I don't buy it. The government runs plenty of social programs, but procurement isn't one of them. Procurement should be about getting the best deal for the taxpayer, period. This isn't a game, it's other people's hard-earned money that they've been told is being spent on their defense or other essential service, but is instead being spent on a social agenda. And then when the time for fiscal belt-tightening comes around, we end up cutting more-worthwhile expenditures because this waste is entrenched in a supply chain of government-privileged middlemen.
Well, the thing is, you'd never want the government to make purchasing decisions entirely on price, so what is it that makes the best deal? Price, quality, timeliness of delivery, these are pretty easy to pick out as parts of "the best deal".
These days it wouldn't be a stretch to add "better for the environment" along the lines of "what is the best deal," since that is also a decision that affects everyone in the community, whether the company you hire pollutes more or less. Favoring contractors that pollute less seems uncontroversial.
Adding "addresses systemic racism that we have in the past committed and that has hurt a part of our community (who are also taxpayers, just like everyone else)" also seems pretty uncontroversial--unless you don't think racism exists or should be addressed.
"Addressing systematic racism" is quite the euphemism for an outright racist policy, choosing winners and losers over what long-dead people with the same skin color did before we were born. The best way to "address racism" is to treat people like individual human beings with equal dignity, agency, and responsibility. The now-pervasive victimhood narrative is one of the most socially destructive forces in America. It's an us vs. them, rich vs. poor, black vs. white narrative that feeds on that insidious emotion, envy, and pits people against each other.
And there's this often-explicit assumption that the biggest thing holding back minorities is the white man. Nothing could be further from the truth today. The biggest problems faced by poor minorities are outrageous levels of violent crime among themselves, widespread illegitimacy, family collapse, and broken cultures that value the wrong things. Many groups have thrived against all odds throughout history, and they sure didn't get ahead with victimhood politics. The story of the Jews always comes to mind. Persecuted for over two thousand years, they not only survived but thrived in some of the most hostile environments possible, like repeated mass expulsions from different European countries, culminating but not ending with the Holocaust. When they got Israel, they quickly made it the richest, freest, and most powerful country in the region, by far.
I also want to reiterate my point from my earlier comment, which I don't think you responded to, that this kind of feel-good policy-making comes back to bite us. It hurts the taxpayer today by using up more of his money to provide the same service, and it hurts him tomorrow by obscuring what the real costs are and perpetuating bad decision making. The creeping inefficiencies become a permanent dead weight on our ability to invest elsewhere or weather a debt crunch.
If we want to have social programs that give minorities a leg up, then let's vote on those and forthrightly decide what portion of our national income we are willing to put that end. Hidden welfare for well-off minorities isn't the right way to do it.
It's funny, I can tell that you obviously feel very strongly about this. But there's also so much in your posts on this stuff that is ahistorical, afactual, or in some cases just total nonsense.
I have relatives like you, too, who come out with something ridiculous like "the moon landings were faked!!" or "cancer's all a scam by Big Pharma to keep us doped up!!" and we used to go back and forth for hours about it. I eventually stopped engaging because these were people who were just carrying around a worldview in their heads that wouldn't allow them to have an honest discussion, and obviously bore no relation to reality.
So you go on thinking all the things you do. I don't think I or anyone would ever persuade you that you had some information wrong or some history wrong or some principles in your thinking wrong. I'm not even going to try, because I know what it's like arguing with folks like you.
> Adding "addresses systemic racism that we have in the past committed and that has hurt a part of our community (who are also taxpayers, just like everyone else)" also seems pretty uncontroversial
When do we start addressing the systemic racism which systematically discriminates against business owned by people of the wrong colour — when that colour is white? I.e., addressing systemic racism by applying systemic racism seems pretty foolish.
It isn't foolish, though I will agree that a very shallow analysis will make these processes seem that way.
In a perfect world, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses would never have faced any discrimination at all. In a perfect world, everyone would have competed on an even playing field since the beginning of government buying. That is not this world.
And the real-world consequence of those decades of discrimination is that minority communities had another barrier placed in front of their ability to build wealth in their communities--not the only one, of course, but still a real one and one that's definitely done lasting damage to those minority communities.
After all this time, and all that damage done, saying "well, we won't discriminate now but you still need to somehow catch up from decades of discrimination, and we won't do anything to undo the damage we did," if you think that's appropriate, then that's fine, you can think that. But it's only foolish if you don't really think at all about the history of the situation and the accumulated effects of that long history of discrimination.
You'd even be in good company if you wanted to take that shallow view--a lot of people I talk to don't seem to want to acknowledge that racism ever existed, or if it did it isn't a problem now, or if it is a problem then someone else should do something about it, and on and on and on.
(And, you know, all these aspirational targets, like spending 20% of our dollars on minority-owned firms, they're not hard-and-fast rules. If there are no qualified minority firms, then the work still goes to a white-owned firm, and after decades of discriminatory procurement practices there aren't necessarily a lot of minority-owned firms with the capacity to manage government contracting projects, so it's not like white folks are suffering in any way in the government procurement space.)
> it's not like white folks are suffering in any way in the government procurement space
Except, y'know, for being ineligible for certain government contracts.
What's worse is that those people are being penalised without having been guilty of anything. This is utterly inimical to a free and health society.
Yes, there are some lingering negative effects from past racist discrimination: but there are also ongoing negative effects from current racist discrimination. You don't fix racism with more racism: you fix it by not being racist.
Yes, and for decades minorities would be penalized and effectively rendered ineligible for government contracts just because they were minorities.
And that has done long-lasting damage to their communities. And they weren't guilty of anything, either! You're absolutely right, decades of systemic racism were utterly inimical to a free and healthy society, and minorities bore the brunt of that for a very, very long time.
Systemic racism created a very un-free and un-healthy situation. A lot of blameless people suffered through no fault of their own, generation upon generation.
Couldn't agree more, racism is bad, &c &c.
This small attempt to undo that--preferring minority-owned businesses for a certain amount of government dollars spent--doesn't really seem to be affecting white-owned government contractors, and it does seem to have a pretty positive effect at starting to undo the effects of all that (utterly inimical to a free and healthy society) discrimination.
Again, you can cling to that flag of "all racism is bad!!!" and that's fine. I'm at least somewhat satisfied that you went so far as to acknowledge that there has been discrimination in the past--a lot of people who sound like you are reluctant to even admit that there's ever been a problem. So, well done you.
In terms of outcomes and fairness and justice, however, there are probably better principled stands to take than the one against minority-owned/woman-owned contracting preference programs.
