If incentives to ingenuity and skill in individual persons were to be abolished, the very fountains of wealth would necessarily dry up; and the equality conjured up by the Socialist imagination would, in reality, be nothing but uniform wretchedness and meanness for one and all, without distinction

From Rerum Novarum, 1891.  This truth needs to be continually told; the equality often promised by politicians can only be established by an equal misery.