Mickey Kaus, on the liberal objection to hiring or promoting friends:
So the idea is that all treatment is to be meted out according to what? Merit? Isn’t that the argument made by the anti-affirmative-action Bakke crowd–that college admissions should be done strictly by grades and test scores, etc? Isn’t the smart, liberal pro-preference position that you can’t really rank everyone by an objective “merit” scale–that all sorts of arbitrary factors are at play so race might as well be another one?
Yes.
Is the liberal position really that you can’t refuse to promote a white employee because you don’t know and trust him, but you can refuse to promote him because he’s white?
Yes.
… I suppose others have already made these points.
Yes. But the more the merrier.
Hypocrisy, maybe.
But you could as easily say that conservatives are hypocritical in the opposite way. They hire their white friends (as do many liberals), but get all indignant when someone else hires based on race.
If they’re hiring their friends, they’re hiring them because they are friends, not because they are white.
Why always assume such choices are based on race, when in fact they are usually based on relationships or power?
SC: I find it interesting that you regard hiring based on race (and its necessary corollary, not hiring based on race; and perhaps even firing based on race) as morally equivalent to hiring based on friendship. This of course is like the familar equation of admissions based on race with admissions based on athletic or musical talent, etc. Such a position would be coherent, in my view, only if one were willing to dispense with civil rights laws barring discrimination based on race.
The notion that conservatives have only white friends is patent nonsense.
My view would probably currently be called conservative, and I live and work in the most integrated environments possible.
My wife is Asian. My wife and I lead a band that routinely employs blacks. Our friends are white, black, Asian and Hispanic. We live in one of the most integrated communities in the U.S.
Who told SC that conservatives are only white and have only white friends? What a farcical statement.
What about small businesses owned by immigrants and staffed by the families, in-laws, children of close friends, &c. of the owner(s)? Is there something wrong, for example, with a Pakistani-American-owned store being staffed entirely by Pakistani immigrants and their children, even if the surrounding neighborhood is mostly black? (Or mostly white, for that matter?) There are certainly people who think so. I don’t.