A Quote by Robert Reich
The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality fo result. Its equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
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The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.
A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.
In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered.
One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.
To me it's always been a no-brainer. Maybe I'm just simplistic about it, but if you believe in equality of opportunity, and want to champion equality of opportunity, that makes you a feminist.
There is no such thing as equality, other than of opportunity and before the law. But there is no equality of what's gonna happen to you when you engage or pursue your opportunity, and there's no guarantee that's what's gonna happen to you once you have your equality before the law. There is no equality of outcome.
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. We seek 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.
My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.
Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.
Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.
Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.
Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.
God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity.
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