I use small-L “liberal” to denote neoliberals [today’s political liberals], and capital-L “Liberal” to denote paleoliberals [the children of the Enlightenment that included our Founders]. The rise of modern political Liberalism was an emergent behavior of movable type – our first Information Age. Bibles had always been laboriously [if magnificently] hand-written and illuminated by teams of monks, under the tutelage and supervision of abbots, and were, even contemporarily, museum pieces to be cherished by their custodians and interpreted by the priestly class.

Johannes Gutenberg changed all that.

Increased commonality of the Bible – in terms of both content and availability – placed it in exponentially more non-ecclesiastical hands. As were the classics of the Greeks and Romans, the histories of the early- and meso-Europeans – and newspapers. Literacy exploded. The Enlightenment, though theologically based, was a reaction to the loss of the aristocracy’s mandate to rule based on its pre-emptive access to knowledge.

Plato’s Doctrine – that the ability to reason [to choose among options] implies free will, which, in turn, implies some form of self-rule [as the highest order of social organization] – had become Jefferson’s Imperative – that as a polity gains parity [with the aristocracy] in the affairs of state, it will insist on self-rule. The individual’s capacity for self-determination implies a moral hazard in its denial – the imposition of arbitrarily stratified societal organization. Vox populi (the voice of the people) became the bumper sticker of the Enlightenment that swept up political thinkers from John Locke, Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin et al. Liberals [Whigs] sought the liberation of the people from the diktat of the ruling aristocracy [Tories]. The realization of the Platonic Doctrine.

The dumbing-down of non-government society to government’s idea of “equality” IS the diktat of a ruling aristocracy, and as such, is explosively illiberal.

The political concept of equality suffers from homonymism – neoliberals and conservatives are using the same word to mean radically different things. When liberals say “equality”, they mean “equality of results”; when conservatives say “equality”, they mean “equality of opportunity”. The difference separates autocracy from liberty. On this, and many other issues, liberals have become the “top-down-control-of-the-people” Tories against whom the Whigs fought the Revolutionary War .

Liberty is a snap-shot of society where results are a performance-driven phenomena; equality of results is a snap-shot of society where performance is irrelevant. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is a philosophy of subsistence – devoid of aspirations or hope – and assumes an altruism that just isn’t there [hence, the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments, and all that has followed]. No one will produce to their ability if that effort is rewarded as to someone else’s idea of their need. A popular joke on the streets of Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union was that “we will pretend to work as long they pretend to pay us.” Performance mirrors reward, settling to the weakest link in the workplace; reward becomes the averaged output of a dwindling economy. Enforced equality of results begins at the apex of societal vitality and prosperity and spirals downward.

At base, it’s human nature. There is nothing fair [read: equitable] about confiscating assets from those who earned them and giving them to those who didn’t.