From Bad to Worse: Affirmative action and prescription drugs, and what they have to do with each other

National Review, July 28, 2003 by John O. McGinnis

In the last week of June, conservatism suffered two of its worst defeats in a generation -- the Supreme Court's endorsement of state-sponsored racial preferences and congressional passage of a huge new prescription-drug entitlement. Worse yet, President Bush praised the Supreme Court decision -- and twisted arms in Congress to pass the drug bill. Both of these defeats illustrate modern democracy's inexorable drive to provide large benefits to the few at the expense of the public good. Politicians tend to favor government programs that will reward identifiable interest groups to the disadvantage of the general citizenry, because the narrow groups are almost by definition better organized to influence elected officials. The racial- preferences issue mobilizes particular groups that focus on identity politics; similarly, the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) makes prescription drugs the main determinant of its political support.

In contrast, the costs of the programs in question are too diffuse to affect political outcomes. While large in the aggregate, the prescription-drug bill imposes costs individually too small to drive taxpayers to opposition; likewise, citizens face only a relatively small statistical chance of being harmed by racial-preference programs, so -- while they are happy to vote against preferences in referenda -- they will not invest resources in lobbying their legislatures to kill preferences.

Racial preferences and the prescription-drug program also resemble each other in that they distribute benefits to people on the basis of immutable characteristics: race and age. At the time of the framing of our Constitution, religion was a close-to-immutable characteristic, in that few people would willingly change it and risk damnation; with the Establishment Clause, the Bill of Rights wisely prohibited the federal government from handing out benefits on the basis of religious identity. Today, race and age offer easy rationales for excluding others from differential government benefits, just as religion did in the era of the Founding. Of course, supporters of racial preferences and prescription-drug benefits justify their favored exclusive benefits with much high-minded rhetoric about justice and social cohesion -- but then, so did 19th-century British politicians trying to justify special benefits to those connected with the Anglican Church.

These special-interest programs will have broad -- and truly unfortunate -- consequences. As racial preferences grow more prevalent, so will divisive identity politics. As prescription-drug costs grow, the government will be more and more likely to engage in price controls, which will discourage innovation and harm the nation's health. But by the time these social bills come due, our current legislators will have moved on to lucrative retirement.

Special-interest programs do face the danger that a rhetorically gifted or charismatic politician might be tempted to wake the public to their costs. Therefore both these programs travel under a heavy armor of evasions and outright lies. "Diversity," of course, is a term that skirts the issue of both preference and race: It suggests that universities are pursuing a program to expose students to different ideas of all kinds, when in reality most university professors want to perpetuate a left-liberal orthodoxy that preferences help sustain. Witness the testimony in the Michigan case that some professors want to exclude Cubans from preferences generally available to Latinos -- on the grounds that Cuban Americans are predominantly Republican.

The mechanics of preferences are also shrouded in secrecy. The Supreme Court rulings last week themselves promote covert discrimination. The Court invalidated Michigan's undergraduate program -- which awarded specific point totals for membership in particular ethnic groups -- but upheld the law- school program, in which admissions officers evaluate each file "holistically" before giving a very similar boost to the racially preferred. Michigan's undergraduate program can get results much like those it got before, simply by hiring more admissions officers. That is a small price to pay for the political benefit of keeping discrimination behind closed doors.

The campaign for the prescription-drug benefit is also rife with deceit. It claims to be structured as an insurance program rather than as an entitlement program. The elderly purchase insurance and receive benefits in return -- and what is obscured is that they are also receiving a large transfer from the government. The disguise is easy to see through: After all, any careful reader of the newspaper understands that the drug benefit, like Social Security, is an entitlement rather than simple insurance. But given that most people pay almost no attention to the issue, a little deception goes a long way. Just as a butterfly needs only the slightest protective coloration to improve its chances of survival, so a political program needs only a small amount of camouflage to ward off most attacks.