https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/12/no_author/the-importance-of-questioning-the-egalitarian-premise/

By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org

December 11, 2025

One of the most basic threats to liberty, which is often overlooked, is that the defense of individual liberty as an ideal is seldom heard in political debate. The ideal of liberty is often overshadowed by quotidian political concerns that follow the latest outrage. In public debates on policies designed to advance social justice goals, the disputants generally argue about the effectiveness of the policies without questioning the underlying ideological premise or its implications for liberty. Most critiques attempt to show that for one reason or another the policy will not work as intended, or that the costs of the policy outweigh any benefits. They focus on problems of scope and implementation.

This is why both sides of the political divide are often referred to as a “uniparty”—two sides of the same coin that merely debate the speed at which government policies should unfold. In his book Socialism, Ludwig von Mises argues that “Communists and anti-Communists” are often involved in disputes of this nature. They are often two rival groups who agree on the premise that the government should replace the free market.

Both groups “want to substitute totalitarian government control for the market economy” although they disagree on the form that government should take. Mises also argued that the totalitarianism of progressives and self-styled anti-fascists is little different from that of “the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis” whom they claim to oppose. He saw all these groups as “mutual rivalries among the various totalitarian movements,” quarreling amongst themselves over “who should run the totalitarian apparatus.”

Murray Rothbard struck at the heart of this problem in relation to the debates on egalitarianism, when he pointed out that the public debate is framed around the types of egalitarian schemes that should be adopted, but very few question the premise itself. In Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature he addresses this question by asking the fundamental question—“should equality be granted its current status as an unquestioned ethical ideal?” He observes that this question is rarely asked. Instead, both sides agree on what they see as the ethical ideal, and disagree only on specific policies:

On the entire question of legally and judicially imposed “civil rights,” we have been subjected to a trap, to a shell game in which “both sides” adopt the same pernicious axiom and simply quarrel about interpretation within the same framework.

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