Imagine three girls born in the same year.
The first is Phoebe, daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates. Before she takes her first breath, she is already the beneficiary of one of the largest fortunes in human history – the largest ever at the time she was born. She attended the best schools, lived in the safest neighborhoods, traveled the world, and had access to opportunities most people don’t even dream about. She will never know want, will never face need, and will never write a resume. She will instead spend her life working for her parents’ foundation while inheriting their fortune.
The second is Chelsea Clinton. Her advantages are political, being born into one of the most connected families on Earth. Presidents, senators, ambassadors, journalists, billionaires, and world leaders are inside her social environment, and doors open because of her name.
Chelsea will also inherit a fortune, but her money was made through political maneuvering rather than economic activity. Her parents got rich primarily by buying and selling power through the Clinton Foundation with transactions that, even if entirely legal, were corrupt. Like Phoebe Gates, Chelsea will never know want or need, and will never send anyone a resume as jobs are thrown at her to gain access to her parents, their network, and their foundation.
The third girl is Becca Johnson. Becca was born on Detroit’s east side. Her mother worked two jobs and she never knew her father. She attended Detroit Public Schools and dreamed of becoming a doctor, but by the time she graduated high school she was already raising her first child. Her family had neither wealth nor power, and the closest thing she had to a blessing was living within walking distance of Cloverleaf Bar and Restaurant, which has some of the best Detroit-style pizza in the world.
No serious person could believe these three girls would begin life with equal opportunities. Opportunity creates disparity such that the only way to make them equal is to eliminate opportunity altogether until all of their parents are equally miserable, and equally poor.
And equally close to Cloverleaf pizza.
We cannot give every child a billionaire or a former president as a parent. We cannot manufacture generations of family wealth, social connections, political influence, and cultural capital out of thin air, and it would be folly to try, yet modern politics behaves as though equality requires exactly that.
The real question is not whether these three girls have identical opportunities. They do not, and they never will. The real question is whether or not the girl from Detroit has any opportunity at all.
If we are honest, our attempts to create equal opportunity through the War on Poverty have destroyed the opportunities and lifestyles of generations of impoverished Americans, whose families traded opportunity for dependency, with rules that precluded having a father in the house. Milton Friedman famously called the War on Poverty “a war on black people,” predicting not only continued poverty, but also the rise in crime rates, drug use, anti-cop sentiment, and rioting, right down to the time frame within which those things would occur.
A society devoted to liberty seeks to expand opportunity. A society devoted to equity seeks to eliminate differences. The first goal is difficult but doable while the second is impossible, and though we cannot eliminate differences, we can do a great deal of harm trying.
We don’t need to worry about Phoebe or Chelsea, but we do need to worry about Becca, and in this essay I am going to spell out why our current system fails her, while illustrating alternate systems that would not.
There are only a handful of people with the kinds of advantages Phoebe Gates or Chelsea Clinton have enjoyed, but there are untold millions of people who grew up like Becca, whether in an inner city like Detroit, the hollers of Appalachia, or any of the other places across our country where ample opportunity does not exist.
Without opportunity, ‘liberty’ is a slogan. This essay is about making it a way of life, not just for the economically powerful and the politically connected, but for everyday Americans as well, including those with the least opportunity today. It is not a question of what we can do for Becca so much as what we can do to ensure that the Beccas of the world have every chance to succeed.
The Shift from Opportunity to Equality
The American ideal was never equality of outcomes. It wasn’t even about equality of opportunity. It was only about equality before the law.
The Founding Fathers did not promise that every citizen would become equally wealthy, equally successful, or equally influential, and nor did they promise an equal start in life. They only promised that a poor farmer and a wealthy merchant would stand equal before the courts, and that a laborer and a landowner would possess the same rights.
Over time, however, the national focus began to shift.
Equality before the law gave way to equality of opportunity. This seemed like a reasonable and worthy goal. If Becca Johnson possesses the intelligence and determination to become a doctor, she should not be denied that opportunity because of her race, religion, sex, or social class.
Of course, she should not be given opportunity because of her race, religion, sex, or social class either, which gets into the heart of the problem: we do not all start from the same place. If we are treated equally under the law, those with a better starting place will tend to do better than those without.
The question is how we deal with that disparity.
