[Baltimore Sun] Chris Roemer: Wealth redistribution won’t deliver justice | COMMENTARY
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American society has historically ordered itself in a way detrimental to minorities generally, and African Americans in particular.
From slavery, to laws that disenfranchised Blacks and codified segregation, to the general acceptance of attitudes that discriminated against African Americans, the United States has a lot to answer for.
We have made a great deal of progress over the past 75 years eliminating the structural barriers that unfairly prevented minorities from fully accessing the American dream.
Whatever barriers remain must be rooted out once and for all. The most significant among these is an educational system that denies poor children the same access to a quality education as their more affluent peers.
If education is the great leveler, school choice is the civil rights issue of our time, yet school choice is fiercely opposed by the Democratic Party for purely political reasons.
Proactive measures to correct past wrongs are still necessary, but such measures must be thoughtfully developed and skillfully implemented. Giving minorities a “hand up and a hand out” of unjust circumstances that society helped to create is nothing more than the moral thing to do.
That said, as we strive to create a more “equitable” society for everyone, we must be careful we are not destroying the mechanisms by which economic prosperity is produced.
Corporations are not the evil entities Democrats endlessly tell us they are. That shtick is getting old.
If equity is the objective, destroying American competitiveness is counterproductive to achieving that goal. The truth is, corporations are the engines by which equity will be achieved.
Artificially produced or government-mandated outcomes tilt at windmills. They corrupt the system, they don’t correct it. Every country that has used the government to spread wealth equally among its people has ruined itself in the process.
Life forces everyone to contend with circumstances that “disadvantage” them in some way. Some people are simply more fortunate than others.
Some have good parents, some have lousy parents. Some have no parents.
Some attend good schools. Some are forced to attend failing schools.
Some deal with serious health issues.
Some are born to families with more resources than others, and some are never even given the chance to be born at all.
Some students learn easily. Some learn only with great difficulty and a lot of hard work.
Some people take ownership of their mistakes and learn from their failures. Others always seem to find someone else to blame.
Most importantly, some people cultivate the ability to persevere regardless of what life throws at them. Other people are defeated by life.
I encourage everyone to look into what Stanford University’s Dr. Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”
Successful people almost always share the same character traits, which include a curious mind, an entrepreneurial spirit and a “never say die” attitude.
These qualities are the source of America’s greatness, and we must always foster an economic system that rewards people who exhibit these qualities, regardless of their race, gender, religion or ethnic background.
To fashion a society that rewards people equally regardless of the effort they put forth, the talent they possess, the initiative they show or the decisions they make is to destroy society.
It is not the government’s job to ensure all people are successful. Nor is it wise to enable people who consistently make poor choices that are detrimental to their future well-being.
Enabling is not compassionate. It is cruelty disguised as compassion. When our assistance becomes enabling, we do far more harm than good.
Initiatives that benefit individuals who have had the rules rigged against them for far too long remain necessary, but the resources used for that purpose must be spent wisely and produce lasting results.
Unfortunately, the federal government spends money like it’s water, and a ridiculous amount of that money is wasted.
For 2023, Senator Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus” report identified roughly $900,000,000,000 in government waste. Put another way, in 2023 the government wasted nearly $1 of every $4 it collected in revenues.
Government is not the vehicle that will achieve the outcomes minorities seek. Government must eliminate structural impediments that advantage one group over another, but to ask the federal government to engineer the redistribution of wealth from one segment of the population to another is a fruitless endeavor that accomplishes little more than flushing trillions of dollars down the toilet.
Ultimately, whether someone succeeds or not is largely up to them. There are no guarantees in life, but people who educate themselves, who work hard, who show grit and determination and who make good decisions are far more likely to succeed than those who don’t, and that’s the way it should be.
To create a society that rewards people equally regardless of their personal character traits or the choices they make is to kill the golden goose, which in the end provides the pay-off for those who do work hard.
But if progressives have their way, I fear when minorities finally reach the end of the road they’ve traveled for so long — a road they fervently hope leads to the equity they seek — they will be disappointed to discover there isn’t anything there anymore because it was all torn down to pay for the road itself.
Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.
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