The Virtues of Conservatism - Part 5

Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety, and embrace inequality as a healthy and necessary factor in societal development. Let us be clear. Conservatives are not insensitive to inequality! Rather, they embrace philosophies and strategies that offer a reasonable management of the reality. One of those strategies is called competition. Competition necessarily and predictably causes inequality ... not for the purpose of subjugation, humiliation or domination, but for the purpose of advancing excellence. To quote Russell Kirk. "For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation."  

The Utopian dream of social justice is just that; a dream. Of course we recognize that social justice is just code for the redistribution of wealth. Social Justice sounds like a great idea, but it's unsustainable, because it violates the law of productivity:

• People will be productive when properly rewarded
• People will prosper in an environment that fosters creative expression, productivity and autonomy
• People want to keep the proceeds of their labor and the freedom to distribute it according to their self interests
• People will resist productivity when not adequately rewarded
• People will resist productivity when rewarded for another persons labor

Humans are born unequal and die unequal. It is this reality of inequality that, in part, feeds the human need to seek significance. Those misguided individuals and organizations who seek to take earned resources from the productive members of our society and distribute those resources to the non productive members of that society are wrong on two levels: On the first level, redistribution is unsustainable. On the second level, there must be a system in place for redistribution, and that system, however noble the effort, will not and cannot be equitable in its organization, methodology or outcomes.

Conservatives embrace variety, accept the reality that inequality will always exist, and submit that"... attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation."  Russell Kirk

The outline for this treatment is credited to Russell Kirk and the web site at: 
http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/ten-conservative-principles/