The Outstater
The Diversity Horizon
CAN WE SEPARATE DIVERSITY from identity long enough to understand that when it is arbitrarily applied it weakens any effort? Probably not, but here is an attempt.
If you are putting together a team and decide to ensure that one-third of them are from Kansas then you have denied yourself the untold talent/ability/energy of those non-Kansans who might have joined. You have gained nothing in return. You have lost competitive advantage.
Yet, you can imagine a situation where deciding that one-third of your team be made up of Kansans would gain competitive advantage. In fact, a WWII study found that naval officers from Kansas (or any Great Plains state) performed more satisfactorily at sea than those from other parts of the country (familiarity working when the horizon was distant.) You might even want to have a few Kansans around if you were trying to sell something to other Kansans, say, or need to be guided through Kansas.
But if you insist on reserving one-third of the spots for Kansans despite applicability or ability, solely because Kansans don’t have access to beachfront or some other irrelevancy, then you can avoid disadvantage only by changing the rules of competition or flattening the measures of comparison — that or assigning unwarranted moral superiority to Kanzoid preference.
All of which they have done — to ours and the Kansans lost opportunity and ruin.
Democracy in Perspective
“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.” — F.A. Hayek
WITH A SURE-TO-BE MOMENTOUS election around the corner, this is a good time to mark the limitations of direct democracy. And yes, I have first-hand experience in this regard. I have held public office myself, specifically president of my college’s men’s freshman dormitory, albeit briefly.
My campaign, which promised not to waste tuition money on the usual vapid administration-approved events, argued that the dormitory’s function was merely to house us, not to entertain us. My constituents already had a favorable ratio of females in the student body with co-ed living soon to come. They had beer and there was the introduction to campus — just beginning back then — of various mild-altering drugs. They wanted to be left alone.
It was a landslide.
Several months later I was called into the dean’s office to explain why I had not organized any of the usual vapid administration-approved events. I told him that I had promised not to do exactly that. Nonetheless, the dean read from some codex or another (the student handbook perhaps) and I was summarily stripped of office, my dorm citizenry disenfranchised.
A day later as I marched angrily across the quad to turn in the required paperwork, I rehearsed my resignation statement. Democracy at my school, I would say, had degenerated to the Stalinesque. Indeed, I would quote the man himself: “It’s not who votes it’s who counts the votes.” And I would throw in for good measure Mark Twain’s “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it,” and the lesson of Third World elections, “One man, one vote, once.”
Nobody asked for my resignation statement and it was made clear to me that representation was not the point of my dorm election. It was more along the lines of POWs being allowed to choose officers so camp commands could be more efficiently communicated.
Nor is it the point of a modern American election, I now realize. The process has been muddied by a divisive, envy-driven electorate and has been captured by malignant forces. Direct democracy today, even if honestly applied, is impractical in large, complex societies such as ours and leads to decisions that ignore the long-term impact of policies.
This is not meant to discourage, it is meant to turn our eyes away from the false promise of democracy and toward our founding concept of liberty as protected not by democracy but by a constitutional republic.
The difference is how decisions are made and how power is structured. In a constitutional republic, officials are elected as representatives of the people but they are governed according to a constitution, including an electoral college, that limits their power and defines the rights of citizens.
True, we still elect representatives to make decisions on our behalf but, again, these decisions must align with the constitution. It serves as a supreme law that is meant to protect individual liberty and ensure that the elected government operates within a set of established principles.
So the dean was right all along? — tcl
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