“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced … to a single principle.” Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1-percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1-percent pay 40-percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50-percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
That’s an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights. Our revolution was about liberty; it was about freedom.
The word equality was not even mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers. The word equal does not make an appearance until the 14th Amendment’s equal protection of the laws after the Civil War. The feminists’ Equal Rights Amendment was abandoned and left to die in 1982 after 10 years of national debate.
[…]
