Material inequality is one of the great bugbears of the Left. While certain left-leaning economists claim that inequality damages the economy, the case against inequality is fundamentally a moral one. The unequal distribution of wealth is claimed to be unfair, the product of nepotism rather than merit. In its defense, libertarians argue that it is an inevitable outcome of individual liberty and property rights. They (and most economic conservatives) also oppose government efforts to eradicate inequality on more pragmatic grounds, such as the incompetence of government administrators or as a step towards totalitarianism. Many social conservatives, however, are more open to wealth redistribution, being less individualistic in spirit than their libertarian friends.
What both libertarians and traditionalists have missed is that the defense of material inequality can and must be based on a defense of the family and its foundational role in society. For if society is ultimately composed of atomic individuals, then the Rawlesian case against material inequality has real merit. Suppose society were truly composed of individuals that are born into a world of individuals. Then society is arranged horizontally, like a ream of papers: individuals born in 1985, individuals born in 1986, and so on. Looking within each sheet of paper we see a great injustice: some individuals are born with privilege, and others without. All this lumpiness within sheets is arbitrary, without any regard to either earned merit or the likelihood that inherited wealth will be used optimally. This collides unhappily with the libertarian ideals of meritorious success and economic efficiency.
Now instead imagine society from the traditionalist perspective. A baby is not born into the group of babies born in 1985, but to a mother and father. Or more accurately, the baby is born into a family, composed not just of her parents, but to their parents, and so on. Society is thus not a heap of papers, but a rope composed of many separate threads passing through time. The goal of civilization is fundamentally not about achieving evenness within each sheet of paper, but about making the rope stronger by strengthening each of its component threads.
From this perspective, inheritance is one of the fibers that binds together different generations into one strand. In the era before industrialization and urbanization, this fiber was more concrete and visibly apparent, since the inheritance was most likely not some generic liquid investment, but a plot of land, a livelihood, and a location that was one’s (and one’s parents’) home in the world.
Opposition to material inequality is necessarily an argument against inherited wealth and privilege. And opposition to inherited wealth is predicated on an understanding of society directly contrary to the traditional perspective just described. From the leftist perspective, a society with inherited wealth makes no more sense than an imaginary society where the inheritances of all people who die in 2016 is randomly swapped among all their descendants. From this perspective, a uniform distribution among all people born in 1985 therefore makes better sense than any alternative. Thus, to oppose inherited wealth is to deny the legitimacy of the family as the basic, enduring unit of civilization.
In contrast, conservatives defend inherited wealth not merely because individuals have a right to choose on whom to pass their wealth. We do so because parents typically pass on their wealth to their children, in accord with the role of the family as the basic atomic unit of society. We are outraged when one individual robs another individual, cutting one strand in the rope of society. But we are even more opposed when the government weakens or abolishes inherited wealth, damaging or breaking all strands of the societal rope.
Thus, there is an underlying logic to the coalition between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, a real unity between two of the legs of the conservatism’s “three-legged stool.” The converse is also true. Our friends on the left may not discern it themselves, but both their economic and cultural policies undermine the role of family in society.
In the words of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This unity across generations exists because it has an internal structure: that of the family. To conserve society, we must conserve this internal structure, through conservative policies, both social and economic.
aflexiblechain 