Hayek on Equality

It may take a little time
A lonely path, an uphill climb
Success or failure will not alter it
--Howard Jones

Back in January I shared some thoughts from Hayek on the competing notions of equality. They're so lucid I'm going to jot them here once again in an effort to remember them better:

"[Individualism] can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally. While individualism is profoundly opposed to all prescriptive privilege, to all protection, by law or force, of any rights not equally applicable to all persons, it also denies government the right to limit what the able or fortunate might achieve.It is equally opposed to any rigid limitation of the position individuals may achieve, whether this power is used to perpetuate inequality or to create equality. Its main principle is that no man or group of men should have the power to decide what another man's status ought to be, and it regards this as a condition of freedom so essential that is must not be sacrificed to the gratification of our sense of justice or of our envy.

"If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level...There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."