|
|||
 |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
 |
|||
|
|
|
|
 | ||||
 | ||||
1791 ========= “It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.” – Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson ========= 1835 ========= “The foremost or indeed sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ========= 1838 ========= “Equality may be divided into that of condition and rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean misery.” – James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat ========= 1848 ========= “All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity … that the indolent man and the laborious man, the spendthrift and the economic, the imprudent and the wise, should obtain and enjoy an equal amount of goods.” – Victor Cousin, Justice and Charity ========= 1941 ========= “It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.” – Henry Miller, Wisdom of the Heart ========= 1957 ========= “When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing. The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.” – Ayn Rand, Galt’s Speech “In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.” – Ayn Rand, Galt’s Speech ========= 1967 ========= “Passion for equality blinds the utopian to the fact that society, as a whole, is based on inequality of men in two respects: the inventor, the innovator, the exceptional man creates something new and insures continuous progress; the others emulate his work or merely improve their own lot by benefiting from his creativity.” – Thomas Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy ========= 1968 ========= “The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.” – Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History ========= 1981 ========= “If … it is imperative that ‘life-chances’ be equalized through an equalization of wealth and income, then we may ask to be told whether the same imperative also requires such measures as are implemented in the nightmare worlds of L. P. Hartley and Kurt Vonnegut; and if not, why not. (The former, in ‘Facial Justice,’ tells of the pretty undergoing plastic surgery to remove their envy-provoking excesses of appeal. In the story ‘Harrison Bergeron,’ the latter described those with talents above average being implanted physiologically with anti-pacesetters, curbing them down to the level of the rest).” – Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes ========= 1988 ========= “Equality cannot really be imposed. If any authority is strong enough to level people, it is also strong enough to create special privileges for itself. That is, in a complex society the great equalizers do not include themselves among those to be equalized.” – Robert Wesson, Politics: Individual and State ========= | ||||
| ||||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
