In his 1963 essay, “The Negro Revolution,” Murray Rothbard observes that by the 1930s and 1940s American intellectuals had embraced two principles:

(1) all races and ethnic groups are intellectually and morally equal or identical, and (2) that therefore no one should be allowed to treat anyone else as if they were not equal, i.e., that the State should be used to compel absolute equality of treatment among the races.

As Rothbard points out, the first principle is incorrect, and the second principle is a non sequitur. Even if all human beings were intellectually and morally equal, which they are not, it would not follow that the state should be used to compel equal treatment. Yet these principles have been harnessed for decades to justify federal enforcement of equality. The promotion of equality has, in turn, been depicted as the hallmark of patriotism, with the idea being promoted that equality is an American ideal. Writing in the New York Times in 2013, the economist Joseph Stiglitz depicts equal opportunity as America’s “national myth,” an essential component of America’s “creed.” He decried inequality as a threat to the American dream and an affront to the ideal of America as a land of opportunity:

Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish – and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other – and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. We have an economic, and not only moral, interest in saving the American dream.