Possession of different degrees and kinds of property

From The Truth About Income Inequality by John H. Hinderaker & Scott W. Johnson.  

In truth, the liberal appetite for “inequalities” to remedy has become insatiable. Redistribution of income, which was not recognized by the founders of this country as a legitimate object of government, has now become its chief purpose. The traditional functions of government have dwindled into relative insignificance. National defense now accounts for only about 17 percent of total federal spending. And an American Bar Association study concluded that the entire apparatus of the civil and criminal justice system consumes less than 3 percent of public spending. These traditional functions of government are dwarfed by its principal contemporary purpose: Taking money from one person in the form of taxes and giving it to someone else. To sustain this vast structure of redistribution, liberals must always claim, with increasing hysteria, that inequality is growing and “income gaps” are expanding. If the public were ever to realize fully the hollowness of these claims, the entire redistributionist enterprise would collapse.

The “equality” espoused by the critics of income inequality is equality of outcome or of result. This notion of equality appropriates the language of America’s founders, but it nevertheless strikes at the heart of the founders’ understanding of equality, which was based on equality of rights. For the founders understood that equality of outcome is impossible and undesirable, given the different abilities with which each person is born. Thus James Madison wrote in the most celebrated of the Federalist papers that the “first object of government” is protecting the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” which necessarily results in the “possession of different degrees and kinds of property,” or inequality of outcome. The liberal critics of income inequality have an argument not just with the facts or with their current political adversaries, but with the authors of the American Constitution itself.