Lyndon B. Johnson dealt with it by establishing the War on Poverty and Affirmative Action, which he described in a commencement speech at Howard University: “Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity – not just legal equity but human ability – not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
The problem is not the intent of the statement so much as the delivery. Affirmative Action has been, at best, a mixed bag. In higher education it dramatically improved the acceptance rates of minority applicants, but it also increased the dropout rate for the same applicants. It turns out that someone in the 90th percentile in math is very well suited for UCLA, but not MIT, where the average student is in the 99th percentile, and saddling someone with the debt of attending a premier school when they will not earn a degree is not helping them.
It is noble to try and take an 18-year-old who has been held back by failing schools and try to erase thirteen years of inadequate education, but it cannot be done. What can be done is to use prep schools to prepare that student further before pairing them with a college, and though Lyndon Johnson could have made prep schools free for those who need them most, he did not choose to do so.
Better yet, we could have improved the schools in our inner cities to give those who live there the same quality of education as students in the suburbs. Not only did we not do that – we lowered educational standards, which ended up increasing the disparity. Furthermore, when inner city parents tried to send their children to charter schools in order to get around failing public systems, like in Detroit, the teachers’ unions fought to have charter programs banned.
Teachers’ unions pretend to be for students and for education, but a teacher’s union is no more for students than an automotive union is for cars. Unions are for their members, and the interests of teachers often conflict with the interests of their students, just as the interests of a factory worker often conflict with the interests of the company they work for.
Detroit Public Schools has become a case study in failure. Despite spending billions of dollars over decades with the highest per-student spending in Michigan, the district continues to rank among the lowest-performing school systems in the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 5 percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in reading and only 7 percent were proficient in mathematics. By eighth grade, proficiency rates were 6 percent in reading and just 4 percent in mathematics.
The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) does not measure high school students, but unless the high schools are vastly superior to the middle schools (they are not), we can assume that the vast majority of Detroit’s high school graduates cannot proficiently read, and yet we expect them to find gainful employment anyway, or to live in government dependency for yet another generation. Let that sink in.
Detroit also has a very large charter school system. Some of the charter schools are outstanding and others are not, but overall, they outperform Detroit’s public schools. Unlike public schools, which often get bigger budgets when they fail, the worst charter schools go out of business, encouraging upward growth.
While many individual teachers in Detroit’s public schools work tirelessly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the unions protect the ones who do not and the system has failed generations of children as a result.
A child who spends thirteen years in a school system where fewer than one in ten students achieve proficiency in core subjects is not equipped to compete in a modern economy, and no amount of rhetoric about equity can substitute for an education that teaches children to read, write, think critically, and solve problems. Some say that charter schools are immoral as they attempt to profit from educating students, but that is a moral judgement that ignores the damage done to people like Becca, who need better schools much more than they need public ones.
By the time someone is an 18-year-old high school graduate, it is too late to address the root problem holding that person back, and while I can accept dealing with symptoms for people where it is too late for an actual solution, it is unconscionable that we have never gone back and fixed the root issue of failing schools.
Not only that, but Detroit is a city designed for two million people with a population of just over 600,000. How can we expect Detroit to attract young families to live in the city without addressing the failing schools? Detroit has a thriving business district, and some neighborhoods are thriving as well, but the city overall will not grow until the boat anchor of a school system holding it back is finally addressed.
The same is true with hiring. Lyndon B. Johnson’s solution was not to offer training programs to up-skill the disadvantaged, but to mandate that minority candidates get hired first even if they are less qualified. As a temporary measure to address symptoms for a generation, I get it, but once again the root cause of the discrepancy was never even on Johnson’s radar, and has never been a part of our national discourse.
In 1971 the Supreme Court decided, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., that any employment practice could violate civil rights law even if it was neutral on its face, provided it produced a disproportionate impact on protected groups and the employer could not justify it as a business necessity.
Initially, employers could still defend hiring standards by demonstrating legitimate business needs directly related to the work being performed. Over time, however, that safeguard was weakened through subsequent court decisions, Congressional action, and expanding federal regulations. These things, along with the ever-present threat of litigation, all worked together, increasingly forcing employers to conclude that defending legitimate standards was more expensive than abandoning them.
Many businesses stopped asking whether a hiring practice selected the best candidate and instead began asking whether it produced the right demographic outcome. What began as an effort to benefit the disadvantaged gradually evolved into a system where avoiding statistical disparities became the required legal end, regardless of whether those disparities reflected discrimination, or differences among applicants.
The economy is global. We have to compete against other countries that don’t have such rules, and though using affirmative action to address symptoms may have made sense for one generation while addressing the root problem, never addressing the root problem of underdeveloped talent in our inner cities (and other poor areas) is unconscionable.
