The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

In his latest budget proposal, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is proposing a “baby bonds” plan to provide taxpayer-funded savings bonds to children born in 2021 that will be cashable on their 18th birthday. 

Here’s how the baby bonds plan would work:

Under the plan, New Jersey would provide a one-time investment of $1,000 for every 2021 baby whose family’s income is no more than five times the federal poverty level. For a family of four, the income cutoff would be $131,000, Murphy said Tuesday during his budget address at Rutgers University’s football stadium in Piscataway.

Murphy said the plan would benefit three out of every four children born in New Jersey, calling it the first statewide program of its kind. The governor did not say whether the plan would continue in future years.

“As this child grows, so, too, will the value of this bond — to help pay for college, to help make a down payment on a home, or to help start a small business,” the Democratic governor said.

On the face of it, this is just another entitlement. But this new entitlement is no ordinary welfare program.

Think about this. A run-of-the-mill welfare entitlement is geared toward the economic status of the recipient. 

Not so with Murphy’s scheme.

Every child comes into this world having never earned a single dollar. Every child is born broke. So fairness would dictate that every single child get the baby bond. After all, a newborn child has no control over his parents’ earning power, no claim on his parents’ income or wealth once he reaches the age of 18, no guarantee he will be given anything by his parents, and no capacity to launch a remunerative career. Yet this child will be handed a nest egg, or not, based on something he has no control over--his parents’ economic status. 

Being judged by something beyond one’s control. Sound familiar?

Now consider this:

[Patrick] Murray, the Monmouth [University] pollster, said Murphy was shrewd to add the “baby bonds” proposal to the budget and cast tax hikes as “measures of racial equality” after the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in recent months.

The governor said during his speech that “too many families of color pay a greater share of their hard-earned income in taxes than millionaires, who are overwhelmingly not people of color.”

“Ensuring fairness and justice in taxation is just as important as ensuring fairness and justice in society,” Murray said. “In fact, it is an essential step in eliminating the structural racism in our society.”

“Structural racism” disappeared from our laws with the end of the Jim Crow era. Here, Murphy’s structural racism refers to statistical disparities in income and wealth, not of individuals, but of families. How do statistical disparities indicate structural racism today? They don’t. There is little doubt that economic disparities are lingering effects, in part, of racist laws from the last century. That was genuine structural racism. But that’s gone. It’s history. The lingering statistical disparities of today prove nothing about racism today. So innocent children born in 2021 are to be cheated because of wrongs perpetrated long ago, if their parents belong to a group that is statistically “overwhelmingly not people of color”--families earning more than $131,000 per year! Statistics prove nothing, but they are useful as a last refuge for damned liars.

The baby bonds program is not overtly racist: All New Jersey children below five times the federal family poverty level will get the bonds. But in that Murphy has a racial motive, the bond program is covertly racist.

Imagine two children born in 2021. One gets a $1000 bond. The other doesn’t. Eighteen years later, one child gets a pile of money from the state, the other gets nothing. Why the unequal treatment of the law? Not because of money the child earns--neither child has ever had any substantiation income--but because of someone else’s income. 

Is this fair? What can possibly justify this disparate treatment by one’s own government? Note the focus on families. Enter mankind’s darkest evil--collectivism. Note the income threshold is not based on any particular individual’s doing. The threshold is “family” income. The child is judged not as an individual but as part of a collective--the family.

The baby bonds program is actually the intersection of two collectivist evils--racism and egalitarian criminal socialism. A child has no control over his parents’ economic status any more than he has control over his skin color. Yet he is to be judged not on his own attributes by the attributes of the family he is born into--their color and their economic status. This is economic and racial bigotry. 

Racism is re-invading American law at the expense of objectivity *, and that is a bad sign. Murphy’s approach to the baby bonds, though it stops just short of explicitly employing race as a criteria for inclusion, is part of a much wider threat to America--the repudiation of individualism and the deliberate regression to tribalism, with the associated “market for victimhood” and “cycle of revenge” that infests tribal societies both today and throughout history. Murphy says “Ensuring fairness and justice in taxation is just as important as ensuring fairness and justice in society.” 

But collectivism is actually the obliteration of fairness and justice because only individuals, not groups, exist in reality. And in reality fairness and justice applies only to individuals. Protecting individual rights, not group “rights”, equally and at all times, is the only foundation for valid law. Anyone who forgets that principle cannot claim ensuring justice as a motive.

* [As philosopher Harry Binswanger explains in What is Objective Law?, “As the law must be objective in its source, so it must be objective in its form: objective laws are clearly defined, consistent, unambiguous, stable, and as straightforward and simple as possible. They are also impartial and universal, in the sense of applying to all individuals as individuals rather than as members of any race, creed, class or other collective.”] {my emphasis}

Related Reading:

NJ Turns its Back on the 14th Amendment – and History

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

The Racism of the 'Anti-Racists': 'This New America' - Apartheid?

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

Related Viewing:

 Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Market for Victimhood [a critically important and timely half-hour talk followed by a one hour Q&A]

“It has been said that education opens the mind, while indoctrination closes it. A good education permits one to think critically, and to consider multiple viewpoints." Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins those who have been sounding the alarm on the closing of the American mind.