When you go shopping for clothes, you would never expect each aisle to list one size for every item, or even every brand. This would mean the clothing brand assumes every individual would be happy with a universal size. But clearly, this isn’t true, because humans come in different shapes, sizes, and heights.

Humoring this idea a bit further, if customers discovered their favorite brands actually implemented this, they’d probably rush to customer service to ask if staff forgot to stock the store properly. Upon discovering there was “nothing that went wrong”, the same customers would likely leave the store in a tizzy, wondering how and why a company would choose to treat customers this way.

Since we would never expect such behavior of clothing brands, why do we expect it of political and socioeconomic systems? The answers are complex, but in order to bring our nation and world to a better place, we have to analyze how popular perspective has drifted away from individual freedoms. This article will examine why some people inherently lean towards “equality for all”, and why others fight for individual freedoms – and why individual freedoms preserve freedom for all.

How Taxes Secretly Tell The Story Of The Individual

As a starting point, taxes can teach us a lot. It’s challenging enough managing the money you do receive every couple weeks; having more taken away in taxes adds insult to injury.

It’s for this reason that most Americans agree more taxation on personal income is undesirable. You trade your time for money, and time is more valuable than money; you should get to keep the maximum amount of what you’ve earned.

Despite all this, 63 percent of Americans say upper-income earners pay too little in taxes, and 67 percent say the same of corporations. This pervasive opinion has persisted for years, despite the fact that the top 10 percent of earners in the US pay 71 percent of federal income tax.

The vast majority of people who are in the top 10 percent of income earners or above had to work their way there. Most of them work managerial positions in finance, technology, medicine, sales, law, and construction. In other words, the majority of people even in the top one percent didn’t get there through stealing from the poor; they got there through personal consistency and hard work.

The left finds it easy to call the rich “immoral”, because only an immoral person would “hoard” wealth and thereby “cause” life to be unfair. But therein also lies the truth: life is unfair. No one is going to experience the same gains and losses as another person across their economic or social life. This is challenging to accept but completely true.

What happened to encouraging good behavior as a baseline for everyone, instead of arbitrarily categorizing people as “good” and “evil” based on their accomplishments? A medical specialist isn’t any less of a person because they make $300,000 per year.

On the other side of the same coin, a fast food worker doesn’t get to claim “moral high ground” because their work is “harder” or “less honorable.” Successful individuals achieved success because they followed where their individual ambition was pointing them. The left doesn’t get to siphon money away just because such ambition paid off. Lowering taxes is best; let individuals keep the money they’ve earned!

Group Freedoms Vs. Individual Freedoms: Which Matter More?

Speaking of siphoning money away, one of the biggest reasons groups like socialists and communists prefer “leveling the playing field” is because to them, everyone should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of others’ labor. The problem with this is it deincentivizes all forms of individual contribution. If the work everyone is doing is all going through one giant funnel and the profits and results of that work are equally distributed, why would any one individual work harder – or specialize in meaningful areas of said work – when it’s not going to be recognized?

For the sake of example, let’s use small numbers without accounting for taxes and dues. If 12 people contribute to work that produces $25,000, this means each person will receive $2,083. Depending on where you live, for a month’s work, this isn’t necessarily horrible.

However, what if one person really loves this type of work and wants to become a manager? Should they get paid more because they are now supervising more work and employees? Would that be unfair to other employees, who are still doing the same work and may get jealous? Should the aspiring manager be barred from higher pay and different work, just because they look at the world differently?

Clearly, we can see that individual ambition warrants rewards – and sometimes, those rewards are financial in nature. By nature of the individual, some are going to work harder than others, and some are going to work more effectively than others.

As a result, those who have worked harder should not have the fruits of their labor stolen and redistributed to those who have not made such individual contributions. As PJ O’Rourke says in How to Explain Conservatism: “Collectivism doesn’t work because it’s based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person’s ‘fair share’ of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.”

If we fight for group freedoms, in the event one individual doesn’t feel properly represented by the group, the group begins to suffer. The individual can then feel betrayed because groups often take the most common viewpoint and present them as fully representative. If we fight for individual freedoms, the individuals and the group are supported, because the group becomes a way for individuals to voice a shared interest together, thereby becoming stronger.

With individuals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning a house seat this year, it’s clear some Americans prefer collectivism to individual freedom. With a growing number of young Americans ignorant of the political and societal forces that have made the US so great, this requires the liberty-minded to be more effective than ever before at dismantling collectivist arguments. It’s up to those who love capitalism, property, and individualism to bring these values back to center stage.