The college admission bribery scandal brought
out the anti-capitalistic mentality of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Its March
2019 editorial is titled College
admissions scandal exposes a corrupt and broken system. The “system” does not refer to college admissions. The Star-Ledger
wrote:
It is not news that the dullard scions of the wealthy are afforded
the same educational benefits enjoyed by real scholars, who earned their way
into prestigious colleges.
But the admissions
scandal not only exposes how
far parents will go to get their kids into elite schools. It reminds us that
the correlation between merit and the just apportionment of rewards isn’t the
bedrock American precept we claim it to be.
Still, who knew the new definition of affirmative action involved
millionaire parents greasing the volleyball coach?
Apparently
missing the extreme irony, the Star-Ledger then writes with a straight face:
Meanwhile, more qualified students who followed the rules were
squeezed out.
For those who thought that giving special consideration to a
deserving minority is a threat to the integrity of the admissions process,
we’ll pause here for cognitive dissonance.
Apparently,
it’s ok for more qualified students to be shut out for the
sake of some other less qualified student labeled “deserving minority.”
Apparently, it’s “far
worse [that] Parents were paying to break the rules” by bribery
versus by racism. What about these rules, which shut out “more qualified
students” because of race or ethnicity? No answer. It’s just assumed that there
is some fundamental difference between cheating by Affirmative Action and
cheating by bribery. There is not. Both forms of affirmative action are wrong. I left these comments, edited for clarity:
This scandal is a case of the wrongdoing of the
few, not the workings of some “master class” of “the rich.” To say it is is
bigotry. Such language is the premise of racism applied to economics. Any kind
of admission policy that results in “more qualified students who followed the
rules [being] squeezed out,” whether based on racial “qualifications” or
bribery, is corrupt.
We didn’t get to our material prosperity through
cheating, but through the workings of a social system—capitalism, to the extent
it is free to function—that, over time, allows rewards to follow value creation
through individual merit and voluntary exchange. It’s ridiculous to say otherwise.
This scandal is not a result of “savage
inequities”--not in the way it is meant in this editorial. The rush to condemn
“the rich” for the college scandal is a primal appeal to ignorance, envy,
resentment, hatred of achievement, and to anyone who wants to blame others for
their own failures. Justice, not bigotry, should be our standard. Punish the
guilty. It is immoral to condemn an entire group, whether by race or by level
of wealth, for the wrongdoing of the guilty.
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