Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals Page 18
The liberal position is that we continue to let government accumulate those funds, invest them in low interest bearing government bonds, and exclude the participants from having any decision making role on what to do with those funds. Again the theory is that our citizens, who are brilliant enough to continue electing liberals to Congress, the presidency, etc., are still too stupid to control and invest any of their own monies that will later form their Social Security benefits. Liberals answer the question as to how to maintain the solvency of the system by saying that we will be prudent enough in future Congresses to not spend those surpluses foolishly, but will secure them by reducing the national debt, thereby freeing up sufficient funds in the future to pay the recipients their guaranteed benefits. This answer requires a great leap of faith that somehow the Democrats will be precluded from ever controlling Congress again, because surely once they reacquire control, those surpluses would somehow vanish for new "investments" in public education, welfare, the environment, etc. (Even the Republicans, unless given a strong majority, are not immune from freely spending this "free money.")
The contrary position, and what should be the Jewish position, is to be consistent with the principle that the individual is capable and must be responsible for his own actions. If we permit the individual taxpayer to invest his own money in higher yielding investments, the future Social Security deficits will not only be manageable, but the retirement benefits will be far greater for the individual than under the current system. The historical record of the stock market shows that over each ten-year cycle, dating back over one hundred years, the average annual return is 9%, far higher than the 2-3 % yield currently being credited to the Social Security fund. There is an element of risk of course. With higher potential reward there must go some higher potential risk. However, even if those funds are invested in higher yielding government bonds, the returns to the participants will be far greater than they are under the present system.
There is another major difference between the two approaches, liberal and conservative, to the Social Security issue. The liberal position is that it is too risky to permit citizens to convert some of their contributions to privately held accounts. It is only government that can safely invest those monies. What they do not say is that Social Security is not an insurance program, that the American citizens have no property right in their theoretical Social Security benefits, and that Congress could if it so decided, drastically reduce those benefits sometime in the future.
The truly risky position is to continue the program as it is. There needs to be fundamental changes if Social Security is to survive past this generation. The conservatives' position of permitting some portion of the payments to be invested privately creates an actual property right to those funds, which then become part of one's estate. This can be passed on to one's heirs, or otherwise invested at retirement age. If I pay in to Social Security all of my life, and then die at age sixty-five with no wife and no minor children, what happens to all of the money my employers and I have paid in for fifty years? That money reverts to the government. If any private insurance company tried to sell an insurance policy like this, their executives would land in jail. Yet this is what our current program really is.
As the Supreme Court has ruled in two cases, Helvering v. Davis and Flemming v. Nestor, Social Security conveys no property rights to the participants, and it is in reality a welfare program that can be changed and altered at the whim of Congress. The fact is there is no Social Security fund out of which future benefits are to be paid. Future benefits will be paid by the taxes that workers in the future will pay. If at least a portion of future payments is invested in mutual funds, bonds, or treasury bills, as those amounts compound through the years, they will become a part of that person's estate, and will relieve the future liability of the fund to pay that portion of the benefits.
It is the principle here that is critical. Do we, in this free country of ours, have the brains and common sense to guide our own destinies? Or do we need Big Brother to watch over us to keep us from falling prey to our own mistakes? The Jewish position should always err on the side of individual responsibility, because that is what God decreed when He gave us His Commandments to live by. They were His rules, and we could either accept them or reject them to our sorrow. We grow by overcoming adversity, and we grow by making mistakes and accepting the consequences thereof.
On a personal note, the stock market crash of October 1987 caught me in an exposed margin position. The fall that fateful Monday of over 500 Dow Jones points, or over 20%, was so swift that it prevented us margin investors from selling out with some portion of our previous holdings. We could not withstand the furious force of that declining market, and because we were on margin, we were obligated to liquidate our positions at a fraction of their previous worth. If I could have held on beyond that day, I would have eventually recovered my original position, and even have seen it grow in the months to come. But the margin problem prevented my holding on and forced the liquidation resulting in heavy losses.
That day's experience was both humbling and humiliating. Not only did it decimate our net worth, but it also exposed me as a somewhat careless investor (speculator). I had not provided our account with enough cushion of equity. Fortunately, it did not lead my family to seek welfare. We picked up the pieces and have survived nicely since then. The point of the story is that this experience was both humbling and enlightening. Never again would I expose myself to the wonders of margin trading, and never again would I take lightly the wonderful day to day delights that one experiences in his normal existence. I achieved, I believe, an increased awareness of the blessings I enjoy from my family, from my work, and from my religion.