It is tempting for some to look at people in disadvantaged locations and think that they have failed – and they have – but as long as we, as a society, refuse to have the difficult discussions about how to address the root issues that lead to a lack of opportunity, we are failing as well. It is not enough to help the disadvantaged of each subsequent generation. At some point we have to advantage them with better schools and better opportunities. People like Becca deserve nothing less.
Sadly, while we did not address the underlying problems, we did not sit still either. We instead moved further in the wrong direction, looking for easy fixes to complicated problems.
Thomas Paine and the Problem of Unearned Advantage
When Thomas Paine published Rights of Man in 1791, he launched a devastating attack on hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. His argument was that the son of a king did not earn his throne, and nor did a duke earn his title just because his father held it. Political authority inherited through bloodlines was, to Paine, unearned, and it lacked moral legitimacy as a result.
Paine was of course correct, and the American Revolution was in part a rejection of inherited political privilege. We replaced hereditary monarchy with representative government, believing that public office should be earned. This was one of the great moral advances of Western civilization.
The problem is that good ideas often refuse to stay in their lane, and can become bad ideas when misapplied.
If inherited political power is illegitimate because it is unearned, why should inherited wealth be viewed differently? Why should children benefit from parents who built successful businesses? Why should one child inherit a stable family while another inherits poverty? Why should anyone benefit from being raised in a culture that prizes education, hard work, delayed gratification, or entrepreneurship? Why should a person born with extraordinary intelligence, beauty, athletic ability, or musical talent receive advantages they did nothing to earn?
A religious person might say they were born with Divine Providence, or ‘gifts,’ by a God who wants those gifts put to good use, but how does the atheist justify different people being born with different levels of advantage or disadvantage, due to no fault or effort of their own?
Once the principle of inherited advantage is detached from hereditary government, the category of “unearned privilege” can quickly expand into absurdity. In the American system, Becca is born with far less advantage than Chelsea or Phoebe.
Interestingly, when we look at the politically powerful in America, many of them were born without any advantages at all.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin. Ronald Reagan grew up in a poor family during the Great Depression. Barack Obama was raised primarily by a single mother and her parents. Bill Clinton was raised by a widowed mother and an abusive stepfather in rural Arkansas. Their beginnings did not determine their path.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender after her father’s death, while finishing college. Ilhan Omar arrived in the United States as a refugee, after spending her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp. Raphael Warnock grew up in public housing, and Maxwell Frost drove for Uber to support himself before winning election to Congress.
The success of these people does not prove that opportunity is equally distributed, but it does prove that birth does not dictate destiny, and that Becca, though disadvantaged by starting point, is not bound to that disadvantage and can absolutely improve her lot in life. It may take time and effort, but she can do it, and in fact the Brookings Institution (which is left-leaning) showed that if someone avoids children out of wedlock, finishes high school, and works consistently, it is hard to stay poor even if they want to.
Doing just those three things virtually assures that someone makes it into the middle class, and even if someone does not think the effort is worth it for themselves, I would ask them to think about their children. Future parents can solve this problem all on their own, in but one generation, by making better choices.
Ironically, people like Ilhan Omar disparage our nation as a place without opportunity, in spite of the fact that she, and others, stand as living proof otherwise.
We see similar patterns with immigrants. When immigrants arrive from disadvantaged countries, they tend to struggle. Their children struggle less, and the grandchildren of the original immigrants tend to have the same economic outcomes as the national average.
This works in the opposite direction too, with the descendants of those who come from countries where immigrants do much better than the average American also trending toward the mean. The difference is that it takes more than three generations. Successful cultural traits seem to break down more slowly, on average, than do cultural traits that hold people back.
The exception to this rule is that of the African American whose ancestry goes through the Antebellum South – the very people most impacted by the War on Poverty and Affirmative Action. Africans immigrating from Africa show tremendous upward mobility, as do Black Caribbean immigrants. They share the same skin color as do African Americans with ancestry through the Antebellum South, but they lack the generational damage on family structure and economic drive that was caused by the War on Poverty.
I don’t blame affirmative action, per se. I blame the War on Poverty primarily. The problem with affirmative action is that we treated it as a solution rather than as a temporary fix to help those for whom it was too late to address the root problem. At some point we have to address the actual problem, and then allow ourselves to become a meritocracy.
Unfortunately, we moved from blaming failure on disadvantage to also blaming success on unearned advantage. That expansion marks one of the most important philosophical shifts of the last two centuries. The question ceased to be whether inherited political authority was legitimate. It became whether any inherited advantage could be legitimate.
