Equality of opportunity is harmful

 Equality of opportunity is harmfful and should be changed to freedom of opportunity

A strong pro–laissez-faire argument for the claim  that the slogan “equality of opportunity” is harmful when treated as a political mandate rather than a negative right, tends to smuggle in coercive leveling—and the only practical way to “equalize” outcomes that flow from differing talents, preferences, families, and effort is to hamper the people who would otherwise advance (often by diluting standards), rather than to elevate everyone to the top.

1) The key distinction: equal rights vs. “equalized starts”

In a free-market framework, the proper meaning of opportunity is: everyone is free to try—i.e., equal rights (no legal barriers, no discrimination by government, secure property rights, freedom of contract). That is best described as freedom of opportunity.

But “equality of opportunity” is often used to mean something much stronger: the state must engineer comparable starting positions (similar preparation, credentials, resources, and sometimes similar measured performance). Once you adopt that stronger meaning, you run into an unavoidable fact: people differ.

• Differences in ability (cognitive, temperamental, physical)
• Differences in interests and values
• Differences in family culture and parental investment
• Differences in willingness to delay gratification, take risks, and work long hours

If you refuse to allow those differences to produce unequal results, you have to intervene—not merely by removing barriers, but by actively offsetting or neutralizing advantage.

2) Why “everyone equally smart” becomes “standards must be lowered”

The line “since it is impossible to make everyone equally smart, everyone must be made equally stupid by progressive education” is rhetorically sharp, and the underlying mechanism can be stated more precisely:

• If policy aims at equalizing measured performance (test scores, graduation rates, admissions rates) across broad groups, and
• if ability and preparation are not equal (and can’t be made equal at reasonable cost, or at all),
• then administrators face pressure to redefine success downward.

That doesn’t always mean literally “making people stupid.” More often it means:

• reducing rigor so more students “meet the benchmark,”
• grade inflation,
• eliminating tracking/advanced pathways,
• discouraging acceleration for high performers,
• teaching to the test or replacing objective standards with vague rubrics.

This is one plausible reading of what critics call “progressive education” when it emphasizes self-esteem, social promotion, and reduced competition over mastery. The harm, from a market-liberal viewpoint, is that human capital formation (real skills and knowledge) is undermined.

3) The incentive problem: penalizing excellence reduces the supply of excellence

A capitalist economy grows by enabling:

• specialization,
• innovation,
• high-skill accumulation,
• entrepreneurship,
• capital formation.

William J. Bernstein’s The Birth of Plenty stresses that modern prosperity rests on institutions and ideas that reward discovery, investment, and improvement. In education terms: when the system treats high performance as a “problem” that creates inequality, it implicitly taxes excellence—not always in money, but in time, attention, permission, and prestige.

If the best students are held back to preserve “equality,” you don’t just “redistribute” achievement—you destroy output (fewer scientists, engineers, managers, skilled tradespeople, entrepreneurs). The losses compound over time because advanced students are often future creators of tools, firms, and productivity gains that benefit everyone.

4) Rights-based capitalism: the state should not guarantee “equal opportunity” as an outcome

George Reisman’s Capitalism argues for capitalism as a system of individual rights: the government’s job is to protect life, liberty, property, and contract—not to guarantee equal results.

Translated to this context:

• Government should ensure no one is legally blocked from education or work due to caste-like restrictions.
• It should not promise that every person will have “equal” educational outcomes, credentials, or competitive position—because achieving that requires coercive interference with voluntary choice and with differences in ability and effort.

The more the state tries to guarantee “equal opportunity” in the strong sense, the more it must:

• direct resources by political criteria,
• standardize curricula,
• suppress competitive differentiation,
• and ultimately treat talented students (and high-effort families) as unfair “advantaged” parties whose advantage must be neutralized.

5) A cleaner formulation of your claim (stronger and harder to refute)

If you want a version that is philosophically tighter and less vulnerable to the “that’s a strawman” response, you can frame it like this:

1. People are not equal in ability, interests, and drive.
2. Therefore, a society that protects freedom will produce unequal outcomes in education and income.
3. If policymakers redefine “equal opportunity” to mean equalized outcomes or equal competitive position, they must use coercion.
4. Because you cannot equalize upward to the best level for everyone, the typical method becomes equalizing downward: restricting selection, compressing standards, and penalizing excellence.
5. This harms not only top performers, but the whole society by lowering skill formation and innovation.

That preserves your core idea—without requiring the literal claim that reformers consciously want stupidity. It’s about system incentives and institutional pressure, not necessarily motives.

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Learn more

• George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (especially the role of incentives, rights, and production)
• William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty (institutions supporting prosperity; innovation and human capital)
• F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (freedom vs. “social justice” equalization projects)
• Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education” / Capitalism and Freedom (school choice and limits of state planning)
• Thomas Sowell, Education: Assumptions Versus History (how policies affect standards and outcomes)
• Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (why intervention creates unintended consequences through incentives)