Free to Choose Chapter 5: Created Equal
“All men are created equal.” We hear those words so often they slide right past us. But what do they actually mean? Thomas Jefferson wrote them. He also owned slaves until the day he died. Clearly, even the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence did not mean everyone is identical in talent, strength, or intelligence. So what did he mean – and how has the meaning of “equality” changed over two centuries?
This is post 8 in my Free to Choose retelling series.
Three Kinds of Equality
Friedman says there are three different meanings of equality, and mixing them up has caused enormous damage.
The first meaning is equality before God – what Friedman calls personal equality. Jefferson and the founders meant that every person has value simply by existing. Nobody is born to rule and nobody is born to serve. You have rights that nobody can take away. “Liberty” was part of the definition, not the opposite of it. Government existed to protect those rights – not to give the majority unlimited power over the individual.
The second meaning is equality of opportunity. After the Civil War ended slavery, the emphasis shifted. The idea was simple: no arbitrary obstacles should block your path. Your birth, your color, your religion, your parents – none of that should determine what you can do in life. Only your abilities and effort should matter. The French had a phrase for it: a career open to the talents.
The third meaning is equality of outcome. This one is newer and very different. Everyone should end up in roughly the same place. Everyone should finish the race at the same time. As the Dodo said in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
The first two meanings support freedom. The third one destroys it.
Why Equality of Outcome Is a Trap
Here is the core problem. If what people get is determined not by what they produce but by what someone decides is “fair,” then who decides what is fair?
“Fairness” is not something you can measure with a ruler. It is a matter of opinion. And once someone has the power to decide what is fair for everyone else, they are no longer equal to the people they are deciding for. You end up in the world of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
There is also a practical problem. If outcomes are equalized no matter what you do, where is the incentive to work hard? Who will become the doctor, who the garbage collector? If both end up in the same place, why would anyone go through years of difficult training? The only answer is force. Someone has to make people do things they would not choose to do freely.
This is not just theory. Friedman points to every country that has tried to make equality of outcome the main goal of society. Russia, China, Cambodia – the end result was terror. And even terror did not produce equal outcomes. It just created a new ruling class: party officials with special shops, special schools, and luxury cars that were “not for sale – only for the Politburo.”
The Inheritance Puzzle
Much of the passion behind equality of outcome comes from a feeling most of us share: it is not fair that some kids start life with wealthy parents and others start with nothing.
Friedman agrees it is not fair. But he asks a deeper question. Unfairness comes in many forms. A child can inherit money – stocks, houses, a family business. A child can also inherit talent – musical ability, athletic gifts, mathematical genius. We can take away inherited property through taxes. But we cannot take away inherited talent. And from an ethical standpoint, what is the difference?
Think about it from the parent’s side. You can help your child by paying for a good education, by setting them up in a business, or by leaving them money. Is there really a moral difference between those three? And if the government lets you spend your money on an expensive vacation but not leave it to your children, does that make sense?
The honest answer is that these ethical questions are complicated. They cannot be solved with simple slogans like “fair shares for all.” If we took that slogan seriously, Friedman says, we would have to give the most music lessons to kids with the least musical talent and ban the gifted from practicing. That might be “fair” to the less talented, but it would not be fair to anyone else – including the rest of us who benefit from hearing great music.
Life Is Not Fair – And That Is Not All Bad
Friedman makes a point that sounds cold at first but has real weight behind it. Life is not fair. Some people are born beautiful, some are born strong, some are born brilliant. We cannot change that. But we all benefit from the unfairness.
He uses the example of Muhammad Ali. It was not fair that Ali was born with the talent to become the greatest boxer in the world. But millions of people enjoyed watching him fight. If we had capped his earnings at the same level as an unskilled dockworker, Ali probably would not have endured the brutal training and punishment of professional boxing. We would all have been worse off.
