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This meme only “works” if you stop letting equality smuggle itself in as a moral trump card.

Humans are born uneven. Not in worth—in capacity. Strength, IQ, impulse control, charm, health, family stability, appetite for risk, luck. You can pretend those differences don’t matter, but the moment people are allowed to act freely, they cash out into unequal outcomes. Some people build, some coast, some burn it all down. Freedom is a sorting machine.

So the first half is basically a description: if people are free, they will not end up equal. Not because someone rigged the game. Because the inputs aren’t equal and choices compound.

The second half is the warning: if you demand equality of outcomes, you don’t get it for free. You get it by force. There’s no other mechanism. Outcomes only converge when you stop people from doing the things that produce divergence: earning more, choosing differently, hiring freely, saying what they think, competing hard, associating with who they want, opting out. Equality-as-leveling needs an enforcer. And enforcers don’t show up with a gentle “please.” They show up with rules, penalties, and permission structures—what you’re allowed to do, to say, to keep.

That’s the core trade: freedom produces inequality; outcome equality requires coercion.

Now for the part people always dodge: there are different “equalities.” And conflating them is the whole scam.

• Equal dignity: every person counts as a person. That’s a moral claim. Compatible with freedom.
• Equality before the law: same rules, same due process, no caste exemptions. Also compatible with freedom—arguably required for it.
• Equality of outcomes: everyone ends up in roughly the same place. That’s the one that fights liberty, because it needs constant correction.

Most modern arguments cheat by pointing at the first two and then demanding the third. “If you deny outcome parity, you deny human worth.” No—what you’re denying is the claim that the state (or HR, or the university, or the tribunal) should get to manage adult lives until the spreadsheet looks morally satisfying.

You can have compassion without pretending outcomes should match. You can want upward mobility without confiscating difference. You can care about the bottom without pretending the top is illegitimate.

And yes: sometimes liberty creates ugly inequality. The honest response is to name the costs and argue about which constraints are justified—fraud laws, safety nets, antitrust, disability supports, basic education—without turning “equality” into a magic word that dissolves the question of coercion.

The meme’s point is simple and harsh: if you want equal outcomes, you’re volunteering everyone for supervision. And the people doing the supervising never start by supervising themselves.