The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Robert Nisbet, the Idea of Progress
• I: Progress
• Godwin: Flux Vs. Stasis
• Progress, Naturalism, and Religion
• Individualism Vs. Peasant-feudalism
• Materialism, Determinism, and Progress
• Popperian Growth of Knowledge
• Popper Vs. Historicism
• Koestler: Chance Vs. Reason
• Social Engineering For Progress
• Progress In Economics
• II: Autonomy
• Mental Health Law and Autonomy
• Sexual Repression Vs. Autonomy
• Medical Paternalism Vs. Autonomy
• Deschooling and Autonomy
• Education and Family Autonomy
• State Paternalism Vs. Family
• Teaching Vs. Student Autonomy
• Privacy In Social Psychology
• Autonomy Vs. Extrinsic Rewards
• Job Autonomy Vs. Contract
• Student Press and Autonomy
• Mercenaries and Autonomy
• Autonomy, Creativity, and Radicalism
• III: Law and Public Policy
• Law Without Justice?
• Blackstone Vs. Bentham On Law
• Evolving Jurisprudence
• Is Bankruptcy Law Bankrupt?
• Reviewing Judicial Review
• The Supreme Court and the Law
• Courts and Social Science Evidence
• The Goals of the First Amendment
• Freedom of Scientific Inquiry
• Protection of Dissenting Belief
• Law Vs. “liberty” and “property”
• Crime Demographics and Law
• Is Legal Punishment Good?
• Punishment and Behavior Modification
• Punishment Vs. Pure Restitution
• Does Punishment Fit the Crime?
• Free Market Justice
• Justice In the Market
• IV: Equality and Social Justice
• Liberty Vs. Equality
• Liberty and Equality
• Bureaucracy and the New Equality
• Policy and the “new Equality”
• Rawls and the New Equality
• Rawls Vs. Nozick On Justice
• Balancing Needs and Abilities
• Nozick and the Lockean Proviso
• Schooling and Subordination
• Educational Equality
• Adam Smith On Social Justice
• De Tocqueville and Equality
• Liberal Justice: From Merit to Need

Policy and the “New Equality”

Edward Erler

• California State University, San Bernadino

“Public Policy and the ‘New Equality.’” The Political Science Reviewer 8 (Fall 1978): 235–262.

Since the opening of the “New Frontier,” public policy analysis has been a growth industry in academia. Not only have universities been adding professional schools and departments to study public policy, but the same study has proliferated in law schools, business schools, medical schools, and in economics, political science, and sociology departments. Traditionally, public policy “sciences” have bridged pure or positive science and governmental decision making. Harold Laswell and other early public policy enthusiasts hoped that defining policy alernatives for solving a problem would enable politicians to make the most rational choices to maintain the values of liberal democracy. Policy science has typically served values, rather than provided them.

Three public philosophies, each with its own conception of “equality” and “public” policy, have provided values for policy decisions. The first, utilitarianism, has been closely linked to liberal democracy and has aimed at justifying individual rights and liberties and particularly the ideal of political equality. But this sort of equality allows natural talents to flourish, therby permitting social inequality. Historically, government policy under utilitarianism and liberal democracy aimed to maintain a self-regulating system of individuals free to pursue their own ends.

The second public philosophy, the “therapeutic ethic,” is now rapidly replacing utilitarianism with the concept of “frustration-aggression syndrome.” This syndrome asserts that frustration always leads to aggression, sometimes to antisocial behavior. The therapeutic ethic also holds: (1) the inequalities born of utilitarianism are the chief source of social frustration, and (2) government must intervene in social interaction to ensure “social peace.” This intervention, in its New Frontier and Great Society versions, went beyond equality of opportunity (to eliminate class or legal barriers to various fields) to “affirmative action” to help the “frustrated” enter the middle class.

The third public philosophy, “The New Equality,” has Martin Rein as a champion and John Rawls as philosophical defender. According to the “New equalitarians,” the “equal opportunity” and rehabilitation of the therapeutic ethic degrades the disadvantaged by suggesting that they are subhuman. Rein believes the key to “humanizing” the disadvantaged is a redistribution of both wealth and status that would treat them as fully human, autonomous, and of “equal dignity.” Policy, then, would redistribute status and wealth to transform the least favored into the most favored and thereby “equalize” personal dignity. This would require a large nonelected and nonresponsive bureaucratic apparatus along with a danger of “class bias” in the functioning of the “New Class” bureaucracy. The “New Equality” explicitly rejects the political equality that permits unequal results in favor of political inequality designed to produce equality of result and condition.

The “New Equality” errs by ignoring that there are no natural rulers among equal human beings, whose natural equality allows each individual to be his own ruler. Government, to be just, must therefore rest on the consent of those who are to be ruled. So liberty, not the “New Equality,” is the “dictate of human equality.”