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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
I feel like social contract theory gets at a lot of this.
The 'so long as he does not impunge on the commons' part of B is where a lot of the practical considerations are hidden, given that there's essentially zero land on the planet that isn't claimed by some person or entity already. Natural rights make a lot of sense if you are talking about an unclaimed frontier, but once everything is already claimed, the whole 'what nature provides' thing stops being practically relevant, and all your discussions are about the relationships between people and the things they own.
And when we're talking about that, I'm pretty happy saying something like: No, people do not have the natural right to be protected from the consequences of their bad decisions, nor even from the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune. that they had no control over.
But people do have the natural right to cooperate on projects, and one of those projects can be something like 'a democratic government concerned with the general welfare of the people inside it, including shielding them from suffering and harm whatever the origin'.
And it turns out that's a pretty popular project that a lot of people like and want to get on board with.
And once a project like that has laid claim to a certain plot of land, it has the natural right to use that land however it wants, including saying 'anyone who lives on our land has to pay such-and-such taxes to be used for such-and-such purposes, and will get one vote to influence everything the project does including those taxes and that spending'.
At that point, I feel like natural rights have pretty much been satisfied and are not very relevant to the everyday questions about what the people in that project decide to do anymore. Aside form ensuring exit rights, which the US at least has.
If someone imagined that such a project did not exist and that the land they lived on was not owned by such a project, then they might think that they were still in the state of nature where their natural rights predominated. But they'd simply be mistaken.
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