An Appeasing Envy; H. Hazlitt

ON APPEASING ANY ATTEMPT to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their in tention. "Your levellers," said Samuel Johnson in the mid eighteenth century,. "wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves." And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: "I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy."! Henry Hazlitt is well known to FREEMAN readers as author, columnist, editor, lecturer, and practitioner of freedom. This article will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book, The Conquest of Poverty, to be published by Arlington House. 142 HENRY HAZLITT At least a handful of writers have begun to recognize explicitly the all-pervasive role played by envy or the fear of envy in life and in contemporary political thought. In 1966, Helmut Schoeck, professor of sociology at the Uni versity of Mainz, devoted. a pene trating book to the subject. 2 There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy, while still others are motivated, not so much by any envy of their own, as by the fear of it in others, and the wish to appease or satisfy it.

But the latter effort is bound to 1 The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski Cede M. De Wolfe Howe, 2 vol. Cambridge, Mass., 1953). From Holmes to Laski, May 12, 1927, p. 942. 2 Helmut Schoeck, Envy (English translation, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969) .

1972 ON APPEASING ENVY 143 be futile. Almost no one is com pletely satisfied with his status in relation to his fellows. In the envi ous the thirst for social advance ment is insatiable. As soon as they have risen one rung in the social or economic ladder, their eyes are fixed upon the next. They envy those who are higher up, no matter by how little. In fact, they are more likely to envy their im mediate friends or neighbors, who are just a little bit better off, than celebrities or millionaires who are incomparably better off. The posi tion of the latter seems unattain able, but of the neighbor who has .i ust a minimal advantage they are tempted to think: "I might almost be in his place." The Urge to Deprive Others Moreover, the envious are· more likely· to be mollified by seeing others dep~ived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chief ly troubles them, but what others have. The envious are not satis fied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge.

In the French revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is reported to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: "Yes, madam, every thing's going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry coal." Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions. As Schoeck writes: "Man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loud est when there is virtually nothing to redistribute."3 (We should, of course, always distinguish· that merely negative envy which begrudges others their advantage from the positive ambi tion that leads men to active emu lation, competition, and creative effort of their own.) But the accusation of envy, or even of the fear of others' envy, as the dominant moti ve for any redistribution proposal, is a seri ous one to make and a difficult if not impossible one to prove. More over, the motives for making a proposal, even if ascertainable, are irrelevant to its inherent merits.

We can, nonetheless, apply cer tain objective tests. Sometimes the motive of appeasing other peo ple's envy is openly avowed. Social ists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistrib uted" plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in abso lute terms for practically every one will be deplored because it is making the rich richer. An implied and sometimes avowed principle of the British Labor Party leaders 3 Ibid., p. 303.

144 THE FREEMAN March after World War II was that "No body should have what everybody can't have." Equality, Yes; Abundance, No! But the main objective test of a social proposal is not merely whether .it emphasizes equality more than abundance, but whether it goes further and attempts to promote equality at the expense of abundance. Is the proposed meas ure intended primarily to help the poor, or to penalize the rich? And would it in fact punish the rich at the cost of also hurting everyone else? This is the actual effect, as we saw earlier,4 of steeply progressive income taxes and confiscatory in heritance taxes. These a.re not only counter-productive fiscally (bringing in less revenue from the higher brackets than lower rates would have brought), but· they discourage or confiscate the capi tal accumulation and investment that would have increased national productivity and real wages. Most of the confiscated funds are then dissipated by the government in current consumption expenditures.

