Ludwig von Mises, “On Equality and Inequality” (1961)

This file is a single-author political-economic essay, organized in seven short sections. Mises’s central thesis is that liberal equality means equality before the law, not equality of natural endowment. He begins by separating the doctrine of rights from the biological claim that human beings are alike in capacity:

It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible.

From this distinction Mises builds the essay’s main conceptual move: inequality of ability need not produce caste rule if social institutions make superior capacities serve others. In precapitalist orders, the able become masters; in capitalism, he argues, they must satisfy buyers. The market is therefore presented not as capitalist domination but as consumer sovereignty.

The common man is supreme in the market economy. He is the customer who “is always right.”

This market argument is paired with a political one. Representative government is, for Mises, the political analogue of consumer choice: officeholders depend on voters as entrepreneurs depend on customers. Socialism reverses this relation. However democratic its language, planning transfers decisions from dispersed individuals to a directing minority.

It always amounts to a subjection of the many to the few.

The middle sections attack what Mises sees as a contradiction in modern egalitarian and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Literature on advertising and consumer manipulation, he argues, claims to defend ordinary people while portraying them as manipulable dependents in need of guardians. He concedes that mass taste may be poor, but denies that this proves the case for paternal rule.

It is generally admitted that the average man displays poor taste.

Section III extends the argument to education. Universal high-school and college aspirations are treated as a test case for the belief that education can erase natural differences. Mises argues that expanding credentials by lowering standards does not equalize ability; it weakens serious instruction and harms those capable of profiting from it.

The experience of the last decades in American education bears out the fact that there are inborn differences in man's intellectual capacities that cannot be eradicated by any effort of education.

The theoretical center comes in section IV, where Mises denies that democracy requires faith in majority genius. Majority rule is not a metaphysical tribute to “the people,” but a practical institution for changing rulers without revolution. The value of democracy is peaceable correction, not collective infallibility.

Government by the people, i.e., by elected representatives, makes peaceful change possible.

In the final sections, Mises criticizes the quasi-religious cult of the “common man” and warns that socialism is advancing most dangerously within the West itself, aided by intellectuals, universities, foundations, and even businessmen who imagine planning would preserve their status without competitive discipline. The essay’s relevance lies in this synthesis of legal equality, market order, and anti-socialism: unequal capacities are real, but capitalism allegedly channels them into service, while socialism restores command. Mises ends with a warning rather than a fatalism.

Yet, this outcome is not inevitable.