<p> The biggest disappointment for Democrats in last week's
generally pleasing election results was Harvey Gantt's loss to
Jesse Helms in the North Carolina Senate race. Gantt apparently
was leading until near the end, when Helms unleashed TV ads
focusing on affirmative action in general and Gantt's own profit
from a television-station deal in particular. No doubt these ads
were intended in part to promote simple racism against Gantt,
who is black, and no doubt they succeeded. But genuine
resentment against racial favoritism is also something the
Democrats are going to have to come to terms with.
</p>
<p> Of all forms of official racial preference, the one that
helped make Harvey Gantt a wealthy man is the least defensible.
In awarding valuable broadcast licenses, the Federal
Communications Commission gives extra points for minority
ownership and civic involvement. Gantt, then mayor of Charlotte,
N.C., was part of a group that snared a franchise in 1985 and
sold it almost immediately to a white media company. (In a
crowning idiocy, the FCC--having deliberated exquisitely,
often for years, over the relative worthiness of contenders for
a license--places virtually no restrictions on how soon or to
whom or for how much the winner can sell out.) As a result, on
an apparent investment of a few hundred dollars, Gantt made
several hundred thousand.
</p>
<p> An opportunity like this is too good to pass up, and you can
hardly blame a generation of black civic leaders for succumbing.
New York City Mayor David Dinkins and Democratic national
chairman Ron Brown are among many who have made or enhanced
their fortunes by lending minority luster to broadcast deals.
You almost suspect a Republican plot here, since the G.O.P.--rhetorically the scourge of reverse-discrimination policies--has never made an issue of this one. The Republican-dominated
FCC and Supreme Court have both endorsed it.
</p>
<p> Yet Jesse Helms' moral outrage that blacks should be getting
rich off an outrageous giveaway from the Federal Government is
oddly narrow. After all, long before it adopted minority
preferences, the FCC was handing out valuable licenses
practically for free on other, equally bogus criteria. After
more than a half-century of this foolishness, many of America's
largest fortunes derive from ownership of broadcasting
franchises. Helms himself has made the odd nickel this way. In
just the past few years, the awarding of cellular-telephone
franchises has created a whole new category of white male
multimillionaires. Reformers have long argued that valuable FCC
licenses should be auctioned off, rather than given away, so
that the value can be shared by all.
</p>
<p> The FCC's preference system for minorities and women is
particularly egregious. But it nicely illustrates a conceptual
flaw common to many forms of reverse discrimination: they
redistribute inequality instead of reducing it. Is the proper
question, Why are there not more blacks among those being
anointed millionaires by the FCC? Or is it, Why is the FCC
anointing millionaires in the first place?
</p>
<p> Almost by definition, reverse-discrimination controversies
arise when society is allotting inequality. Something valuable
is up for grabs: a job or a promotion or a place at medical
school. A better question than who should get the goody is
whether the inequality is necessary at all.
</p>
<p> A place at medical school is valuable because of a variety
of social and governmental policies that reduce opportunities
to deliver health care and increase the incomes of doctors.
Restrictive licensing laws forbid nurses and paramedics to
perform simple tasks (or, in reality, allow doctors to collect
a middleman's fee). Medical-school places are limited. Medicare
and Medicaid expand the market for doctors' services, while
doing little to promote competition on price.
</p>
<p> As an egalitarian ideal, a society with more opportunities
for those who wish to practice medicine, with cheaper health
care for all and with a smaller gap between the incomes of
doctors and the incomes of most other people (including nurses)
would surely be more desirable than a society like the one we
have now, except that 12% of the doctors are black and half are
women.
</p>
<p> Of course it is a more ambitious ideal, possibly harder to
achieve politically than simple reverse discrimination. It steps
directly on more powerful toes. But it cannot be faulted by
conservatives as social engineering, as interference with free
lives and free markets. Broadcasting and medicine are just two
areas where the more radical solution, the more egalitarian one,
is more oriented toward free markets. But don't expect
conservatives to take up this rallying cry. Some of them would
rather admit a ration of minorities into their cozy
establishments than see those establishments truly shaken up.
Others, like Jesse Helms, would rather rub racial wounds raw
than promote their own alleged principles.
</p>
<p> One controversial Helms ad showed a white hand crumpling a
rejection slip. "You needed that job, and you were the best
qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a
racial quota. Is that really fair?" That is, at the very least,
a crude description of how affirmative action works. But simple
mathematics dictates that every job gained by a black or a woman
through such efforts is a job lost by a white or a man. Whether
that is "fair" depends on knowing the unknowable: whether,
without all past and present discrimination, a black or a woman
would have got that job anyway. Simple mathematics also dictates
that for every victim of discrimination there is a--usually
unknown--beneficiary.
</p>
<p> Both sides of the affirmative-action debate spend too much
energy nursing grievances over specific, and debatable,
occasions of "unfairness" and not enough time pondering the
unfairness of life in general. Two people chase one job. You get
rich and I don't. Or you get cancer and I don't. Much of that
unfairness just has to be lived with. But some of it can be
mitigated by government policy, and some of it is actually
created by government policies that ought to be undone. All
