Some domestic lowlights of the Bush Administration

National Review, Nov 30, 1992 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

CONSERVATIVES woke up on the morning of November 4, 1992, not to a "mandate" or a "landslide," for Plurality Bill got only 43 per cent of the vote. But reality doesn't matter in Washington, D.C. The Democratic Congress will pass the Clinton agenda, and much of the fault will lie with George Bush. Rather than dismantle or even hold steady the machinery of big government, he vastly expanded it. Whenever a pressure group raised its voice, liberty and property rights were deemed expendable.

For example, Bush gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act, ordering employers to pretend we're all physically and mentally equal, and to spend to make it so. A small, money-losing company may have to widen its corridors, install elevators, and redo its bathrooms. Another firm can be forced to hire a blind lawyer, and a second employee to read to him. Discrimination against those who have trouble learning, reasoning, and remembering is now illegal, as is discrimination against former (and "former") crack addicts.

Another bill George Bush signed-- the Civil Rights Act of 1991---is the quota bill he claimed it wasn't. Companies now have to make their workforces at all levels "representative of the community," or prove to the EEOC that they aren't racist. No hiring standard with a racially "disparate impact" can be used, from screening out ex-cons to requiring a high-school diploma.

Should mugging someone because he's Cambodian be a more serious crime than mugging him because he has a gold watch? No, according to our entire Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. But, thanks to the Bush Administration's "hate crimes" legislation, it now is.

Mr. Bush also took the side of speeding drunk and felon Rodney King over the policemen who had to arrest him. Before he had time to learn the facts, Mr. Bush claimed on national television to be "sickened," thereby injecting himself into a matter properly left to the jury.

When the jury made its correct decision, Bush ordered the Justice Department to bring the four impoverished LAPD cops up on double-jeopardy civil-rights charges (as the criminal King prepared to collect a million dollars from the taxpayers of Los Angeles). Liberal reporters at the American Lawyer, who watched the whole trial on Court TV, agreed with the jury, but by then the damage had been done.

When South Central Angelenos started their spree of murder, mugging, looting, and burning, Mr. Bush waffled. In one speech, he called for law and order; in another, he implied that lack of welfare was to blame. But not to worry, he would speed along more "aid to the cities." When Mr. Bush was politically forced to deploy federal troops, he did not empower them to protect property; that was left to armed residents.

After the riots, Bush instructed his banking regulators to go easy on bad loans made to minority enterprises. This was consonant with his steppedup enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA orders banks to meet de facto racial quotas in mortgage lending, and President Bush's 1989 S&L bailout bill ordered the Federal Reserve to release an annual study on percentages of loans approved for different groups (but it ignores credit ratings, job histories, assets, and other very relevant factors in loan making). The Fed's finding that blacks and Hispanics get fewer loans than whites is highly publicized, but not its note that Asians get more loans than whites.

Bush's "National Goals for Education" was the most centralist and millenarian plan since John Dewey. The Federal Government is to make sure that "all children will start school ready to learn"; that "the high-school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 per cent"; and that "every adult American will be literate and possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy" (emphasis added). Since the central government has constitutional responsibility only for the public schools in Washington, D.C., let's see those shaped up, and then we can think about putting the Department of Education in charge of Alabama and Wyoming.

The labor policies of the Bush Administration were left-liberal across the board--increasing the minimum wage, extending idleness-inducing unemployment benefits, empowering the EEOC--but his crackdown on "child labor" was especially bothersome. At the behest of labor unions, his Labor Secretary set up a sting operation and fined businesses $100,000 for employing 15-year-old kids for more than 3 hours a day or 18 hours a week. What was wrong with work as opposed to hanging around, and why the government rather than parents should be making decisions about what children do with their time, we were never told.

It may be that the Administration just didn't understand the price system. Before the Gulf War, oil prices went up, as they should have, in anticipation of lower supplies. But the White House threatened price controls, and the press secretary complained about "gouging." Oil companies were forced to lower their prices and take a loss.