My Wall Street reporter self of 1987-1990 is amazed to hear politicians and the news media throw the word “equity” around as though everyone knows what it means. A generation ago, corporate raiders seized equity stakes in target companies, and we financial scribes checked how equities were performing vis-à-vis bonds to see if they were flashing economic signals.
Today, “equity” is used to mean something utterly different. An NPR story on March 8 opened, “President Biden marked International Women’s Day on Monday by signing two executive orders geared toward promoting gender equity …” NPR’s phrasing was essentially identical to many others. Everyone is doing it.
Biden explained, “In our nation, as in all nations, women have fought for justice, shattered barriers, built and sustained economies, carried communities through times of crisis, and served with dignity and resolve. Too often, they have done so while being denied the freedom, full participation, and equal opportunity all women are due.”
This sounds reasonable, but don’t be fooled. It’s evasive, and not just because it tendentiously lumps American women together with foreign women in vile countries that repress them. It’s evasive also because “equity” and “equality” are used as interchangeable synonyms when they are nothing of the sort.
“Equity” in modern parlance is all-purpose camouflage for radical policies. It’s no coincidence that the president has also signed an executive order on “racial equity.” In his earliest days in office, therefore, he’s covered race and gender and now needs only an executive order on “class equity” to have marshaled all three horsemen of the woke apocalypse — race, gender, and class. What we’re watching is sub-Marxist militancy being wrapped in the soothing rhetoric of fairness and foisted on an unwitting nation.
As Shelby Steele, a black conservative commentator, told the Wall Street Journal last month, “this equity is a term that has no meaning but it’s one that gives blacks [or other favored victim groups] power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that somebody’s a bigot.”
That’s the essence of it. “Equity” is vague enough to mean whatever the speaker wants. It sounds as agreeable as mom and apple pie so anyone who opposes it must be a right-wing hyena who should shut up or be ignored.
Although “equity” echoes “equality,” it’s more useful because America is up to its eyes in data that shows great and improving equality. That no longer fits the Left’s narrative. Democrats and Biden, who has always been much more left-wing than his aw-shucks blue-collar schtick suggests, don’t want inconvenient facts to taint their woeful tale of America as systemically unjust. If people were allowed to see the details of actual equality, it might derail efforts to make the public increasingly dependent on central government and to buy its acquiescence with vast dollops of money filched from future generations in the form of long-term borrowing.
The great thing about “equity” is that it can’t be measured the way equality can. If a favored group such as African Americans fail to open as many businesses as white people or own a smaller proportion of the economy than their population might suggest, it can be argued that they’ve been denied equity. If women fail to hold half the engineering jobs in the country or fail to occupy half the seats in corporate boardrooms, it can be argued that they have not yet achieved equity and “something must be done.” Disparate outcomes are due to many factors, including personal choices, rather than to unequal treatment. But that’s unhelpful if your goal is federal action and control.
Equity or the lack of it is an immovable justification for Washington to interfere in the lives of private citizens and the business of private corporations. It gives the Left unending excuses to take further measures (very much including buying voter support at the expense of the nation) to tighten its grip on power. That is what this guff about “equity” is really all about: power. The result will be a people less free and less capable, a country less prosperous, and a future less bright.
And by the way, the massive costs of America’s dwindling future under Democratic rule are already showing under the old meaning of “equity.” Growth stocks in equity markets have gone into sharp decline since Biden was elected. And those bonds I mentioned earlier, which are markers of the nation’s long-term health, are sinking fast.
