Equality of Opportunity

With the Alito battle coming to a public head once again, here is the first in a series of commentary on the "progressive steps" that according to Kennedy, Feingold and Co., Judge Alito will dismantle.

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." - Thomas Sowell

Sowell is, of course, correct. Just as it's a fact of life that you can't please everyone, it's equally a fact that politicians will nevertheless pretend that they can spread the rewards around so that all are happy. Never mind that, at its logical extreme, this is known as Communism.

Over time, one of the favorite tools of spread-it-around politicians and their friends in education and private industry has been affirmative action.

Affirmative action--the giving of preferential treatment to those who had been severely disadvantaged in the past--was originally proposed with African-Americans as its target group, and with the goal of bringing them more into the mainstream of the nation's life. As such, it seemed like a noble idea since African-Americans were the only people brought here against their will, enslaved for hundreds of years, then forced to suffer another century of Jim Crow discrimination, which was nearly as bad as slavery.

However, the idea of affirmative action suggests a rather superficial reading of history. In the first place, the awarding of special considerations initially was based on skin color, rather than economic circumstances.

This ignored the experiences of virtually every immigrant group.

The Irish and Italians, for example, were the victims of terrible poverty and discrimination. Imported Chinese laborers were barely more than chattel. And economist Sowell (himself an African-American) wrote in his landmark 1981 book, Ethnic America, that in his opinion the living conditions endured by Russian and Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the worst in the country's history, not even excluding slavery.

Yet today no one suggests that American descendants of any of these people are due some compensation for the affronts to their ancestors. This has not meant that no one else has wanted to jump on the bandwagon, though. Quite the contrary. A basic understanding of human nature would suggest that when some people are accorded special treatment, others will try to get it, too. Which is precisely what has happened.

Those minority groups clamoring for their own piece of the affirmative action pie have expanded to include Hispanic-Americans, the disabled, and even women (who, while they certainly have been discriminated against, are actually the majority of any population).

Affirmative action programs have persisted despite opposition from conservatives in Congress and a current presidential administration that has tied itself into intellectual knots trying to decide where it stands. The Supreme Court has narrowly upheld them, albeit with restrictions, from Bakke in 1978 to the University of Michigan case in June of 2004.

I got to thinking about all this as a result of the announcement a few weeks ago by the Census Bureau that the population of Texas, our second-largest state, is now estimated to consist of 50.2% minorities. In other words, there is no longer a majority against which to measure minority status.

This highlights the fact that the ethnic composition of America is changing, and changing fast. While the country is still predominantly white (or, more accurately, "non-Hispanic white"), that majority has fallen from 85% of the overall population in the 1960s to about 67% today. By 2050, if present trends persist, non-Hispanic whites will fall below 50%, and thus become just another minority. What will become true nationally is already the case in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, and now Texas, with five other states--Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona--likely to follow in the next decade.

This trend has resulted in the coining of a new adjective, "majority-minority," to describe states in which it has happened. It has also ignited a debate over the very use of the term "minority" itself. Does the word, as applied to population groups, continue to have meaning? And, by extension, if minority groups are fast becoming extinct, then don't we have to redefine the purpose of affirmative action programs?

Regarding terminology, Haig Bosmajian, author of The Language of Oppression, thinks the word is still useful because "by 'minority' today we mean a disadvantaged group of citizens... There's power behind these terms." But Roderick Harrison of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, counters that the word is "a confusing term as one thinks of today's population."

Star Parker (whom I have featured on this blog), a former welfare mother who put herself through college and now heads the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education puts it more bluntly: The word is "absolutely misused. It's become an entitlement word, a word for victimization."

As for affirmative action itself, defenders such as former University of Michigan president Lee Bollinger believe that we should not give up "the largeness of vision that defined the best of the civil rights era." Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Gregory Rodriguez of the New America Foundation couldn't disagree more. Rodriguez calls for "a thorough reconsideration of our collective notion of fairness and our society's duty to uphold it... in the more demographically complex post-civil rights era, there is no longer a coherent vision or a collectively held rationale for addressing social inequity."

My own view is that it's time to move on, and find new ways of looking at our collective problems, and dealing with them. In the end, each of us is a minority of one, with full responsibility for our individual lives. Support for that notion lies at the very heart of what the nation is supposed to be, a place where everyone has equality of opportunity.

Government has a role in making that happen, and in quashing the kinds of discrimination that impede the individual, but any attempt to guarantee equality of outcome is doomed to failure.

The great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek hit the nail right on the head back in 1945, when he wrote in his classic, The Road to Serfdom: "From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.

Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."