* city minority contracts, mostly
Topics: Subsidy
27 Sep 1994
From: ervan
The headline article of today's Chronicle was "Protest targets exclusion of
blacks. March for economic rights". "for" means "against" of course, but
you already knew that. Al Green, president of the local NAACP, said "We've
been denied our lawful fair share of the economic order." "Lawful" and
"fair" obviously stand in contradiction in that sentence.
Euphemisms aside, his complaint was based on:
1) a recent report showing that the city of Houston's minority contract quota
program is not working.
2) There are disproportionately few black judges in Harris County's judiciary.
3) Some minority designated congressional districts have been struck down.
In other words, after finding that the government has failed three out of
three (in his opinion), his proposal is for more government.
As for (1), the city has done just you would expect, it ignored its own laws
and granted contracts on the basis of who contributed to the mayor's
campaign. That's the nature of the beast after all, to transfer money to
the politically connected by exploiting everyone else. To the extent that
the minority contract quotas have worked, the free market has done a
tolerable job of undoing the damage inherent in the policy by putting forth
black owned shell companies and letting the actual work still go to the
people who can do it efficiently. The cost is then the frictional cost of
having one or two people at the top not actually do anything, plus all of
the paperwork to prove you have actually complied with the law. To the
extent that it has actually done what it intended, the effect is to raise
our taxes to pay people to be inefficient (since the reward is based on who
you are and not what you do, the longer the project takes, the better).
As evidence of my prior claim that the effect of AA is to polarize everyone
because they are fighting over a fixed amount of spoils based purely on
race, the Chronicle notes "the program [...] has become a source of friction
among black, Hispanic and women's business interests, all of which have
jockeyed for more city contracts." I wonder what the women will offer mayor
Bob to bump up their quota...
What few fiscally sensible people there are at city hall have suggested
privatizing city services. That has really upset people. All of the AA'ers
screamed first. At least they were honest, they basically said that it's
harder to force private businesses to implement quotas than it is to get the
city to do so. They now have the state employee's union on their side. The
executive director quipped "[our benefits would be] wiped out through
privatization". Yes, exactly. In other words, they could no longer use the
coercive power of government to fleece the taxpayers to pay them more than
they are worth. Both groups fear competing based on their own ability.
As for claim (2), I don't suppose it would have anything to do with few
blacks going to law school.
Claim (3) is a curious reflection back on claim (1). It says that we have
to arrange districts to produce the 'right' outcome (more liberal blacks in
power), regardless of what voters want in anything resembling a fair
election (granting for the moment that such ever exists (*)). (1) said that
we have to arrange the economic system to produce more income for essentialy
the same group, regardless of real productivity, i.e. letting people buy
what they want.
On a related note, Robert Reich said in a speech that there is prejudice
against hiring female managers because "even though women are half the work
force, they make up only between 3 and 6 percent of corporate executives and
officers. Minorities account for only 1 percent." Yes, but women are not
half of the work force that is in a position to be promoted. One need look
no further than the following model:
1) Upper level managers generally are people who have worked their way up
through the ranks at a particular company over several decades.
2) Women usually interrupt (if not terminate) their careers for pregnancy and
child care.
Reality may suck (if you want to see it that way), but don't blame capitalism.
Another interesting conundrum in all of this is that one branch of feminism
wants to claim that women are in all ways, except as football players ;-),
the same in potential as men. Another branch wants to claim that women are
special in some way, generally more nurturing. A naive instance of this is
the argument that we need more women legislators and we'd be less likely to
go to war. There are lots of tricky questions here, but my point is that
any feminist who holds the latter point of view must also accept the
converse: men are more ruthless. If the job needs someone who is ruthless
(like CEO's perhaps), then it is not surprising that it is dominated by men.
Though this diverges from my main point, I want to comment on the genetic
fitness for employment argument. It goes like this: Group X is not
genetically predisposed to be meaningfully different than Y, but X does have
different average characteristcs than Y because of social custom, therefore
differentiating between X & Y is Xism. This is nonsense of course. People
are as they are. That they came to be that way because of upbringing
instead of genetic predisposition is not relevant. If someone wants to play
guitar, it doesn't matter if there is a music gene or simply if his/her
parents encouraged it. At the larger level, mucking about in employment to
put people in jobs they could have had if their upbringing had been
different makes no more sense than putting them in jobs they could have had
if their genes had been different. So, whenever a feminist makes the
argument that women pay more for clothing, prefer lower paying jobs, don't
care as much about math, etc. etc. only because society 'told' them to and
not because it is intrinsically female to do so, my response is: so what?
Be whoever you want. If you don't want to pay more for dresses, don't.
Don't blame me for telling you that you might like to. It doesn't matter if
men are genetically predisposed to be ruthless or if society conditions boys
to be that way, we can only expect to find mostly men in positions requiring
a ruthless person (assuming, for the sake of argument, that the feminists
are right about women being more caring).
------------
More dreaded footnotes:
(*) For those of you who have not heard my thoughts on this before, I do
think that there have been unfair districts that needed to be changed.
However, the current redistricting is driven not by a concern for fairness
but by a concern for guaranteeing a particular outcome, i.e. removing the
voters from the loop and just letting the politicians pick their own successors.
---Ervan
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