys, they work their butts off at school. They are NOT promoted through the system and only the best get to study in the West. And they kick ass of most Western kids -- rich or poor. For one thing, they don't waste time at varsity team-sports (football, basketball, soccer, hockey). They might be active in individual sports (martial arts) or music.
That should tell you something. Actually, it tells me everything I need to know.
Most of those Asian students only know how to pass exams. Latter-day mandarins and brahmins never think of anything new.
Our masters love them. They work like dogs and never threaten to come up with the concept that one day will drive their old bosses out of business. No wonder they're our planned replacements.
Sheesh, Mises Canada pumps out some of the stupidest articles republished on Zero Hedge!
Where is the "freedom of opportunity" to make the public "money" supply out of nothing?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-really-controls-the-world/5445239 I had already read most of the quotes in that article several times before. In my view, that is now like archeology. While it certainly WAS true that that was how the world was controlled, in my view, NOBODY IS IN "CONTROL" NOW!Ruling classes have become criminally insane, because they do NOT understand the consequences of globalized electronic monkey money frauds, backed by the threat of force from apes with atomic bombs. No group of human beings fully understands & controls that anymore. The people who originally made and maintained those systems no longer can control those things. The human world WAS "successfully controlled" by backing up lies with violence, for thousands of years ... However, the advancing science and technology has exceeded any human comprehension of that ...
MEANWHILE, it is considered relatively "normal" (despite the new normal becoming paranormal) for some people to publish articles like the one above which DELIBERATELY IGNORES that the public "money" supply is totally based on governments enforcing the frauds by privately controlled banks, so that ANY "opportunities" ONLY operate inside of fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems!
I guess I sort of WISH that I too could live in the kind of abstract fantasy land that the Mises Canada group apparently is able to. How nice it would be to be able to deliberately ignore that the production of destruction actually controls production ...
Yes, it would be more pleasant to dwell in such sublime abstractions as "freedom of opportunity" versus "equality of opportunity" WITHOUT ever examining how the real world is actually being controlled by lies backed by violence.
Of course, I do not expect any answer, but nevertheless, I repeat where is the "freedom of opportunity" to make the public "money" supply out of nothing? Where is the "equality of opportunity" for everyone to be able to legally counterfeit the public "money" supply, while that fraud is universally enforced by governments on behalf of all?
What you need is a job in a Russian / Western business venture.....so many to chose from
Russia’s Eurochem Makes Final Selection For Louisianna Ammonia Plant Site
U.S. Starwood Luxury Hotels Opens Its First-ever Moscow Resort
Canada’s Global Cobalt and Russia’s IMHL Announce New Co. For Ontario and Russian Mining Operations
NY Law Firm Chadbourne & Parke Expand Moscow Office to Support Energy Sector
Riverwood Solutions of Plano Texas Opens Software Devt. Center in St Petersburg Russia
Ah yes, the new privatized idiocracy. We got a great education in public schools and college cost me $335 to $445 per semester including dorm room and cafeteria. That was between '64 & '70. It was so great I stayed a couple of extra years. Got a BS, a BA and a MA. Fortunately failed the draft physical. We considered it to be an honor to work for the U.S. Governement and did. Was this a great country or what?
Kids these days? They're screwed.
Honestly, today's kids are not more screwed, hopeless, ignorant or confused about what's going on than the kids of 1950-ties.
Both generations followed idiotic suicidal government propaganda devoid of merit. In 1950-ties improvements of standard of living and suddenly open “opportunities” were caused solely by horrendous fear, instilled in US ruling elites, of cold war Soviet type bloody revolution. They made sure Americans were happy.
Fast forward to now and young are again cheerleaders of policy of globalization that really means their own pauperization, enslavement and collapse of economy on which they depend. Now and then clueless youth act against their own interests and their community or family interests praising sic wet dreams of gluttony spewed by psychotic oligarchs.
Americans were justifiably proud to work for their government so were soviet people. However they did not realize that they were being bribed and corrupted using all mighty dollar/rubel and propaganda of their righteousness while their governments were killing innocent people within their borders as well as all over the world.
