REBALANCING FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD

I get really tired of Chicago-  and Austrian-school partisans glibly dismissing active-state liberals’ efforts to rebalance the distribution of income from the obscene levels of inequality inflicted by captured political toadies in concert with unrestrained “Greed-is-good” capitalists intent on scooping up all the marbles.
Friedman’s flippant comment -- “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.” – is both a gross oversimplification and a straw-man argument. Nobody’s arguing for equality of  outcomes – contrary to Friedman’s implication. But just as “All men are created equal” proposes equality before the law, those who argue for economic justice propose equality of opportunity.
The ruling class in America, intent on preserving its privileges and station, conspires to deny lesser classes equal opportunity by, among other things, underfunding universal education/retraining at all levels, denying many access to affordable health and child care, disallowing paid family leave, tearing holes in the social safety net, turning the concept of progressive taxation on its head and covertly enforcing a rigid class structure discouraging social mobility. Only by Herculean effort and imagination do visionary technical innovators like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Fred Smith, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Meg Whitman, Elon Musk and the like shatter the molds constraining social mobility.  Those not so endowed are consigned to “lives of quiet desperation.”
Equality and freedom are neither absolute nor mutually exclusive. As with so many things in life, a constructive balance between the two must be sought. In its present, unbalanced, “conservative” incarnation “freedom” means the lack of restraint on the corporate “Masters of the Universe,” free to abuse the economic and political processes to the detriment of the working classes.  The net economic outcome of  “freedom” for the past 4 decades is indisputable: The rich get stupendously richer, the poor suffer and the middle class marks time, resulting in the greatest inequality in history.
And if this sounds like class warfare, it is. As Warren Buffett admits, “but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war and we’re winning.” These same Masters of the Universe and their congressional henchmen who cry out “Horrors! Socialism!” at the mere mention of a social safety net for the poor and working classes, are quick to socialize corporate losses in a financial/economic crisis while privatizing subsequent gains when the crisis abates. This conservative concept of “freedom” implies freedom and prosperity for the upper classes and the opposite for the working classes – a condition recognized by the followers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the Left. The working classes on the Right suffer the same discontent, but mistakenly attribute their plight to immigrants and welfare recipients rather than the Masters of the Universe who have hijacked government to serve their selfish ends.
Liberals, I submit, are justified in proposing “A society that puts freedom before equality will get neither,” given that “freedom,” abused by the ruling class, results in gross inequality, prompting, as it did in 1929 and 2008, financial and economic cataclysm, creating social unrest and discontent, inviting the rise of authoritarian government.  Hello?
The world in the 21st century is in the midst of a technological transformation of society, not unlike the Industrial Revolutions of the 19thand 20th centuries, requiring a commensurate transformation of labor-force skill sets. As a society, we have a choice: a) to embrace today’s unbalanced vision of “freedom” with its attendant benefits for the wealthy and negative consequences for the working classes or b) rebalance freedom and equality with a massive publicly funded education and retraining program to prepare the labor force to adapt productively to new and unprecedented technological change for the benefit of all. The latter course, coupled with progressive reforms of taxation, health and child care, and the unemployment safety net, will be needed to provide the working classes with equality of opportunity enabling them to adapt to the present and future Brave New World. Presently, women seem to be at the forefront of such a reform movement.
To misquote John F. Kennedy: “Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by women. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”