There's a lot of talk in politics about "leveling the playing field" so that everybody gets the same opportunities. Usually, the same people that use that phrase also support major tax rate increases for the successful, or all-out income redistribution at the extreme. Those policies push apparent success toward uniformity.
The leveling of the field is an important goal. It's really a shame that a person born in a certain place could have almost no hope for a high-paying job compared to someone born just a few miles away in a nicer city. (Bring your own race anecdotes.) However, it's not such a noble goal to make everybody the same.
Let's break out the physical world analogies. Suppose we have a group of people standing on a field, and that this field isn't level (i.e. some parts are physically higher than others). These people are going to partake in some competition or event in which height is advantageous. Of course, it's not fair that some people should start lower than others. The event organizers should do some landscaping to ensure everybody has the same chance before merit is considered.
However, let's suppose the event organizers subscribe to the "redistribution" philosophy, and want everybody to have the same success - that is, the same final height - so they need to take off from the top. That's not landscaping, that's cutting people's heads off.
So before we start trying to level the playing field, let's stop to make sure we're landscaping the ground under people's feet, not decapitating them.
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