Egalitarianism is Self-Defeating

This post is written by Tyler Mittan. Check out his personal and libertarian blogs! The original post can be found here.

Photo credit: the Under Current,
"Nobody deserves egalitarianism"

I am not sure if this argument is original or not but it is something that I had come up with on my own. It may have been said before but it probably deserves more attention. When I say egalitarianism, I mean it in the context that all people are equal and deserve equal amount of wealth. I do believe in egalitarianism in so much as we all have equal rights and no one person is intrinsically better than another person. The egalitarianism that socialists or liberals want is self-defeating and that is the egalitarianism I intend to prove is self-defeating.

Before I set out the argument, I will delve into some muddleheaded explanation but I think people will get the point:

There seems to be a problem with equating a currency to morally good. What I mean by that is you can’t say that it is morally good to have x amount of dollars. Maybe you could but I think it’d be arbitrary and that seems wrong. What the egalitarian would probably say is something very vague like, “well off”. This is very hard to determine because prices of goods fluctuate (this is assuming that an egalitarian intends to spend the money.. after all, that’s usually what people want money for). What this would do is create an unequal amount of money and goods distributed to individuals. It appears that there must be some authority that makes things equal again, whether it’s wealth in terms of material or actual money. Authority means an inequality of power.. some have more authority than others. If everybody has an equal voice and equal rights, authority cannot exist. However, egalitarianism requires authority therefore it is self-defeating. 

Now for the argument:

1. If everybody has an equal voice then authority must not exist. (No one particular person can have a more influential decision, voice, etc. than another. No one particular person can have more or less freedom than another.)

2. Egalitarianism requires authority. (There must be some with the authority to redistribute wealth again or else some will have more than others. There also must be somebody that makes the “laws” or “rules” that everybody must redistribute everything)

3. Therefore egalitarianism is self-defeating. (Egalitarianism rests on the claim that everybody is equal and a decentralization of power but requires some to have more authority than others to redistribute wealth)