Efficiency and Equality

Matthew Continetti has really hit a home run with this short article in the upcoming Weekly Standard.  Continetti argues that arguments of efficiency currently being voiced by the Romney campaign are fine but are ultimately insufficient.  Here is how Romney should frame his economic argument:

...Cast the graphs aside, and reject the distinction between efficiency and equality. To support markets is not to reject fairness but to embrace it. One supports free enterprise not only because it improves the bottom line, but also because it is the only economic arrangement compatible with the equal rights of citizens. A government that tries to correct inequalities of result inevitably will interfere with our rights to life, liberty, and property. It will, for instance, unfairly favor some businesses over others—usually the powerful and politically well-connected.

Consider the laborer. He is endowed with the natural rights to use his skills as he likes and to dispose of his earnings as he sees fit. The duty of government is to protect his rights of safety and conscience and the property he creates through his labor. By exercising these rights, he improves his condition. Or as Lincoln put it in his 1859 speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”

Too often Republicans and conservatives see the misuse of the principle of equality by the Left and then reject it wholesale.  This is a shame.  The Founders and Lincoln believed in equality, but their equality was an equality of natural rights based on our unchaining human nature.  They believed in equality of opportunity while modern liberalism teaches equality of results (an irony is that modern liberalism uses the logic of natural rights while rejecting the substance of the natural rights teaching).

A tyranny can be efficient.  FDR once famously praised Mussolini because the trains in Italy ran on time.  The problem revolves around the ends that efficiency is directed towards.  Working within the universe of natural rights and natural law makes those ends worthy of the moral beings that we are.