There are two different types of equality to examine when you discuss it in a sociopolitical aspect. The first is that people are equal to pursue their own personal desires and self-interests, meaning that no one is hindered or promoted any differently than anyone else. The second is that everyone is equal as pertaining to status in society, meaning everyone has the same level of income and can purchase the same thing.
A man should be free to pursue his own self-interest and not worry about interference from either government or any other group or people. The type of equality that says that people are free according to the dictates of their own conscience to do what they want to do, provided that it does not harm anyone else, is the only type of equality that creates jobs and a society free from oppression.
The fact that men are not endowed at birth with equal knowledge, skills, abilities, preferences, opinions, feelings, desires, likes, interests, hobbies or any number of things is plain enough evidence that the second type of equality is nonsense and entirely unattainable. Some people are born lazy while many others are born with energy reserves to last them forever; some are born ambitious while others are born anxious. Some people are born with the desire to succeed and others are born with the desire to get by. Some are born with the ability and will to succeed and others are born with an incapacity for success and disdain for the spotlight. Now the problem is that the socialist society does not see that regulation and government intervention will not ever change these unchallengeable facts. No matter what kind of regulation you have there will always be inequality in these things. "Socialism has always found things that are unalterable in nature, and endeavor, by regulation and reform, to change these things; and in effect they try to change nature, something that is impossible to do."
"Pre-capitalist movements for the reform of property generally culminate in the demand for equality in wealth. All shall be equally rich; no one shall possess more or less than the others. This equality is to be achieved by re-dividing the land and to be made lasting by prohibiting sale or mortgage of land. Clearly, this is not Socialism, though it is sometimes called Agrarian Socialism. “Socialism does not want to divide the means of production at all, and wants to do more than merely expropriate; it wants to produce on the basis of common ownership of the means of production. All such proposals, therefore, which aim only to expropriate the means of production are not to be regarded as Socialism; at best, they can be only proposals for a way to Socialism." - Mises, Socialism, p. 236.The inequality of humans can be traced back to many things, but a perfunctory thought on the subject quickly demonstrates it to be true, people are unequal. No two people are alike in skills, abilities, desires and goals etc..; therefore, to regulate equality in society fails to do anything but cause destruction of the moral standings of man.
Another thing to discuss on the topic of inequality is the inequality of desires and what is considered fair. Some man may believe that for his desires and needs to be met he needs a house and food on the table, while another man may think that for his desires and needs to be met he needs a house, food and a car, and yet another man may believe that for his desires and needs to be met he would need food, a family, a car and some sort of recreation, and yet as many other men as there are can think as many different things are necessary. The list is ever changing with nearly every person you speak to.
Now the question that liberty puts to the socialist is "who is to decide not only what is fair but why?" What one person calls fair and just the next person may call heinous and immoral. Freedom of thought must be discarded at this point. To decide what is fair for everyone interferes with the morality of mankind, for some people who come from different cultures than those passing legislation may have a different view on the subject and completely different perspective on the effects of the judgment. We can plainly see that forcing others into your ideas and values or morality and equality is unfair and unjustifiable. No one should subject anyone, without their conscience decision, to their point of views. This type of rule of law evolves, slowly or quickly, into a dictatorship or oligopoly. The Labor Party of England boasts that it only has 200,000 members in its party, but that those 200,000 members rule and govern a country of 80,000,000. Justice and elitism at its finest.
Inequality is the way of life. If someone lives in a truly free market society they are not limited to stay in any one class of society. The free market allows people who would normally not have a chance at success to have the opportunity to progress freely into wealth, if they have the desire and ability. If they do not they can either learn how to or they can content themselves with their current status in society, or any number of other options. There should not be any punishment for those who do succeed because others cannot succeed, why punish the successful because they were successful? The economic thought of the last few centuries is that someone is only successful when he exploits and steals from someone else. The rich are only rich because they have stolen from the lower classes and forced them into subjection of their will. This is a false idea dreamed up by the victim mentality.
Today in modern America the rich are thought of as the robbers of society’s privileges. They say that the rich stole what made them rich from the poor and subjected them to their system of economical oppression. People who think in terms of equality of freedom to pursue one’s own desires can right away see the flaws in this system. If you don’t want the product that a company is providing don’t buy it, and that would eliminate the idea that big business controls society. Government in the United States has, however, started moving away from this system and implementing laws and regulations to limit this kind of equality. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for a person to start his own business. Nearly every business in almost all industries is regulated by either state or federal law, or both. The ease of breaking these laws unknowingly is becoming increasingly easy all the time. The licenses required to start businesses are becoming more and more expensive, thus less people can afford it. Therefore, government in the United States is the one limiting economic growth of the people, not big business. If you did not have so many laws and regulations on businesses, in every field of business, the victim mentality would not be so strong and prevalent today. The federal and state governments of the United States are limiting the amount of equality among men, even though that is what they are sworn and committed to propagate. In a free society where everyone had an equal opportunity to business ventures the poverty level decreases dramatically. However, when you attempt to regulate and govern every aspect of that society people tend to veer away from the entrepreneurial mentality and lean towards dependence on others. Now, not everyone has the same pecuniary resources as everyone else and therefore cannot begin their business with the amount of revenue and capital as others. This should not deter anyone from starting small and growing large. In the free market society, where everyone is free to pursue their own ventures, the wealthiest men in history have been created and none of them started out in the upper class! The examples of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Sam Walton and many others are examples of freedom of equality at its best. These men all started from middle to lower class families and became the wealthiest people in the world. The freedom of equality to pursue one’s own interest has led to this kind of prosperity, not equality of income etc… (Whether or not these businesses are ethical and subject men to freedom or slavery will be seen in another segment of the Philosophical Errors of Socialism.)
Some people believe that a free market society forms into a monopolistic society where the worker is exploited by the business owner. The truth could not be further away from this statement. Men are free to work where they want and purchase what they want. If a man does not want to work for the big capitalist he does not have to, he can work somewhere else or an even better solution is that he could start his own business and work for himself. If people are opposed to big business, especially monopolies, they are not forced to purchase the products of the big companies in a free society. If this big company truly has a monopoly and is the only source of the product desired it is most likely not a product that is needed to sustain life. Be it oil or phones or cars or whatever the monopoly may produce it is not going to be vital to life. The reasoning behind this statement is that when someone needs something in order to sustain life everyone can, with exerted effort, produce that thing for themself. For example, food is a necessity of life. If someone does not like the food the monopoly is supplying they can generally go out and plant their own garden and grow their own food. If enough people do this the monopoly on food will be destroyed, and the monopoly can do nothing about it. The same is true for housing; if the need is there people can generally build their own houses, just like they did for the last few millennia. Therefore, in a truly free market society monopolies cannot exist; unless there is no one else who would like to venture into that same business or industry, in which case who cares if there is a monopoly! Someone in an important industry will always have competitors. Man can survive without the comforts of modern society, such as cell phones, computers, automobiles, electricity, and so on and so forth.
Thus inequality, in either sense of the term, is a problem for socialists. In its free sense of the term, that being, that everyone is equal to pursue their own desires, is the only way that man can be truly free and happy. In the second sense of the term, that man is equal on all levels of society including wealth is a contradiction to fact and logic. This is a major philosophical error of Socialism.
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