You didn't build that

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” – Elizabeth Warren

Provocative remarks—famously repeated by President Obama during his 2012 re-election campaign and stressed by the left today—but unpersuasive.

The Equality Illusion

In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell raises questions concerning “equality” scarcely considered in our time: How is “equality” defined, and what are the costs of pursuing it?

“Equality” may be easy to define for concepts like numbers, as they have “only one dimension, magnitude (2 + 3 = 5),” Sowell notes. The same is not true for people. A confluence of various and often unquantifiable factors—intelligence, ability, beauty, geographic location, economic status, luck, among many others—forms multidimensional human beings.  Striving to level one human dimension—say, the economic—invariably results in the inequality of another dimension—the political—by transferring political power into the hands of those anointed to pursue economic equalizing. Determining how much economic inequality to trade for political inequality is arbitrary. “Equality,” it turns out, is an illusion.