Anyone who accuses the left of egalitarianism is met with swift rebuke: “We accept differences between people, including differences in income and wealth. We just believe the differences should not be allowed to become too extreme.” This sentiment reflects what can probably be described as a prevailing consensus in today’s society: differences are acceptable, but too much is too much. And it is encapsulated in the rallying cry of “no more billionaires,” a demand first championed by Bernie Sanders.   

The economist Murray N. Rothbard used the following argument against egalitarianism in his essay “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”: “This means, of course, that equality of all men – the egalitarian ideal – can only be achieved if all men are precisely uniform, precisely identical with respect to all of their attributes. The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction – a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.”

Indeed, such conceptions of equality are nothing new; if anything, the authors of classical utopian novels were obsessed with the notion of equality. In almost every design of a utopian system, private ownership of the means of production (and sometimes even all private property) is abolished, as is any distinction between rich and poor. As early as 1516, the novel Utopia by the Englishman Thomas More, who established the name of this literary genre, states: “Thus I do fully persuade myself that no equal and just distribution of things can be made, nor that perfect wealth shall ever be among men unless this propriety be exiled and banished. But so long as it shall continue, so long shall remain among the most and best part of men the heavy and inevitable burden of poverty and wretchedness.”

In philosopher Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 novel The City of the Sun, almost all of the city’s inhabitants, whether male........

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