The same logic applies to inventors, entrepreneurs, and creators. Henry Ford got rich. But the country got cheap, reliable cars and the techniques of mass production. The Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations poured private wealth back into universities, hospitals, and museums that benefited everyone. In Chicago alone, businessmen built the Art Institute, the Symphony Orchestra, the University of Chicago, and the Field Museum – not because the government told them to, but because they wanted to give something back.
A free market system does not prevent compassion. It fuels it. The explosion of charitable activity in America during the late 1800s and early 1900s happened precisely because people were free to get rich and then free to decide how to share that wealth.
The British Warning
Friedman uses Britain as his main example of what happens when a country chases equality of outcome. After World War II, Britain went all in. Income tax rates hit 98 percent on investment income and 83 percent on wages. The government expanded housing, medical care, unemployment benefits, and pensions. The goal was to take from the rich and give to the poor.
The results were the opposite of what the reformers intended.
The old aristocracy was indeed pushed aside. But new privileged classes rose to replace them. Government bureaucrats had secure jobs, protected pensions, and immunity from the rules they enforced on everyone else. Trade unions claimed to represent the poorest workers but actually served the highest-paid laborers. And a new class of millionaires emerged – people clever enough to find loopholes, dodge taxes, and move their wealth overseas.
Meanwhile, the actual poor did not benefit much. A vast reshuffling of wealth, yes. Greater equality, no.
The deeper damage was cultural. When laws force people to hand over most of what they earn, many will evade or break those laws. Once disrespect for one set of laws spreads, it infects respect for all laws – including laws against violence and theft. Friedman suggests the rise in crime in Britain was partly a consequence of pushing equality of outcome too far.
And Britain’s best and brightest left. Doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs moved to the United States and other countries where they could use their talents freely. Economic growth in Britain fell far behind its neighbors. The drive for equality made the country poorer.
Capitalism Reduces Inequality
This is the argument that surprises most people. The common belief is that free markets make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Friedman says the evidence shows the exact opposite.
Wherever free markets have been allowed to operate, ordinary people have reached levels of comfort that were unimaginable a few generations earlier. Wherever markets have been suppressed – feudal Europe, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, much of South America – the gap between rich and poor has been wider, not narrower.
Think about what modern capitalism actually produced. Running water, electricity, ready-made clothing, cars, television, supermarkets. The rich in ancient Rome already had servants, musicians, and artists. Modern inventions did not change their lives much. But these inventions transformed the lives of ordinary people. Things that were once luxuries for the elite became everyday items for the masses.
In 1848, John Stuart Mill worried that mechanical inventions had not yet lightened the day’s toil of any human being. By the time Friedman was writing, you had to travel to non-capitalist countries to find people still doing backbreaking manual labor from dawn to dusk.
Who Really Supports Equality of Outcome?
Friedman makes a sharp observation. Very few people actually want equality of outcome in practice – not even the people who preach it the loudest.
Governments that talk about equality run lotteries and gambling operations, which create massive inequality by design.
Intellectuals who advocate for redistribution are themselves among the highest-paid people in society. If they truly believed in equal outcomes, Friedman says, they could practice it right now. Calculate the world’s average income – about $200 per person in 1979 dollars – keep that amount, and give the rest away. Nobody does.
He points to Israel’s kibbutzim as a test case. The kibbutz is a voluntary commune where people share equally. In Israel, kibbutzim are admired, not stigmatized. There are no barriers to joining. Yet at no time have more than 5 percent of Israeli Jews chosen to live in one. That 5 percent, Friedman suggests, is roughly the fraction of people who would voluntarily choose enforced equality over the messiness of freedom.
Key Takeaway
A society that puts equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The force required to equalize outcomes will destroy liberty, and the people who wield that force will use it to benefit themselves. But a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, produce both more freedom and more equality. Free markets do not guarantee identical results. They guarantee that today’s disadvantaged have a real shot at becoming tomorrow’s privileged – and that no one’s privilege is permanent. The choice is not between equality and inequality. It is between a system where everyone has a chance and a system where someone else decides what you deserve.
Book: Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman | ISBN: 978-0-15-633460-0
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