But if people in different stations are mistakenly thought to be the same, then we might envy them the rewards they’ve earned fair and square and might implement coercive policies to hammer down the nails that stick up. The economist Friedrich Hayek wrote, “It is just not true that humans are born equal;… if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position;… [thus] the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other.”23
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