Submitted by George Reisman via Mises Canada [6],
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. [7]
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.
