California’s opponents of racial discrimination are being outfunded $12 million to $1 million, but in most polls have held an edge over the racial-grievance industry.
The advantage won’t last, though, unless the good guys there receive help in financing their campaign against state ballot Proposition 16.
This year’s ballot initiative known as Prop 16 aims to repeal the 1996 ballot’s Proposition 209, which reasonably and rightly enshrined in the state constitution these words: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” That 1996 provision banning invidious discrimination in any form is Martin Luther King’s dream distilled to its immensely moral essence: In public life and public policy, skin color should play no substantive role.
Against that color-blind ideal, today’s “progressives” want government to dole out special favors, in terms of state contracts and university admissions (among other things), to the usual array of racial and other minorities who suffered from past discrimination. Prop 16 would allow liberal lawmakers to reinstitute racial set-asides and various quota-like practices in a sort of racial spoils system.
Prop 16’s idea of “let’s practice discrimination in order to defeat discrimination” is not only immoral but also impractical. It could cost taxpayers billions of extra dollars, and most of its effects, even on the groups it means to “help,” range from the immaterial to the directly counterproductive. Its indirect results could also be malignant.
When applied to public contracting, a detailed study in 2007 found that requiring race-based set-asides adds major costs, in part because the distribution of minority-owned businesses across the state is uneven (and for other reasons). If a contract is required for work done in, say, the Russian River Valley, but the only qualified minority contractor for that work is well south in San Diego, the costs of long-distance management of the project will likely be higher, perhaps because it will require extra costs for on-site subcontracting.
For road construction in California alone, the study found that Proposition 209 saved the state $64 million in 1998-99. Adjusted for inflation, that would mean about $100 million, or $50 million annually, or more than a billion dollars since Proposition 209 was implemented. Applied to all government contracting, not just roads, the savings could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
This is where indirect effects come in. Adding the extra layer of contracting to capital outlays takes away money the state surely could better use for social services helpful to minorities struggling to make ends meet, rather than for well-connected contractors.
In education, meanwhile, race-based affirmative action has perverse effects, as was shown by a 2012 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, conducted by economists at Duke University and the London School of Economics. By pushing elite universities to accept students whose high school backgrounds leave them academically unprepared, many racial-preference programs actually make it harder for those students to succeed. Those same students, when accepted on their own merits into good but less competitive colleges, shine.
Indeed, other accounts confirm that once Proposition 209 ruled out race-based preferences, good things, not bad, happened for California’s minority students. Their grade-point averages and graduation rates increased, and the number of minority science and engineering majors grew.
These are just a few reasons Proposition 209 should remain in place and why Prop 16 should be defeated. But Prop 16’s well-intentioned opponents are scraping for financing to sell their worthy message. Without funding, the polls could turn against them. Let’s hope enough California voters are wise enough to keep that from happening.
