Stephen Wolfe has a provocative article that discusses the matter of equality and inequality.
He says that, in the Christian tradition, civil and social inequality are to be expected; and are not unacceptable. A shorthand translation: we all have different gifts, we all persevere differently, and we all don’t have the same outcomes.
He says, however, that natural and moral equality are part of the Christian tradition. Skim the article to understand what he means by these things. He says that we start out at the same place before we encounter the world and respond to it; and we are all given a privileged position over the rest of creation.
Wolfe gets down in the weeds a bit, but I think he is essentially correct. Consider all of this when the left hollers about “equality”. Pastors really ought to be teaching about these distinctions.
Equality is a defining feature of liberal political philosophy, It’s also a cherished ideal in America, at least if defined properly. Equality before the law protects people from violence and oppression. Equality of opportunity gives people the chance to succeed. Certain types of equality respect the dignity arising from the common nature that all humans share.
Yet equality necessarily fails if it becomes the central guiding principle of a regime. The French Revolution was founded on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” They had too much equality and too little fraternity, and as a consequence oscillated between unbridled license and horrifying repression. Communist revolutions inevitably end with elite “party leaders” ruling over a mass of impoverished “comrades” tasked with burying the corpses of their unlucky brethren.
Republican liberty requires a judicious mix of equality and inequality. The difficulty is to craft a defense of inequality and hierarchy without discarding the idea that humans have equal value. T
Great points, Fred. The details can get tricky, but you are getting it right, and I appreciate the thoughts you shared.
This is yet another example in which the left appeals to misplaced conceptions of morality and virtue, but refuses to acknowledge that longstanding Christian teaching does not support their position. People need to understand this.
Yesterday I just read a blog post by Scott Johnson and thought I would post it here:
Posted on July 17, 2025 by Scott Johnson
Quote of the day
” I first became aware of Holy Cross political science professor emeritus David Lewis Schaefer at a 1974 event hosted for students over several days by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on a college campus outside Philadelphia. Along with Professor Schaefer, the teachers included Allan Bloom, Thomas Pangle, Gerhart Niemeyer, and other prominent conservative university teachers. It was a distinguished group and an outstanding program.
Professor Schaefer had just published the long lead article “The ‘sense” and non-sense of justice” in the Fall 1973 Political Science Reviewer. The essay is a withering critique of John Rawls’s esteemed A Theory of Justice.
Professor Schaefer was not done with Rawls. He kept at it in his 2007 book Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007). He is also the author of The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990), a book that I found learned and useful.
Law & Liberty has now posted “Refuting economic sophistry,” Professor Schaefer’s review of The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism, by Phll Gramm and Donald Boudreaux. Professor Schaefer praises the book. John Tamny has a longer and more critical review of the book here.
In the conclusion of his review Professor Schaefer takes up the Gramm/Boudreaux treatment of economic inequality. Thirty years ago John and I wrote “The Truth About Income Inequality,” published in 1995 by the organization that John now heads. Then Center of the American Experiment president Mitch Pearlstein hosted John’s debate with the late Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Martin Sabo on our paper. The C-SPAN video of the debate is posted here.
The Gramm/Boudreaux treatment of income inequality comports with ours. For practicing lawyers, anyway, I think we did okay. This is the conclusion of Professor Schaefer’s review.
* * * * *
Turning their attention to economic inequality, Gramm and Boudreaux refute the related myths, espoused by everyone from Pope Francis to French socialist economist Thomas Piketty to Disney heiress Abigail Disney, that economic inequality in America is steadily growing, causing the impoverishment of millions. The greatest flaw in these arguments (elaborated in Gramm’s previous co-authored book The Myth of American Inequality) is their reliance on Census Bureau figures that omit two-thirds of all transfer payments (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, “tax credits”) from the definition of “income,” while also failing to adjust household income for the amount of taxes paid. When the necessary adjustments are made, the Bureau’s claim that members of the top income quintile receive on average 16.7 times as much as members of the bottom quintile is replaced by a ratio of 4 to 1. Additionally, so flat is the adjusted income distribution among the bottom three out of five quintiles that in 2017, those in the bottom quintile received an average of $49,613, compared to $53,924 for the second quintile and $65,631 for the middle. And after adjusting for household size, it turns out that “individuals living in the bottom 60 percent of American households all have roughly the same level of income … even though only 36 percent of prime working-age persons in the bottom quintile actually work, compared to 85 percent in the second quintile and 92 percent in the middle quintile.” In sum, the current combination of taxes and transfers serves to disincentivize work for many, leading to the social and moral problems documented by AEI economist Nicholas Eberstadt in his monograph Men Without Work.
While citing evidence of considerable economic mobility (that is, increases in income over time) among those born into the lowest quintile, the authors properly take collectivists such as Piketty to task for describing the incomes of higher earners as “what they ‘take,’ ‘claim,’ or ‘absorb’” from others rather than “what they earn or create.” While Bill Gates, for instance, “owns 0.53 percent of Microsoft,” they write, “his products enrich our lives, he created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and our pension funds are more valuable because we own many times more shares of Microsoft than he does.”
While Gramm and Boudreaux conclude that following proper adjustments to income, the rate of real poverty in America is only 2.5 percent, they add that far from that poverty being caused by “capitalism,” “poverty and dependence” are rather “the great failures” of federal policies, specifically the “War on Poverty” initiated by Lyndon Johnson—along with failing American public schools. Hence, they urge a reform of welfare programs to include “work incentives and mandatory work requirements for able-bodied working-age adults,” along with reform of our educational system, which might include adding charter schools, school choice, and—I add—breaking the power of teachers’ unions to block improvement.
As Gramm and Boudreaux remind us, although “in the richest countries in history’s most prosperous age, it is poverty, not affluence, that looks unnatural,” prosperity isn’t natural, but must be “continuously produced” by work, innovation, and investment. Yet currently, “the explosive growth of means-tested social welfare spending … absorbs 57.4 percent of general revenues in the U.S.,” putting at risk not only America’s fiscal soundness, but vital services such as defense, along with adequate capital investment in the nation’s future.
I wish that every American college and high school teacher of politics, economics, and history could be persuaded to read this invaluable book and to share its lessons with their students.”
TJ’s “…all men are created equal…” as qualified by the succeeding phrase “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”…essentially means all humans should be equal before the law. Equal in their relationship to government. One should not be favored over another by government, regardless of their race, ability, or inability.
In no other way are humans equal. And a free society lets people excel or fail as they will.
Since this is so straight forward, leftist have moved on from equality to its opposite: EQUITY. Opposite in the same way social justice is the opposite of justice.
Precisely right, J. Sobran. My impression is that they use the words equality and equity almost interchangeably; when they say equality, they also mean equity. To the extent they succeed, they kill abundance for everyone.