The article screams “Obama wants stimulus projects to hire more minorities, women”.  One quick glance at that headline tells you pretty much all you need to know about the information presented in the article.  For the people who only read headlines, it’s a pretty good one at communicating the message. 

The McClatchy article opens with:

Amid mounting criticism that minorities, women and low-income workers are missing out on business opportunities and jobs under the stimulus bill, the Obama administration is urging the nation’s governors to work harder to ensure that these groups participate fully in state transportation projects that receive federal funding.

The issue of equity has cast a cloud over the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in recent weeks as various reports appear to confirm what minority advocates and some economists have been saying: that the fruits of the stimulus bill may not be reaching groups who are suffering the most in the worst recession in decades.

I saw it mentioned on Mr. Cohen’s entertaining piece “Let’s have an Inquisition”, down in the comments thread, about how global warming stinks of the religious idea of original sin, but I’m here to argue that the liberals have already found the perfect original sin for America, and it’s bigotry.  Racial, sexist, class based, the liberals would have you believe that bigotry is the evil monster lurking in the heart of every American who is making money.  In typical communist fashion, they get weepy and emotional discussing how the wealthy have only gotten their money through the exploitation of not just the working class as a whole, but specifically minorities and women.

Observe:

“Behind virtually every economic indicator you will find gross racial disparities. We believe that tackling systemic inequality requires specific, concrete and targeted action,” said Rep. Barbara Lee , D- Calif. , the chairwoman of the black caucus.

Well, this is pure malarkey, plain and simple.  But putting aside the intense hatred I have of race baiters like Rep. Lee for working to prevent the Great Melting Pot from functioning as intended, to keep Americans of all ethnicity using hyphenated names for themselves rather than enjoying the brotherhood that should stem from all of us being Americans first and foremost, I continued reading, looking for the plan of action the liberals were calling for.  I found it rather quickly:

In advance of a proposed new jobs bill that could include more than $69 billion for state transportation projects, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood sent a letter this week to governors, urging them to do a better job of spreading the wealth in their transportation contracting efforts.

LaHood called for state officials to break up large individual contracts into several pieces so that smaller women- and minority-owned companies can better compete for them.

He wants states to set goals for awarding more transportation contracts to these so-called “disadvantaged business enterprises” and is offering lending and bonding assistance to help make it happen.

Completely ignoring the idea that maybe these workers aren’t qualified to build the bridges and roads to which we entrust the safety of our families, and that such a lack of qualification may in fact be the reason these workers aren’t getting “their fair share” (what a bunch of Marxist garbage that phrase is, eh?), the President’s Administration is responding to calls from communist, race baiting organizations to produce “some kind of mandate or carrot-and-stick approach” to guarantee that minorities and women are getting a proportional amount of Federal stimulus money, in relation to their percentage of the total make up of the American populace.

Affirmative Action Economic Stimulus (AAES).  Great.  Just what we need…

As any of you who have ever read Henry Hazlitt’s marvelous book Economics in One Lesson will know, we’ve got a big problem on our hands.  (For those who have never read it, the entire book may be read online and free here.)

In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?

Essentially, the lesson that is argued by the Austrian economist is that we don’t need to focus on the numbers and equations that define economics because the world economy is so big that we cannot know those equations, nor understand what the values of any constants or variables should be.  We’re better served by taking a step back and looking at the overall picture.  Something that is certainly not happening in this case.

Let’s begin by looking at the type of work the liberals want to see targeted by this AAES:  Government infrastructure projects.

We all understand the need for transportation.  It allows the American people to travel, allows us to move goods and raw materials around the country to where they are needed.  But we are not discussing the need for quality transportation and the resulting infrastructure, it’s the other part we need to focus on, the part about government programs.

Keep reading Mr. Hazlitt’s book, and once you get to chapter 8, you discover this gem, this golden nugget of truth:

I HAVE REFERRED to various union make-work and featherbed practices. These practices, and the public toleration of them, spring from the same fundamental fallacy as the fear of machines. This is the belief that a more efficient way of doing a thing destroys jobs, and its necessary corollary that a less efficient way of doing it creates them.

Allied to this fallacy is the belief that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, and that, if we cannot add to this work by thinking up more cumbersome ways of doing it, at least we can think of devices for spreading it around among as large a number of people as possible.

See, to a politician, the idea that we’ve got quality transportation does not mean as much in the next election cycle as the number of jobs they’ve created.  No one cares if the roads are in good shape or shoddy if they aren’t working.  Having good roads is lower on the voter’s list of priorities than having a job with which they can pay their bills and support their families.  Thus, government jobs are often designed to be inefficient, to employ as many people for as long as possible, regardless of the outcomes as related to the original purpose of the government’s actions. 

Why buy a machine and employ one man to run it efficiently, when without the machine you can employ 20 men?

