Wednesday, October 24, 2012

What is freedom and equality?


Are we so envious that we cannot admit any differences in talents and abilities and even legislate against it? We need to have equal opportunity but not equal outcome.

The only way to gain equality is to enforce it artificially, to abandon freedom and real equal opportunity in favor of dictatorship. True freedom and true equality of opportunity allow real merit to take place. Only about 20 out of 10,000 people are gifted enough to do truly original research, which human progress and well-being have depended upon.

The Right has had serious problems with imperialism but it has been more merit-oriented than the Left. The Left has had what Cattell called an “overblown parental instinct” toward those who lag behind, and almost always at the expense of the innovators. This has to be called selfish on the part of the Left because it leads to the decline of society as a whole, and the Left is not used to being called selfish. Some have called this the mommy-left and the daddy-right, which sounds sexist but seems to be more or less true.

Rather than a big central government trying to dictate an overall equality, it is far more just to have many small independent states or ethnostates protected by a light federalism, which allows more natural variety, more freedom, more meritocracy, more chance for innovation, more evolution, with cooperative competition.

I wish politicians and intellectuals had the courage to talk about these things, which are vitally important for the future of human life.  When anyone does bring these things up they are usually buried by demagoguery, or by self-serving special interest groups.

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