The long-run effect of such tax rates, of course, is to leave the working poor worse off than they would otherwise have been. There are economists who will 4 "Should We Divide the Wealth 1" in THE FREEMAN, February, 1972, p. 100. admit all this, but will answer that it is nonetheless politically neces sary to impose such near-confisca tory taxes, or to enact similar redistributive measures, in order to placate the dissatisfied and the envious - in order, even, to pre vent actual revolution. Appeasement Provokes Envy This argument is the reverse of the truth. The effect of trying to appease envy is to provoke more of it. The most popular theory of the French Revolution is that it came about because the economic con dition of the masses was becoming worse and worse, while the king and the aristocracy remained com pletely blind to it. But Tocqueville, one of the most penetrating social observers and historians of his or any time, put forward an exactly opposite explanation. Let me state it first as summarized by an emin ent French commentator in 1899: Here is the theory invented by Tocqueville .... The lighter a yoke, the more it seems insupportable; what exasperates is not the crushing burden but the impediment; what inspires. to revolt is not oppression but humiliation. The French of 1789 were incensed against the nobles be cause they were almost the equals of the nobles; it is the slight difference that can be appreciated, and what can be appreciated that counts. The 1972 ON APPEASING ENVY 145 eighteenth-century middle class was rich, in. a position to fill almost any employment, almost as powerful as the nobility. It was exasperated by this "almost" and stimulated by the proximity of its goal; impatience is always provoked by the final strides. 5 I have quoted this passage be cause I do not find the theory stated in quite this condensed form by Tocqueville himself. Yet this. is essentially the theme of his L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, and he presented impressive fac tual documentation to support it.

As the prosperity which I have just described began to extend in France, the community nevertheless became more unsettled and uneasy; public discontent grew fierce; hatred against all established institutions increased. The nation was visibly ad vancing toward a revolution. . . . It might be said that the French found their position the more in tolerable precisely where it had be come better. Surprising as this fact is, history is full of such contradic tions. It is not always by going from bad to worse that a country falls into revolution. It happens most frequent ly that a people, which had sup ported the most crushing laws with out complaint, and apparently as if they were unfelt, throws them off with violence as· soon as the burden 5 Emile Faguet, Politicians and M oral ists of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Little, Brown; 1928), p. 93. begins to be diminished. The state of things destroyed by a revolution is almost always somewhat better than that which immediately preceded it; and experience has shown that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that when it enters upon the work of reform.

Nothing short of great political gen ius can save a sovereign who under takes to relieve his subj ects after a long period of oppression. The evils which were endured with patience so long as they were inevitable seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them. The abuses which are removed seem to lay bare those which remain, and to render the sense of them more acute; the evil has decreased, it is true, but the perception of the evil is more keen. . . . No one any longer contended in 1780 that France was in a state of decline; there seemed, on the con trary, to be just then no bounds to her progress. Then it was that the theory of the continual and indefinite perfectibility. of man took its origin. Twenty years before nothing was to be hoped of the future: then nothing was to be feared. The imagination, grasping at this near, and unheard of felicity, caused men to overlook the advantages they already pos sessed, and hurried them forward to something new. 6 6 Alexis de Tocqueville, On the State of Society in France before the Revolu tion of 1789. (London : John Murray, 1856) pp. 321-324. Also' available as The Old Regime and. the French Revolution in a Doubleday paperback.

146 THE FREEMAN March Aggravated by Sympathy The expressions of sympathy that came from the privileged class itself only aggravated the situation: The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people de claimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered. They pointed out to each other the mon strous vices of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower orders: they em ployed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the miseries of the com mon people and their ill-paid labor; and thus they infuriated while they endeavored to relieve them. 7 Tocqueville went on to quote at length from the mutual recrimi7 Ibid., pp. 329-330. nations of the king, the nobles, and the parliament in blaming each other for the wrongs of the people. To read them now is to get .the uncanny feeling that they are plagiarizing the rhetoric of the limousine liberals of our own day.

All this does not mean that we should refrain from taking any measure truly calculated to relieve hardship and reduce poverty. What it does mean is that we should never take governmental measures merely for the purpose of trying to assuage the envious or appease the agitators, or to buy off a revolution. Such measures, betraying weakness and a guilty conscience, only lead to more far reaching and even ruinous de mands. A government that pays social blackmail will precipitate the very consequences that it fears. ~ IDEAS ON LIBERTY The "Law of Sympathy" BUT AID and sympathy must operate in the field of private and personal relationships under the regulation of reason and con science. If men trust to the State to supply "reason and con science," they so deaden themselves that the "law of sympathy" ceases to operate anywhere. Men who shrug off their personal obligations become hard and unfeeling, and it is small wonder then that they are entirely willing to go along with hard and unfeeling politics. It is when he decides to "let the State do it" that the humanitarian ends up by condoning the use of the guillotine for the "betterment" of man.

FROM JOHN CHAMBERLAIN'S REVIEW OF SUMNER'S What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, September 1955 issue of Ideas on Liberty.