The Sense in Which Republicans Do Favor Equality of Opportunity

Paul Krugman has a great column out today about how there's zero evidence that Mitt Romney actually does favor "equality of opportunity," and less than zero evidence that Congressional Republicans do. The main thrust of his case is that we have extravagantly unequal opportunity in this country, as seen in things like malnutrition among poor children (not to mention the hideously inegalitarian educational system). But there is a Republican response to make, along the lines of my post on this subject a little over a year ago. (Note that I don't think it's a good response, just a response.) The government programs Krugman is advocating, they might say, aren't about equality of opportunity, but rather about ensuring equal outcomes. WIC and other food-stamp programs aim at ensuring that poor people, equally with rich people, have enough to eat. That's an outcome, right? If we really want to focus exclusively on opportunity, then we should provide everyone with the opportunity to achieve the outcome "has enough to eat."

Now as I said, this is not a good response. The first enormous problem with it is that making sure everyone has enough to eat ought to have priority, purely on its own terms, over any kind of esoteric concern with "opportunity" versus "outcomes." Failing to accord it such demonstrates that right-wingers who would make the above statement are, to put it mildly, callous bastards. But as I mention in my previous post, there's another problem, at the esoteric philosophy level. Even if we concede that the right-wing vision provides "equality of opportunity" at the level of "do I have enough material goods to sustain myself?", it entirely annihilates anything resembling such equality when it comes to the higher reaches of human aspiration. No one will, for instance, become President if they have to spend their whole life working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to feed themselves and find shelter. If we actually cared about the democratic egalitarian notion that "anyone can grow up to be President," we should need to guarantee a sizable amount of outcome-equality at the "lower," more formative levels of life and society. Otherwise our society would become, in a sense, a series of competitions, arranged from "basic necessities" to "highest aspirations," where at every step along the way only the winners of one game would get to even play the next one. That might suit Mitt Romney just fine, since he's one of the people who has won at every stage of the game, but it doesn't really sound very much like equality of opportunity, in the truest sense, to me.