That question lies at the heart of modern equity. Once every inherited advantage is viewed as immoral, society no longer seeks to protect equal rights. It begins searching for ways to compensate for unequal starting points. That impulse is understandable, but impossible to satisfy. No government can equalize the circumstances into which human beings are born, but they can do a great deal of harm trying.
Give advantage, yes – of course. But do not take advantage away.
From Fairness to Oppression
Once all forms of advantage or disadvantage came to be viewed as unfair – and more to the point, as something for the government to correct – any persistent disparity becomes evidence that something is fundamentally wrong. That assumption arose through a body of scholarship known as Critical Theory.
Critical Theory differs from traditional scholarship in that while traditional scholarship begins with a question and then follows the evidence, Critical Theory begins with the unproven assumption that society is necessarily organized around relationships of power. Critical Theory then asks how those relationships perpetuate oppression.
I touch on the difference between actual science and ‘science’ based on unproven theories in the essay The Garb of Science. This distinction is not central to this essay, but if you want more on this subject, I encourage you to read it.
Under a traditional approach, if one group consistently outperforms another, the investigator asks why. Perhaps discrimination is responsible, or perhaps the explanation lies in education, family structure, geography, religion, culture, incentives, or any number of other factors. Perhaps there are multiple causes. Every hypothesis is tested, and evidence points to the most likely explanations.
Don’t underplay geography. The entire continent of Africa has only one river system that is navigable from the interior to the coast: the Nile. Every other river on the continent has to run from an internal shelf to a much lower coastline, and it is thus no surprise that the Egyptian Empire rose where it did. A lack of navigable rivers has always held Africa back.
North America lacked pack animals until the Spaniards introduced the horse. Without pack animals, travel was limited, preventing the Native Americans from developing as quickly as the Europeans, who were blessed with both navigable rivers and pack animals.
People like to blame colonialism for disparity across regions, but most of the rich nations on Earth are either in Europe, or are former British colonies. We forget at great peril that everywhere the Union Jack was raised, so too was the Magna Carta, and though the British treatment of those in their colonies was often regrettable, the successful former colonies are the ones who kept much of what Britain gave them.
I just approached a problem rationally. Critical Theory does not approach problems that way.
Once the purpose of inquiry is to expose oppression, no other explanations are allowed. Looking at culture becomes “victim blaming.” Differences in values become stereotypes, family structure becomes an attempt to blame the disadvantaged for their own circumstances, and individual choices become evidence that the critic has failed to appreciate systemic barriers.
This is one of the reasons debates over race, poverty, education, and crime have become so frustrating. The participants are no longer arguing over evidence. They are operating from different rules of inquiry. One side asks, “What best explains the disparity?” while the other asks, “How does this disparity reveal oppression?” Those are fundamentally different questions, and they inevitably produce different conclusions most of the time.
There are times where they produce the same conclusions. When people say ‘systemic racism,’ I say ‘the War on Poverty.’ Lyndon B. Johnson was an avowed racist so I hold it as entirely possible that the harm his program caused may have been intentional. The War on Poverty really did act as systemic oppression, and of course it did. The idea that one can solve poverty through dependency is absurd.
But not every disparity has oppressive roots.
In the United States, Critical Theory expanded into Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, Intersectionality, and countless other fields that reinterpret society through the relationship between the supposed oppressor and the supposedly oppressed. Universities offer degree programs in these fields in spite of the fact that assuming oppression as the basis of all disparities flies in the face of the Scientific Method, and in spite of the fact that such a degree offers no marketable job skills.
One might even call such degree programs oppressive in the sense that they saddle people with college debt without providing job skills.
What these fields did do is to make sex a struggle between men and women. Sexual orientation became a struggle between heterosexuals and LGBTQ individuals, gender identity became a struggle between cisgender and transgender people, immigration became a struggle between citizens and immigrants, and so on. The entire country was broken down into different groups of the supposedly oppressed, all vying to get even with the nation they blame for their oppression.
This necessarily creates a two-tiered system of justice in which the actions of individuals are viewed through the lens of their oppressed or oppressor state, which is precisely why the Pakistani Grooming Gangs in Britain were allowed to operate for so long, and is why in many cases they are still allowed to operate today. Authorities knew for decades exactly what was happening but did not want to marginalize an oppressed group, and so more than 250,000 British girls, mostly from white, working-class families, were systematically raped, gang-raped, and prostituted, repeatedly, for decades, according to The Independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report, led by British MP Rupert Lowe and presented to the British Parliament. Not all claims have as of yet been independently verified so the total number could change, but whatever number it ends on will be far too high.
