From Thomas Sowell, writing in his 2002 book The Quest for Cosmic Justice:
There has now been created a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example. Irrational as such ideological indulgences may be, they are virtually inevitable when equality becomes the social touchstone, for equality can be achieved only by either divorcing performance from reward or by producing equal performances. Since the latter is all but impossible, if only because everyone is not equally interested in the same kinds of performances, the passion for equality leads toward a divorce of performance and reward – which is to say a divorce of incentive and behavior, and even a divorce of cause and effect in our minds.
Via EIA