All government infrastructure projects are like this.  It is what gives us the oft joked about County road projects, where you’ve got one guy down in a hole running the shovel, and six men standing around the edge of the hole watching.  To the politician, this is government work at its greatest.  7 employed men doing what one man can accomplish on his own with the right equipment.

But this is an inefficient use of the tax dollars they’ve robbed from the rest of us.  It is stealing from those who produce to distribute to those who have not.  The men in the joke, the six standing on the side of the hole looking in, what are they doing to earn the stolen money they’re getting for their “work”?  The moral outrage we should all feel at this is justified.  It’s no different than you working to have money to buy something, then someone who hasn’t worked for money stealing it from you.  It’s theft, at the most basic definition of the term.  We are not “reinvesting in communities”, as the name of the Act implies, we’re stealing resources from one community that the race baiters and vote buyers have determined have too much, and we’re giving them to the government sanctioned looters in another community.

We understand that the idea Mr. Hazlitt is proposing is at work in the mind of Rep. Lee, the idea that “there is just a fixed amount of work to be done in the world”.  Rep. Lee is concerned that there is only a certain amount of money being spent on transportation projects, and that the minorities whom she represents aren’t getting “their fair share of the pie”.  But she is failing to follow the lesson Mr. Hazlitt offers.

Let us be more intelligent than the “distinguished Representative” from California and take a look at the whole picture.  Trust me, the woman is nothing more than a popularity contest winner, it isn’t hard to think more deeply about tying your shoe than she can.

What are the consequences of increased hiring of minorities for the express purpose of putting them to work on deliberately inefficient government make-work programs?

Well, for one thing, these jobs probably don’t pay as well as manufacturing jobs.  If we ponder my previous thought about the idea of one man with a machine being more efficient than 20 men with pick axes, we realize that this is a very real point of contention.  We’ve taken 20 men and put them to hard labor, for little money in terms of individual wages and great cost to the taxpayers when you consider the group as a whole.  But if we’d instead bought the machine, how many of these people would’ve instead been put to work procuring the raw materials necessary to build it?  How many would’ve been employed at higher paying jobs with Caterpillar, John Deere, or Case in the construction of these machines?  How many people could’ve been employed shipping these machines?  How much more tax revenue could be generated by their work in private industry creating wealth, instead of toiling at some pointless government job destroying it?

But no, Rep. Lee wants a government mandate to force these individuals into low wage, hard labor, slave jobs.  She doesn’t want to see them employed by large companies working to fill government contracts for a decent wage, she wants them toiling, day in and day out, under an ARRA sign for peanuts.  That way, whenever they look up from their back braking slave labor to wipe the sweat from their eyes, they see the sign telling them that they owe their employment to the benevolent hand of the government, and specifically Rep. Lee.

God forbid that they get more money and better working conditions, then look up and see “International Tractor” written on a sign in a factory…

And aside from the inefficient manner of government work, and the command-and-control type of economy we’re producing by using government mandate to allocate labor, what of the effects on other demographics?

By focusing money on people just because of their skin tone, we’re eliminating competition.  What makes us so sure that the minorities the government must hire to meet racial quotas are as qualified as those who are getting these jobs now?  Why is the need of the out of work white person, who may be more qualified to do the job, less important than the need of the unemployed minority?  I thought this was a country of equality, a country where need was need regardless of race?  Isn’t that what Rep. Lee and her posse are clamoring about on the daily?

What of the families of the white worker who is being denied a job because of some twit from California’s horrendous sense of “fairness”?  His kids need to eat, his wife needs a roof over her head, just the same as those of the minority families, yet through government mandate, they will be denied these things, with no chance to compete for what should be theirs by virtue of superior qualification and experience.  Now that’s some serious justice, eh?  (Justice is another term that has been twisted by the Marxists for their own purposes.  They love to redefine words to fit their own arguments, regardless of what the dictionary says they mean.)

 It’s typical “Progressive” thought at work.  Inefficient use of stolen money, slavery, and vote buying, endangerment of the lives of the citizens who use these transportation pathways, all rolled up into one execrable idea that the government should be looking out for the little guy when it should be realized that the little guy should be looking out for himself.  He can do a much better job of that than politicians thousands of miles away in DC who aren’t interested in him, but in keeping their own avenues to power open.

I’d rather see this money spent on programs that teach minorities useful skills, rather than see them sent out to the chain gangs on the side of the road somewhere, all under the banner of “fairness”.  I’d rather see the cycle of dependency upon government broken, and people given back the option to live their lives to the fullest.  It’s better for the people, it’s better for country, but it’s not better for the leeches in DC, so you get imbeciles like Rep. Lee out there encouraging government mandated slavery, both for the taxpayers and the workers, in an effort to preserve and grow their own power, and using the cudgel of bigotry as their preferred weapon of choice.  It’s horrible.

(Hat tip to PATruth for pointing out the article)

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