Excellent work.

The difference between leftists and conservatives is often put in terms of equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes, but that is not, IMHO, its essence. Rather, Leftists tend to be totalitarian and binary, where conservatives are minimalist and optimalist.

If we start with a default definition of "fairness" as "happiness in proportion to virtue," we might infer that it is government's job to cause people to be as happy as they deserve to be. But equality of outcome doesn't produce that result, because it inadequately incentivizes those who find happiness by providing things that make happiness possible. If the only way for the salt of the earth not to die of some minor ailment is to pay inventors of medical technologies disproportionately to their virtue, then so be it. We can force people to work their butts off, but not to work their brains out. (It won’t do to say that those who are not altruistically motivated don’t “deserve” incentives; we don’t care how happy they are; we care how happy they enable us to be.)

The conservative view is that inequality is the price we pay for a rising floor. Under that view, the job of government is to cause the fruits of smartness to be distributed as equally as possible without killing the tree they grow on. That's why I say conservatives are "optimalists." They don’t seek “equality of opportunity” or “equality of outcome”; they seek as much equality of everything as is optimal, and they recognize that reasonable people can disagree as to how that result can be measured and, therefore, achieved. They then go to work on a political system that aims for a consensus regarding the methods employed to achieve optimal outcomes as measured by that system. It’s very meta and very self-referential, but that’s not anyone’s fault, something that totalitarians refuse to believe, which is what makes them so dangerous.