I don't believe in equality. I think that it's a lovely ideal, but completely and utterly impractical, rather like Communism. To be fair, I can see why people want to believe in it: it assuages guilt at those worse off, and allows us to drag down those better off. But be honest: is there really an equal to you anywhere? I find it remarkable that we live in an age that recognises the individuality of everyone more than ever, and yet continues to shout out the equality creed which is completely at odds with it. Face it: there is no one at all who is exactly the same as you, and therefore there is no one who is exactly your equal. On some points you are better off than others, on some points you are worse off (I don't claim that there is an absolute heirarchy of merit).
I'm not discounting any small kind of equality (to take it to absurdity, I'm sure it's possible to find two people who are the same height, say) but I do believe that there is no absolute equality, that in general no one is equal. On particular aspects, it may be possible to group individuals who do have the same level of that particular quality, but in respect of that aspect it may be foolhardy to treat the groups as equal. Many times the terms 'equality' and 'discrimination' are bandied about, but you should be very careful about exactly who is being discriminated against, and why.
I'll try to illustrate my point with a pertinent example (considering my career as an actuary). I shall look at the glamorous world of life insurance. The purpose of life insurance is to offset the cost of your death by asking a company to pay a lump sum on your death to your estate. In return, the company asks for you to pay premiums to cover their costs. Lots of companies provide this service, and since they are in competition with each other they try to set their premiums as low as possible (and still cover their costs) in order to attract as large a market share as possible (working on the assumption that all other things being equal, the customer would prefer to pay less for this life cover).
What I'm interested in is how much a company should ask you to pay. The rough calculation is such that the amount of money you pay to them should cover the amount of money they expect to pay out. The key point is that the sooner you die, the more it costs the company in real terms, the later you die, the less it costs them. Say Company D discriminates (it charges different premiums to individuals depending on the company's view of how long they'll live) and Company E uses equality (everyone using them for life cover is charged the same). [Just a note: I mean that company E charges the same premium rate, relative to the amount of life cover; I'm not absurdly saying that they charge the same premium regardless of the level of cover.] Here's what will happen...
Company E would charge to same amount to an 85 year old smoker as it would to a 25 year old fitness instructor. Effectively, those people in Company E's portfolio who live longer subsidise those people who die earlier. The bad risks (as they are called) are much better off since they're getting cheaper insurance here than they would at Company D (who would charge an amount based on the individual's likelihood on dying). The people with low mortality rates, though, will find that the rates Company D offer will be much lower than those of Company E. Because of this, we see an effect called anti-selection: all the bad risks buy policies from Company E, all of the good risks buy policies from Company D. Within Company E's portfolio, we no longer have the people with low mortality rates to subsidise those with high mortality rates, and so Company E will very shortly go bankrupt.
It is for these reasons that older people get charged more (they're closer to dying), women get charged less (they live longer than men), smokers get charged more (it has a significant effect on your expected lifetime), and certain medical conditions will either increase your premiums or prevent you from getting life cover at all in some cases. You may call this discrimination against older people/men/smokers/ill folk, but it's not. It would be discrimination if all of these people had the same expetced lifetimes, but they don't. If we charged everyone the same amount of premiums, the people being discriminated against would be the people with low mortality rates, and the companies themselves. To apply this kind of individual charging structure where some people pay more than others is exactly there to prevent discrimination.
What I'm saying is (and in most situations even) equality breeds discrimination.
And now a note on racism. Before you attack we for being élitist or xenophobic or racist or anything like that, listen carefully to what it is that I'm saying. I am aginst false equality, where we say two people are equal just because they're people. I am against positive discrimination to particular groups of people when it leaves everyone else worse off. But I am also against mindless prejudice where we discriminate against a group of people on the grounds that we don't like them, and we just hate them out of ignorance. To apply the correct judgement through inequality requires rational thought, careful judgement, and most importantly good information. Otherwise that is ignorant prejudice.
And now an addendum. For all my talk of equality which I believe is against most people's viewpoints, I have another contrary belief. In stuations like exams, I find most people would prefer to do better than everyone else, whereas I actually prefer equality, and would like it if everyone did as well as each other. Similarly, I can't abide servitude; I could never keep servants, and treat anyone doing a service for me as an equal. Furthermore I wouldn't force someone to do something that I felt I could do, and that they would prefer not to. But this may be the topic of a different rant, I feel.