But ordinary people in the US did not win their prosperity, they were given their fair opportunities only to shut them up and overlook unconstitutional un-American central command and control system developed in US funded by DoD in form almost identical to that of Soviet Union. They looked away, silent witnesses of eroding basic constitutional rights and rampant state monopoly to detriment of future generations as long as they were doing OK.
Greatest generation was divided and conquered by power elites. The Values of parents were separated from values of children in order to cause political ad social and moral weakness and now their grandchildren are paying for their betrayal or extreme gullibility of believing in goodness of ruling class who wanted them dead all along.
Interesting take on so called "opportunities” for rest of us in the US in last 70 years can be found at:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/diversity-of-one/
I agree with much that you written but it must be pointed out that the Soviets were evil fucking cunts.
If they weren't such murdering pricks there 'could' have been an alternative to this Banker oligarchy we have now. But there wasn't really a choice, stay in a place with full grocery stores or...starve and end up in a gulag.
Vlad is well aware of this I think.
Squid
Public education is the freedom to escape from your idiot parents.
And I'm willing to bet the vast majority of people here went to public schools. Somehow we escaped the indoctrination. How is that?
Also, I'd like to know more about these innovations in education, because most of the profit-fueled education "innovations" to date have been terrible.
Making everyone equal is easy. Kill them.
Perhaps public education was designed to be second rate.
The elites obviously want their children to follow in their footsteps and don't really want them to have to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the population.
A two tier private and public education system is the mechanism of choice for social stratification.
A small wealthy elite pass through the first rate private education system and the rest pass through the second rate public education system.
In the UK 7% of the population pass through private schools but form the vast majority of those at the top.
I believe this is achieved in the US through private Universities.
Another collosal reasoning fail from the I-Me-My-Mises institute. Quel surprise.
As people have mentioned here the origins of the Libertarian movement and individual rights were born during the Enlightenment and both the French and American visionaries of that age recognised that.
The Old aristocratic system, based on hereditary privileges; aka birthrights; gave unequal treatment before the Law between nobles and commoners. The Rights of man changed that. No more privileged class.
But... The Enlightenment did not say that equal before Law meant equal before opportunity and enterprise. No way. The Enlightenment was for individual freedoms, stating that freedom only ended for one when it took away another man's freedom; aka broke the law which protected the principle of equal rights but not equal results!
Its the egalitarian "constructivist" movement of socialism which started to level the playing field by imposing "equal results" as the aim in society, with the elected playing as the regulators in this artificial game of privation of individual liberties. But this occurred in the face of fears of reversal of the revolution by the old order.
However, once society got organised in democratically elected republics we saw that lobbies and pressure groups started to tilt the table by introducing laws that favored one powerful class over another less powerful; aka we were back to the issue of NOT EQUAL before LAW. The market mechanism is a clear example of this artificial and (according to Marxist logic) extreme pursuit by the "status quo" class to ensure they get more and more powerful by becoming monopolistic. Alas, this is now a reality all over the world. You just have to look at the TPP type regional deals that favour Oligarchy groups over national laws, or the current TBTF banksta cabal.
So, now we have TWO competing artificial movements in society of huge social magnitude : the egalitarians who want to equalize the economic results via taxation and social spends and the monopolists/oligarchy deniers who want to build their own power at the expense of the unwashed.
There is no way that a Republic, that has democracy and equal voting rights to all as its foundation, can allow economic inequality (and thus legal inequality via presure groups) to increase to the point where we are today, without de facto becoming a new Aristocracy; aka initiating the end of Republic and democracy.
How do we find BALANCE between the egalitarianism of statists and the oligarchy impulse of the new aristocrats is what our modern social constructs are all about. And the current American elitist and power hungry Congress, in the tradition of a militarist minded hegemonic elitist movement, which dates back to the Cold war days when the US was top dog in the West, is anything BUT the expression of people who defend equal rights for all before the LAW; either at home or abroad in terms of International conventions that the US government has often initiated but refuses to apply to its own citizens.
".......the poorer boy becomes the richer man.......
This, in briefest essence, is how it actually happens that in a free society penniless newcomers are able, again and again, to overtake and surpass even those with the greatest inherited wealth....."
The Story of My Life....
And this hasn't changed in America......
One can Focus on what is Wrong in their Life; or Focus on Doing Something about it.....