“Aliis si licet, tibi non licet.”
– Terence, Second Century BC Roman playwright
Were he alive today, Terence could explain much of what is happening in our own foundering Republic. Consider the line above from his work “Heauton Timōroumenos.” In true Roman fashion it goes straight to the heart of the matter. “What is permitted to others,” one of his characters tells another, “is not permitted to you.” Yes, Terrance would have no problem explaining why Donald Trump is being hounded by the drones of official Washington while Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton remain unpunished for actual crimes. Equality and its twin, equal justice under law, are dead; butchered by the Democrat Party. Once the bedrock of our country, both are now well and truly buried under the foundation of the new national security state.
In equality’s stead we have “equity,” which no one pimping it has ever defined. This, as well as its aural similarity to the moribund “equality” allows it to approach us in a thick verbal fog, werewolf-like, before it leaps and in a twinkling rips America’s throat out.
The Roman Republic had “equity,” as Terence could confirm. Roman society was based on multiple interlocking hierarchies with reciprocal privileges, responsibilities and obligations. These elements together created a remarkably stable society. But their equity was not what modern Democrats mean by the term
Roman equity recognized inequality in the social orders and demanded more from the patrician class than from the ordinary citizen. They sacrificed more for the state, subsidized works that favored the poor, supported clients lower on society’s pecking order and they obeyed a stricter set of rules and laws. The “lower orders,” in turn were expected to follow their lead, shut up and work.
Traditional Romans had an individual hierarchy of service as well. The state came first; one was expected to unquestionably sacrifice oneself for Rome. Family was next; through marriage, business, military prowess and politics every Roman worked to advance the interests of his or her family. The individual came last. When a leading Roman became self-serving like, say, Sulla, his colleagues usually found a short pier for him to take a long walk on. It was the real reason behind Julius Caesar’s untimely end: a little too self-dealing.
Here and now helping one’s self while a high-ranking official doesn’t seem to excite much interest in government or the media – at least if one has the right party connections. And the meaning of “equity” has taken a stomach-churning twist.
Roman equity required Gaius Marius to pay his legions out of his own pocket when the Senate failed to do so. It also made the Roman army his client – an ominous foretaste of the Julio-Claudian Roman empire to come.
Democrat “equity,” in contrast, requires one flavor of Americans to grovel and apologize for their supposed advantages to another flavor, while saddling the industrious and productive with massive debt to compensate those who are less so for wrongs experienced firsthand by neither group. Democrats do this not out of a sense of obligation for their role in past depredations, although the Democrat party was buried to its eyeteeth in them; they do it in hopes that it will gain them more political support among the beneficiaries than they lose among those forced to pay for their caprices.
Their sense of “equity” is also upside-down. Witness the current “student loan forgiveness” debacle, which will essentially require middle class working stiffs to pay $2,000 each in loan writeoffs for those struggling with bills from colleges which are recruiting grounds for the elite in business and government. So, a Boise welder paying a Wall Street lawyer’s college debt. Even Augustus would blanche at the suggestion.
Democrats embrace racialized hiring, college admissions and workforce analysis. They seek racial quotas in lending and especially in the dispensation of justice. And they do this not to ensure social stability, as equity did with Rome, but to create chaos – which they will then propose to solve through initiatives ever more beneficial to themselves and their partisans.
None of these things will work, because they neglect what equity really is: a morally-based system of checks and balances aimed at producing a stable society through acceptance by a large majority of the state’ population that its operating principles are fair regardless of individual outcome. Democrats recognize no reciprocal obligation for recipients of others’ largess. There is no understanding that this is being done so that society will remain peaceful, no sense that their “equity” will somehow balance our country’s books.
Democrats are interested in none of that. Relabeling their redistributionist fantasies “equity” is like the old joke about calling a dog’s tail a leg: it’s still a four-legged dog, and calling a tail a leg makes you look like a nitwit.
Which in this case is true, and a good argument for removing from office any Democrat who uses the term “equity” in the current manner.
