What's Really Fair

By Michael Kinsley

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 without reference to race.