Affirmative Action: The Rationale

Johnson’s “result” can never be realized because there will always be people who fail to even take care of themselves, however equal we are before the law, however level the playing field, however available opportunities for success. Humans are not—and cannot be made to be—equal in two critical areas: ability and ambition. Some people will always excel: some will always fail. But, a nation where every man has an equal opportunity to succeed, where the rules are applied fairly, where each individual is guaranteed the unfettered ability to pursue his own happiness within the boundaries set by objective law and reason…such a place is one that can and will be created in time, with effort, through education, by reason…but not by force.

Proponents of affirmative action endorse a forced solution to the social problem of racism that actually slows progress and keeps the old sores open and festering. Their solution, of course, violates the rights of all individuals and attempts to cure racism with racism, injustice with injustice. It forces universities, government offices, and business firms of every kind to lower their admissions and hiring standards in order to meet racist demands for “diversity.” Finally, their solution provides the descendants of the oppressed with an excuse for their failure.

If justice was President Kennedy’s objective when he issued Executive Order 10925, what became of affirmative action in reality is abomination. Affirmative action should never have been about correcting the past. Work to ensure that all Americans enjoy a market place free from racial bias is about setting up a better future.

Setting up a better future requires the abandonment of collectivism-altruism in all of its forms. As long as people continue to view themselves as members of some group and not as individuals with their own, self-made identity; as long as people continue to believe sacrifice is a moral duty and that there is virtue in suffering, individual rights will continue to be sacrificed to the collective. The losers will wear their bleeding sores like medals of honor, beating their chests in righteous indignation, drawing imagined power from their suffering.

Setting up a better future is about the recognition of government’s responsibility to protect the rights of individuals to pursue their own happiness. All of the laws protecting the rights of individuals have been on the books since Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the incorporation doctrine, Gitlow v. New York, 1925. No new law need be written. [In fact both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unnecessary, redundant and divisive.] Existing law must be enforced. Victims of discrimination should have the courts to protect them from rogue elements within our country that persist in discriminatory practices. But, sadly, the Supremes got it all wrong, too. Federal courts today use “strict scrutiny” when deciding these cases, and where the court deems necessary, affirmative action [even hiring quotas] has been employed, United States v. Paradise, 1987. In other words, the courts have opted to force violators to change their immoral practices with immoral force, rather than simply to punish violators for their illegal practices. Strict scrutiny wrongly preserves the immoral practices of affirmative action.

A government that fails to protect the rights of all individuals, i.e., each human, every citizen, has failed its primary mandate and has, therefore, lost legitimacy. If the failure is wide-spread [as it was during the 100 years of segregation in this country] then it is the peoples’ right to revolution.

…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. [Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson]

The Civil Rights Movement [1955-1965] was that revolution, and both the followers of Dr. King and the followers of Malcolm X [however different their tactics] waged and won a just war against an illegitimate government.