Scan the government grandees caught up in the current administration’s ballooning IRS, Associated Press, and Benghazi scandals. In each case, a blue-chip Ivy League degree was no guarantee that our best and brightest technocrats would prove transparent or act honorably. What difference did it make that Press Secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obama, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had degrees from prestigious universities when they misled the American people or Congress?
Ideas of the 1960s have grown reactionary in our world, which is vastly different from the America of a half-century ago.
Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare, and generous public pensions? Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such thing as double-dipping. Seniors often were physically worn out from blue-collar jobs. They were usually poorer and frequently sicker than society in general. Many people died not long after they retired.
Not now. Seniors often live a quarter-century or longer after retirement from mostly white-collar jobs, drawing subsidies from those least able to pay for them. Most seniors are not like today’s strapped youth, scrimping for a down-payment on a house. Most are not struggling to find even part-time work. None are paying off crushing student loans. In a calcified economy, why would an affluent couple in their early 60s earn a “senior discount” at a movie, while the struggling young couple with three children in the same ticket line does not?
Affirmative action and enforced “diversity” were originally designed to give a boost to those who were victims of historical bias from the supposedly oppressive white-majority society. Is that still true, a half-century after these assumptions became institutionalized? Through greater immigration and intermarriage, America has become a multiracial nation. Skin color, general appearance, accent, or the sound of one’s name cannot so easily identify either the “oppressors” or the “victims.”
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