Discussing ways to eliminate wasteful discretionary spending, Mickey Kaus writes (from his new Daily Caller home), “There is, for one thing, a whole affirmative action/equal employment compliance bureaucracy that makes at best a secondary contribution to the public good.”
Well, despite being generally quite sensible, Mickey is, after all, still a liberal (though most liberals these days would probably not admit him to their club); otherwise he couldn’t possibly believe that, even “at best,” the government’s enormous affirmative action apparatus makes even “a secondary contribution to the public good.”
But leave aside for now all the actual harm these multiple agencies do, enforcing and re-enforcing the nefarious notion that the government should benefit some Americans and burden others because of their race. Instead, let’s consider only their cost. How much would it save the strapped taxpayers if all the department and agency “civil rights” enforcement bureaus (except the EEOC and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Dept., about which more in a moment) were shuttered and their employees either let go or transferred to productive work elsewhere?
If I were still an academic I’d “invite” an enterprising graduate student to find out — first by identifying all the agencies like the Education Dept.’s Office of Civil Rights, and then by totaling their budgets.
I don’t understand the theory, if there is one, of how government is organized (does anyone?). Maybe there’s a good reason to have the separate agencies, in addition to the EEOC and Justice’s Civil Rights Division. If so, I’d be interested in hearing it. In the absence of a persuasive defense of them, however, my inclination would be to close them all down and beef up the EEOC’s and Civil Rights Division’s enforcement capabilities, with one big qualification: by legislation or presidential executive order (if we ever get a president opposed to racial favoritism), I would restrict these two remaining organizations to combating actual discrimination, which is to say I’d bar them from enforcing or even allowing any racial preference programs, from pursuing “disparate impact” litigation, or promoting “diversity.”