I’ll say that again – the authorities knew it was happening for decades and refused to do anything about it, other than cover it up while actively suppressing the voices of victims, if they dared complain. Even today, the British leadership seems more concerned with making the controversy go away than with stopping the human trafficking and rape of untold numbers of underage British girls.
Nor is this just in Great Britain. Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia have all found similar grooming gangs.
I’m picking on grooming gangs because they are such an egregious example, but it is only one example. All of the rioting, looting, arson, and violence that occurred around the country after the death of George Floyd was tolerated for the same reason. We were told these riots were ‘mostly peaceful’ even though CNN could not find camera angles that did not show fires, and we were told this while the rest of the public were locked in their homes under penalty of law to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Supposedly rioting was safe, as if a virus could tell the intent of those who were not locked down, or as if the oppressed are somehow immune from disease.
Critical Theory tends to make problems worse rather than better by excusing the guilty. In the case of the underage British girls, they were effectively sacrificed on the altar of Islamophobia. In Becca’s case, she needed good schools, but Critical Theory takes that solution off the table by calling it victim-blaming.
The Death of Merit
Richard Dawkins argued that free thought has no possible scientific explanation and that, as such, it does not exist. He said there is no difference between believing in free thought and believing in God. As an atheist, Dawkins wrote God off, and so he wrote off free thought as well. He described our brains as computers, driven by programming in the form of DNA, and data in the form of lived experience, and claimed that we act in entirely predictable ways based upon those two things.
As Dawkins put it, we are ‘mere meat machines,’ that are sufficiently complicated to ‘think that we think,’ but actual free thought and free will are simply not possible, and thus cannot possibly exist outside of a purely religious context that any rational person must reject.
Ironically, we cannot be rational without free will, but then I’m not a supporter of Dawkins’ argument so his contradictions don’t bother me…
I argued in a previous essay that the modern rejection of agency is a method of control. If our choices are nothing more than the inevitable product of DNA and environment, then agency disappears, and our successes and failures are reduced to the predictable output of a biological machine. I will not repeat that argument in detail here, but the implications are profound and I encourage you to read that previous essay, as this is where the modern concept of equity reaches its logical conclusion.
If people possess no meaningful agency, then there can be no meaningful differences in merit. If culture cannot explain disparities because that is “victim blaming,” and individual choices cannot explain disparities because they are determined, then there are very few explanations left. Phoebe Gates, Chelsea Clinton, and Becca Johnson become, for all practical purposes, interchangeable human beings. They should, absent oppression, arrive at the same destination, and when they do not, the disparity becomes an indictment against the whole of society.
The assumption is no longer that people are unique individuals with different talents, ambitions, values, and choices. The assumption is that they are fundamentally identical. Every meaningful difference has been explained away as either an unearned privilege or an injustice, and this philosophy has been moving toward that conclusion for generations.
Paine questioned inherited political privilege. Johnson questioned whether equal legal rights were sufficient. Griggs questioned whether equal rules were enough. Critical Theory questioned institutions. The rejection of free will questioned the very existence of human agency.
Once every meaningful difference is dismissed as either oppression or privilege, there is only one conclusion left to reach: people are interchangeable. If they are interchangeable, then any difference in outcome becomes proof that someone, somewhere, must be cheating.
The ridiculousness of that assumption seems self-evident, and yet it seems like every policy prescription coming from the political left, today, assumes it is true. This, incidentally, is the assumption that has turned Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Bill Maher, and others away from the modern left. In the quest for youthful relevance, the Democratic leadership is leaving its moderates behind. Many of them may vote Republican.
At the beginning of this essay I introduced you to three girls.
Phoebe Gates was born into one of the wealthiest families on Earth. Chelsea Clinton was born into one of the most politically connected families in history. Becca Johnson was born into circumstances that gave her neither wealth nor influence, attending one of the worst public school systems in America and beginning life from a severe disadvantage as a result. Aside from a loving mother and access to good pizza, Becca started with nothing.
Nothing the government can do will make those three starting points equal. Government cannot manufacture family wealth or create generations of social connections. It cannot give every child parents who remain together, neighborhoods free of crime, or schools that prepare them equally well for adulthood. Those differences have always existed, and they always will.
