Supreme farce
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It might be a
hilarious comedy routine to have a group of highly educated judges solemnly
expounding on something that everybody knows to be utter nonsense. But it isn't
nearly as funny when this solemn discourse about nonsense takes place on the
Supreme Court of the United States — and when most people are unaware of what
nonsense the learned justices are talking.
The
issue before the High Court is whether local authorities have the legal right
to make students' race a factor in deciding which school to assign them to attend.
The parent of a white student is complaining because he is not allowed to go to
the school near where he lives but is instead being assigned to a different
school far away, in order to create the kind of racial mix of students the
local authorities are seeking, in the name of "diversity."
Those
of us old enough to remember the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown
v. Board of Education will see a painful irony now, since that case began
because a black girl was not allowed to go to a school near where she lived but
was instead assigned to a different school far away, because of the prevailing
racial dogmas of that day.
The
racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And
flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those
dogmas.
Some of
the learned justices are pondering whether there is a "compelling"
government interest in creating the educational and social benefits of racial
"diversity." If so, then supposedly it is OK to do to white kids
today what the Supreme Court back in 1954 said could not be done to black kids
— namely, assign children to schools according to their race.
What
are those "compelling" benefits of "diversity"? They are as
invisible as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend
to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor's
wardrobe.
Not
only is there no hard evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in
school produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number
of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or exceed
the national average, even though most black schools fall far below the
average.
My own
study of successful all-black schools was published 30 years ago in The Public
Interest quarterly. Since then, there have been other studies of similar
schools across the country, published by the Heritage Foundation in
There
have also been all-Chinese-American schools that exceeded national norms. How
have such schools managed to succeed and excel without the
"compelling" need for a racial mixing of students?
Look at
it another way: Have black kids bussed into white schools had their test scores
shoot up? No — not even after decades of bussing.
Some
black students — in fact, whole schools of them — have performed dramatically
better than other black students and exceeded the norms in white schools.
Yet
this phenomenon, which goes back as far as 1899 and included an all-black
school within walking distance of the Supreme Court that declared such things
impossible back in 1954, is totally ignored.
Are
such things exceptional? Yes. But the mystical benefits of
"diversity" are non-existent, however politically correct it is to
proclaim such benefits.
Hard
evidence shows that students of all races can succeed or fail in schools that
are racially mixed or racially unmixed.
The
latest variation on the theme of mixing and matching by race is that there needs
to be a "critical mass" of black students in a given school or
college, in order for them to perform up to standard.
Not
only is there no hard evidence for this dogma, such hard evidence as there is
points in the opposite direction. Bright black kids have benefitted from being
in classes with other bright kids, regardless of the other kids' color.
All
this is ignored in the Supreme Court's supreme farce.
14 December 2006
Supreme farce, Part II
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | From time to time, the Supreme Court of the United
States makes a decision that causes anger or outrage, but that reaction usually
passes with time, especially since there is nothing the public can do about it
— either to change the decision or to remove from the bench those who made it.
This
has emboldened many federal judges at all levels to take advantage of their
lifetime appointments to make rulings that impose their own personal views and
call it law. Some have even added insult to injury by rationalizing such
judicial activism.
In a
recent interview, Justice Stephen Breyer claimed that laws are "not
clear," so that judges are forced to base their decisions on the
"values" they see behind the laws, rather than the specific words in
those laws.
"Not
clear" is an old ploy and "values" are a blank check.
Most of
the controversial Supreme Court decisions that have outraged and polarized the
country have not involved laws or facts that were "not clear."
Everybody knows what an abortion is and what the death penalty is.
Everybody
knows the difference between government's power to seize private property for
"public use," like building a reservoir or a bridge, and allowing
politicians to grab people's homes willy-nilly, in order to turn the property
over to some other private parties, such as owners of casinos, hotels or shopping
malls.
"Not
clear"? Even the most crystal-clear law in the world can be twisted by
clever lawyers and clever judges to seem unclear, if that is all it takes to
give them the power to impose their own notions as the law of the land.
To
people who want to see judges impose their own views instead of applying the
laws as written, "not clear" is a magic phrase like "open
sesame," opening the floodgates to unbridled judicial power.
The
people who use this foolish argument are not fools themselves, though they may
well regard the rest of us as fools enough to buy some pretty words, at the
cost of losing the right of free people to govern themselves through the
democratic process.
Very
often both headstrong judges and those who support them in the media and in
academia act as if these elites have both the right and the duty to impose
their superior wisdom and virtue on the rest of us.
Many
are unduly impressed by their superiority to others within some narrow band out
of the vast spectrum of human concerns. From the fact that they know so much
more than the average person, at least within that narrow band, they assume
that they have more knowledge than all the millions of average people put
together, across the whole spectrum of concerns involved in decisions.
That is
the grand fallacy of social engineering in general.
No
doubt the central planners in the days of the Soviet Union knew more economics
than the average Soviet citizen. But nobody knows enough to set the 24 million
prices that central planners had to set.
Yet
hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens could have dealt with 24 million
prices much more effectively because each individual or enterprise had only to
deal with the relatively few prices necessary for their own decision-making.
In
this, as in so many other situations in so many other societies, the total
knowledge of the many vastly exceeded the special knowledge of the few.
That is
what makes limiting the powers of the government so important — because it is
virtually impossible to limit the presumptions of government officials, whether
legislative, executive or judicial.
In the
United States, those limits are set by the Constitution. Yet those limits have
been repeatedly and increasingly exceeded by activist judges claiming that the
laws are "not clear."
It is
shameless sophistry. But they are not going to stop until they get stopped. And
the only way to stop them is to start impeaching those judges who go counter to
the law.
There
will of course be outcries about a threat to an "independent
judiciary." But the judiciary is not supposed to be independent of the
laws, which is the dangerous situation today.