24/05/2005 11:16:33 am
From Inequality to Opportunities for All. It struck me as I yesterday went by car some 160 kilometres in southern Sweden how fundamentally unequal opportunity was distributed in the agricultural society. Of course nobody had what we today call good living standards in those days, not even the wealthy. But the point is that the access to land was what determined your life. And that was just pure chance, it wasn?t up to you as a person at all. You had to be lucky enough to be born in a family that owned some land. Then you could at least have food, drink, clothes and a house. In the very southern Sweden, in Skåne, the land is very good for agriculture. Close by, a bit more to the north, in Småland, that is not the case - and people there were very poor (and a very large share of the population moved to the US in the late 19th Century).

During industrialism, when agriculture got more efficient and more people started to work in the industry, access to land was no longer what determined your future. Instead, it was ability to work or access to capital. And that is more up to you - but still somewhat unequally distributed. Now that we have been moving for decades into the knowledge-based service society, the mind is what determines your opportunities. It is up to you all the way - not your parents and not the land.

It is a fundamental difference, which implies that politics doesn?t have a fundamentally unequal situation to adjust with a big government. This is where Marx was totally wrong. He believed that inequality - and the oppression from a few with privileges of the many born without them - would last. It didn?t. And the policies of big government that we still have, which are based on that assumption, should be abolished too.