We rise or fall in this life pretty much on our own. We learn by our mistakes and, as we age, we should make better and better decisions. It is a hopeless task to try and shield people from the consequences of their own actions through some form of government intervention. This never achieves the aims sought and inevitably leads to more restrictions on individual freedom.
All of these three major subjects-taxation, education, Social Security-when placed under the glass and observed through a Jewish magnifying lens, must lead an objective observer to believe that current liberal positions are antithetical to Judaism and Jewish tradition. The liberal positions are probably all taken with the best of intentions, but as Daniel Webster said, "Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." And let us not forget that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
(RACE PREFERENCE)
Words are powerful things. If we were to label affirmative action today as a system of quotas and discrimination, it is doubtful that system would exist. It would be particularly noxious to Jews, because we have been kept out of many professions and opportunities throughout our history simply because the powers that be did not want too many of us in that occupation, school, club, or industry. We were the "killers of the Messiah" and as such did not deserve our rightful places to be earned by merit. Thus it has been an ultra sensitive point to most Jews that we, as well as all others, be given equal opportunity to pursue our goals in whatever career we chose, regardless of our race, color, or religion.
It is this strongly held belief that was behind the Jews marching alongside black Americans during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. We did not believe that blacks should be denied those rights open to other Americans. The right to vote, to eat where you choose, to ride whatever buses you wanted, to attend the school of your choice cannot be denied to any American. Jews in general were not advocating special privileges for black Americans. No, they simply wanted equal opportunity for all, the same struggle Jews have been engaged in for thousands of years.
&n
bsp; Senator Hubert Humphrey, the noted Democrat liberal of that time, assured the Senate at the time of debating the civil rights laws in the 1960s, that these laws were not intended to favor one people over another. They were intended to level the playing field for all so that no person would be given favorable or unfavorable treatment simply because of the color of his skin. Thus was launched, with the best of motives, the laws that have resulted in our affirmative action programs. One could easily argue that all of this was in harmony with Jewish tradition. We believed in fair and equal treatment for all. Even our slaves were to be released in the seventh or jubilee year.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized courts to take affirmative action to remove racially discriminatory practices and it also said that race preference was forbidden. Thus affirmative action and race preference are entirely different. It was race preference that was to be eliminated. The "affirmative action" part meant to proactively go after and eliminate from our society those practices that were in fact race based.
The problem is that the entire thrust of the civil rights laws was turned upside down by the courts and the bureaucrats who implemented and enforced these laws. Instead of carrying out Humphrey's pledge that no person was to be favored over another for a job or an education because of the color of his skin, the reverse came into being. People were favored over others simply because of their skin color. There arose throughout the government, business, and educational communities an entire body of rules that tended to mandate favorable treatment for minorities. If you were non-white, you were given priority in getting contracts, gaining admission to certain schools, or in the rate of advancement to higher positions. For an entire generation, little opposition was voiced to these policies and programs.
In the late 1990s, the Supreme Court revisited some of its earlier decisions. There appeared to be a trend toward slowly getting back to the original purpose of civil rights laws to make them more neutral in their implementation. As more politically conservative judges are appointed to the Supreme Court, further progress can be made in restoring the original purpose of these laws.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court seemed to regress in their recent University of Michigan cases, where they ruled that the race of an applicant can be used as a criterion for admission. Although the court in the case of Gratz v. Bollinger ruled that the undergraduate school could not automatically add twenty points to an applicant's score because of race, it did not disaffirm the concept that race can be a factor in the admissions policy of the university. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the court welcomed the law school's use of race to admit applicants in order to achieve a "more diverse student body," with its accompanying "advantages." Those advantages were never documented by the court but were simply assumed to exist.
After all in the original 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education which established the concept of bussing, (a forerunner to the civil rights law), Thurgood Marshall then executive director of the NAACP, wrote that "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state hound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere." In his 1978 Bakke decision, Justice Lewis Powell wrote, "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal."
