Is the new obsession with “inequality” causing us to forget the importance of freedom of opportunity?


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Is the new obsession with “inequality” choking off freedom of opportunity?

Recent concerns about economic inequality have generated rash ideas for remaking American society. The problem isn’t merely that “Free College,” “Medicare for All,” and “Tax the Rich” are poorly designed proposals—it’s that they’re based on flawed notions of fairness, equality, liberty, and dignity.

In All Fairness: Equality, Liberty, and the Quest for Human Dignity ([link removed]) , edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne—with a foreword by the brilliant legal scholar Richard A. Epstein—brings together 20 experts to challenge recent, coercive egalitarian measures, exposing the quicksand on which they rest and the self-serving interests they too often promote and protect.
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Edited by
Robert M. Whaples
Michael C. Munger
Christopher J. Coyne

Foreword by
Richard A. Epstein

Hardcover | 336 pages | Index
15 Figures • 4 Tables

Available: Oct. 1, 2019
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Genuine fairness and dignity, the book’s authors hold, requires respect for individual preferences and voluntary choices. To put this principle into action, government officials must stop granting favors to special interests and end policies that shackle individual initiative and freedom of opportunity.

Cutting through the fog and exposing numerous errors of fact, logic, and practice among today’s egalitarians, In All Fairness ([link removed]) clears the path for a deeper understanding of equality, liberty, and the quest for human dignity.

Here are just a few of the book’s insights:
* Today’s egalitarians claim to champion social harmony and the underprivileged, yet they propose zero-sum policies that politicize and polarize society, rather than focusing on improving opportunities for mutual gain through voluntary cooperation.
* Today’s egalitarians lament the role of “brute luck” in determining success, but their remedies would also require luck: they would need to somehow escape the common perils of bad-faith political actors and incompetent bureaucracy.
* Modern egalitarianism clashes with the notion of human equality championed in the institutionalized concept of equality under the law and designed constitutional mechanisms to curb abuses of government power.
* Contrary to today’s egalitarians, economic growth driven by markets, accountable institutions, and innovation is causing absolute poverty to fall rapidly around the world.
* Egalitarian impulses created the subprime mortgage meltdown that sparked the financial crisis of 2008–2009, namely through government efforts to artificially boost home ownership rates by encouraging lenders to weaken their mortgage underwriting standards.
* Public-opinion surveys show that Americans favor flat and low taxes and dislike the idea of equalizing incomes or wealth via highly progressive and punitive taxes.
* Today’s egalitarians could make almost everyone better off by focusing enough attention on raining in government policies that disproportionately harm the poor (such as zoning laws, occupational licensure, and business subsidies) or unfairly help the well-off (such as bank bailouts and barriers to entry into markets).

Regardless of where you stand on the issues of equality, fairness, liberty, and the quest for human dignity, In All Fairness ([link removed]) will challenge your assumptions—and remove any trace of clichéd, knee-jerk thinking about these vital topics.

You won’t look at wealth and poverty, equality and inequality, in the same way ever again.
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About the Editors
Robert M. Whaples is co-editor and managing editor of The Independent Review and professor of economics at Wake Forest University.

Michael C. Munger is co-editor of The Independent Review and director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program and professor in the Departments of Political Science and Economics at Duke University.

Christopher J. Coyne is co-editor of The Independent Review and F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

With a foreword by:
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Chicago, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

Praise For In All Fairness

“How, between the covers of a single volume, could one hope to illuminate the vast sea of moral, intellectual, and political failures that add up to modern egalitarianism? Only by combining the expertise and insights of historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and more. With the book In All Fairness, the Independent Institute has done so brilliantly. Each author's contribution stands on its own and can be read with profit. Taken together, they complement each other to create a whole that far exceeds the sum of its parts.”
—Steven E. Landsburg, Professor of Economics, University of Rochester

“Fairness counts among humankind’s most fundamental social desiderata—demanded even by small children on the playing field. The difficulty is that it is easier to say what fairness is than to determine what is fair. The many faceted book In All Fairness, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne, does justice to the complexity of the topic in its historical, philosophical, and economic dimensions. Anyone who has ever been inclined to say ‘but that’s just not fair’—which includes just about all of us—will find enlightenment and information in this thoughtfully compiled, instructive, and constructive book.”
—Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh; Founding Editor, American Philosophical Quarterly; author, Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice

“The authors of the timely book, In All Fairness: Equality, Liberty and the Quest for Human Dignity, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne, dig creatively into the roots of inequality, drawing from philosophy, economics, and religion going way back in human history. This fascinating book shows that realizing proposed egalitarian wealth or income distributions requires a great deal of coercive power, unfairly affects ‘The Forgotten Man,’ and breeds unintended consequences. The book rightly stresses equality of opportunity achieved through economic freedom over equality of outcomes.”
—John B. Taylor, Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics, Stanford University; George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics, Hoover Institution
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