The question, then, is not whether Phoebe and Chelsea possess advantages they did not earn. Of course they do. Every child is born with advantages and disadvantages they did nothing to deserve. Some inherit wealth, others intelligence, others strong families, others extraordinary health, and still others a culture that prizes education and delayed gratification. Likewise, some inherit addiction, broken homes, failing schools, crime, abuse, and poverty.
Human beings have never begun life from identical starting points, and they never will.
The mistake modern politics makes is in concluding that because those differences are unfair, they must be eliminated.
Let me ask a different question. As a father, I view it as my job to ensure that I give my children every advantage I can to help them succeed. I don’t view that as ‘privilege’ so much as ‘good parenting,’ and perhaps we should begin to ask the question of what our society might look like if every parent did the same.
Doing otherwise turns society’s attention toward those who already possess advantages rather than toward those who lack them. Instead of asking how to improve Detroit’s schools, we ask why Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Instead of asking how to strengthen families, we ask why some children grow up in stable homes, and instead of asking how Becca can build a better life, we ask why Phoebe’s life is so much easier.
Poverty is not hard to explain. We are born naked, cold, and hungry. That is our natural state. Wealth is hard to explain as it has to be built, and even the poorest among us is lucky to be born in the United States instead of somewhere else, as we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
A free society accepts that people are individuals with different abilities, different ambitions, different values, and different goals. Some will succeed spectacularly. Others will fail despite doing everything right. Still others will overcome extraordinary hardship to accomplish things that seemed impossible. The purpose of liberty is not to eliminate those differences. It is to ensure that no one has to worry about artificial barriers preventing them from making the most of whatever gifts and opportunities they have.
Those who succeed do not just benefit themselves either. Elon Musk can put a satellite into orbit for a fraction of the price of what NASA can do it for. We all benefit from that cost savings as it makes everything that uses a satellite less expensive to use. Elon Musk is even looking at putting AI data centers in orbit so he can use solar energy to power them. Yes – he is fabulously wealthy – but he is making all of us better off, and he is keeping just a tiny fraction of the wealth he is creating for the world.
That is why the real measure of justice is not whether Becca becomes Phoebe Gates. It is whether Becca has more opportunity than she would have had otherwise, and whether her daughter will have more opportunity than Becca had.
A society that continually expands opportunity is moving in the right direction, even though it will never achieve equal outcomes. Equal outcomes are not the goal – better outcomes are. A society that obsesses over equality while neglecting opportunity will achieve neither.
And really, Phoebe Gates is not the girl we should be offended by. Her father co-founded the company Microsoft, which has done more to bring in the computer revolution than any other company on Earth. Microsoft has benefited lives around the world, so if the Gates family got rich doing so – that’s what drove Bill Gates forward and I’m OK with that.
The one we should be worried about is Chelsea Clinton, whose parents got her ahead as public servants, using political means to help themselves and to help their daughter. Unlike what Bill Gates did, which grew the world economy exponentially, Bill and Hillary Clinton truly did run a zero-sum game. Their wealth really did come at the expense of others.
In the end, this essay has never really been about Bill Gates, Chelsea Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, Thomas Paine, Richard Dawkins, or even the Frankfurt School. They are but chapters in the story, not the story itself. The story has always been about Becca, and there are millions upon millions of people like her around the country, and around the world.
The Beccas of the world do not need us to pretend that people are interchangeable, nor do they need us to tear down those who have been more fortunate. They need good schools, safe communities, strong families, economic freedom, and the opportunity to build something better than what they inherited.
Without opportunity, liberty is little more than a slogan. With opportunity, it becomes the means by which each generation leaves the next one better off than the last. That has always been the American promise, and it still can be if we are willing to pursue opportunity and leave the politics of grievance behind.
I promised a solution, so let me close with one. Milton Friedman suggested replacing the minimum wage and all welfare systems with a negative income tax, which I wrote about in some detail a little over five years ago.
Imagine that every adult is guaranteed an income of $30,000 per year. Someone with no earnings would receive the full amount. If they earn $10,000 working, they would not lose the entire benefit. Instead, half of each additional dollar earned would reduce the payment, leaving them with $35,000 in total income. At $20,000 in earnings they would have $40,000, and so on, until the benefit eventually phases itself out.
Every hour worked leaves the person better off than they were before. The system rewards work instead of punishing it while still ensuring that no one falls below a basic standard of living.
Lyndon B. Johnson could have implemented such a program. Milton Friedman recommended that he do so, but Johnson decided to address poverty through dependency instead, and to this day, long after Lyndon B. Johnson has passed away, Becca continues to pay the price.
She deserves better.
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