Don’t mess with excellence

I’ve heard a few very intelligent people speak recently on our need as a society to move from private property rights to shared, public rights. This might extend to homes, land, or any goods and services that one might possess. In other words, your stuff wouldn’t really be yours.

The rational for this shift isn’t quite clear to me, other than people like the word “egalitarian” and want to combat “inequalities in society.” Language is an unfortunately powerful thing.

But has inequality ever not existed? Have we ever not had the poor among us? Have certain races at certain times in certain places not always had disadvantages? My opinion is that the notion that we will win the battle of inequality by trying to make it illegal is fraught with foolishness.

First, nobody ever asks if fighting inequality is even good. “Life isn’t fair” is one of the first lessons our kids learn because it is true. Good, healthy people get cancer. Smart, hardworking people go broke. Life kicks us all in one way or another, including those at the proverbial “top.”

Perhaps more importantly, nobody every asks what we are giving up in order to try this grand social experiment – one that would require an entire 180-degree turn in how our democracy works.

If you don’t appreciate that the United States of America is the most prosperous nation in the history of the planet and has the strongest, most positive, pro-freedom influence on the globe, that does not make it untrue. Part of the core of what we have achieved is in no small part because of private property – that men and women can work and learn and grow and achieve and retain all that they have earned. Without that incentive, who among us will risk what little we could gain to develop new, powerful drugs to cure diseases? Or who will build the next great means of mass transportation? Who will send us, the everyday citizens, to the moon 50 or 100 years from now? There is so much untapped possibility, but it is only a possibility if we are incentivized to attain all that it is.

Part of the incentive, for better or for worse, is that we might own what we create. That is no small thing, and perhaps we shouldn’t mess with the excellence that we’ve inherited.