Chapter Ǵǹ: Can a Liberal Be an Egalitarian? ȃȅȆPerhaps the redistributionist case rests less on any of the foregoing
arguments than on inchoate notions about what makes for a healthy tone
of society—notions about avoiding social distinctions and feelings of infe-
riority and about promoting solidarity and brotherhood. Slogans about
equality as part of the democratic ideal support this conjecture. I admit-
tedly would consider it a good thing—though I would be hard pressed to
explain justwhy—if the distributions of physical and mental talent and
energy, personal ambition and inclination, inherited property, advanta-
geous family backgrounds, and so forth meshed with the derived demands
for material and human factors of production in such a way that the per-
sonal incomes created on the free market were not conspicuously unequal.
Spontaneous equality of this sort could perhaps be furthered by measures
to break down any contrived restrictions on economic opportunity.
Spontaneous equality would still contrast sharply with deliberately lev-
eling down the rich. Deliberate leveling would be likely to do the reverse
of overcoming incentives to envy, embarrassments to social intercourse,
and obstacles to brotherhood and mutual respect. Ļe degree of envy and
so forth would probably not correlate at all closely with the size of inequal-
ities remaining under an avowed program of equalization; sometimes the
smallest distinctions are the most keenly resented. More important, the
idea of deliberate leveling seems dangerously akin to ideas that all men
arenotequal in those respects which concern the State, that men with
different incomes are different in intolerable ways, and that differences in
people’s material wealth and lifestyle—differences going beyond the dis-
comforts of actual poverty—are conditions to emphasize, to be suspicious
of, and to take action about. To work against poverty is admirable, but to
be concerned about other people’s exceptional good fortune and to want
to interfere strikes me as hardly compatible with a coherent liberalism.
People are all too ready, anyway, to pass judgment on their fellows. Ļey
are all too ready to display intolerance, bitterness, Puritanism, a busybody
spirit, and suspicion of other people and their personalities and lifestyles.
Many redistributionists, it is true, are moved by humanitarian motives;
they do not want to promote suspiciousness or pander to resentment. But
“good intentions are not enough.” Ļe spirit of live-and-let-live, so cru-
cial to a free society, is fragile. Any policy that dignifies and reinforces the
less lovely traits of human nature, however unintentionally, deserves bad
marks on this score.
Ļe leveler philosophy may rest in part on the feeling that extremely
high incomes are undeserved. Of course not all large incomes derive from