The March 1998 issue of Commentary conducted a symposium on the question, "Is Affirmative Action on the Way Out? Should It Be?" Some interesting thoughts were expressed in answer. Author Joseph Epstein wrote that affirmative action produces the same devious conduct when people are trying to do good as when they are out to do evil. He refers to the cheating that has been going on in the admissions policies of universities and law schools to permit more minority students to attend than what was warranted by their qualifications and test scores. Epstein predicted that we shall struggle along for several years with various compromises without finding the correct solution, because despite the best of efforts, we live in "an intractably unjust world, and all artificial attempts to make it just, seem chiefly to have the effect of creating new, subtler, but often no less real injustices-sometimes even, sadly, for those they set out to help."
Leslie Lenkowsky, professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, wrote, "A sound affirmative action policy would seek to ensure that members of minority and other disadvantaged groups had the opportunity (and if necessary, some help) to pursue success in whatever directions they desired. But it would not insist, as we have been doing, that by the end of the race, every group should have a proportionately equal share of the prizes."
Norman Podhoretz, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and an original backer of affirmative action, now writes, "I am therefore an unqualified and unapologetic abolitionist with respect to affirmative action, and I hope (though I doubt) that the people who think it is finally on the way out are right. If it were abolished, we would be obeying the injunction laid upon doctors when they are told, `First do no harm.' Nor do we need a new social-engineering gimmick ready to hand as a substitute."
Lino A. Graglia, professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin, sums it up most graphically. "It is a prescription for racial consciousness and conflict inconsistent with the maintenance of a viable multiracial society; it means abandoning hope for an integrated society and accepting the inevitability of separatism. For most people, it is simply morally wrong for government to treat people on the basis of race."
It would seem that whatever holds true for "race" must of course hold true for religion, and this is the connection I believe, of affirmative action, to Judaism, and where Jews should stand on this subject. As we have struggled these thousands of years for the right to be treated the same as other peoples, and not be discriminated against because of our religion, and as we have succeeded in that endeavor in these United States, so should we be fighting the good fight against any other form of discrimination based on being a member of a particular class. But where have our Jewish leaders been this past generation on the subject? Not very visible in protesting how affirmative action was being implemented, I'm afraid.
Even the learned thinkers participating in Commentary's symposium did not make any connection to Judaism as it relates to governmentsponsored actions. Perhaps they thought it was so obvious that Jews should be against affirmative action as it evolved, that it needed no reference. I believe it does need that reference, and it should be shouted loud and clear from every Jewish rooftop. As Jews we must oppose all forms of government-controlled favoritism for any group or class, because we know from our history that what is favored today, may well be reversed into drastic negative actions against a particular group or class tomorrow. Freedom is still what it is all about!
The relationship of Democratic liberals to affirmative action is well known. Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore have stressed that these programs are simply intended to give a hand up to those who need it. This is the usual spin that liberals use to justify their government programs. What it ignores, of course, are those invisible persons who are harmed by these actions and will lose out because they are not part of the favored class.
It reminds me of Henry Hazlitt's famous example of the window that is broken by a vandal in his classic book, Economics in One Lesson. The broken window provides new business for the glazier, and thus the incident seems to have generated new business activity. To update Hazlitt's version with all due respect, what is visible is that in today's world, the insurance company will reimburse the store owner for that damage, the window repair people will enjoy additional business, the store owner is not out any money, and everyone will be better off for that window breaking. The effect not seen is that the insurance company has to use its funds to fix something that did not previously require repairs, and thus there was a net loss to the community. And what is not seen at the time is that probably insurance premiums for property coverage will increase for everyone at renewal time. I
f breaking windows made for economic progress, what a simple and wonderful world this would be.
Speaking of simplicity, Mr. Hazlitt once summed up the whole of economics in a single sentence that is almost totally ignored today by our teachers and politicians. He wrote, "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
And so it is with affirmative action programs. Those few who are actually helped are visible. What is not seen are those who are denied either jobs, promotions, or access to schooling to which they otherwise would be entitled to without the workings of affirmative action. As Judge Bork writes, affirmative action began as an outreach program, but then was turned into a quota program. This has led to greater group antagonisms and increased racial acrimony. He quotes the well-known personality, Ms. Susan Estrich, 1988 presidential campaign manager for Democrat Michael Dukakis, as saying that affirmative action was never intended to be permanent, and it is now time to move on to another approach. This is quite a stretch for Ms. Estrich, as she can normally be counted on to toe the liberal line on almost all issues. What this seems to indicate is wide agreement that affirmative action, as implemented, was not consistent with the original purposes of the law as promised by Senator Humphrey and his supporters.