Guaranteed Equity Only Invites Tyranny

President Biden’s administration has issued a sweeping new executive order (EO) this month creating a “White House Steering Committee on Equity” chaired by Director of Domestic Policy Susan Rice which misconstrues and conflates the federal government’s constitutional role to ensure equality of opportunity for all citizens with false pretenses to entitle equal outcomes.

Dubiously dubbed “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” the order mandates that all federal agencies develop an annual Equity Action Plan that openly divides and favors individuals and groups to the detriment of others based upon stereotypic neo-Marxist classifications independent of earned merit or true necessity.

Section 5 of the EO specifically charges each “Agency Equity Team” with “the implementation of equity initiatives,” and “delivering equitable outcomes” for the American people.

First, to be very clear, no one I know — or wish to know — can conscience any acts of discrimination based on race, national origin, sex or economic class with respect to employment, university admissions and access to government benefits, programs or services.

Every U.S. citizen is equal under the law, and each must be fairly treated as such. Nothing, however, in the Biden EO even limits its definition of equity to legal residents.

Differences between equality and equity are fundamental and crucial: differences between assuring equal opportunities and equal outcomes; between equal treatment under the law and fingers on scales of justice; between unbiasedly judging people's behaviors and achievements as individuals — or superficially as members of groups; between rewarding those who strive for achievements and those who don't.

This bedrock equality principle is enunciated by America's founders in the second paragraph of our nation's Declaration of Independence: ''We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.''

And yes, as a compassionate nation, some individuals and groups do need and deserve special aid, such as financial support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, voucher credit programs that allow free choice of K-12 schools, and quality affordable housing for unavoidably distressed low-income people irrespective of race.

Most Americans generously recognize a fair and moral responsibility to provide assistance to all poor and disadvantaged citizens who urgently need temporary or sustaining help.

In doing so, the “slippery slope” here is to avoid disincentivizing self-help initiatives which essentially rebrand and reorient racism of the “Jim Crow” era, the class hatred in Stalin’s “anti-kulak” policies, and the dogmatism of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.”

The Biden administration was already well along this hazardous “equity” path when it rendered certain farmers and restaurant owners ineligible for COVID-19 related benefits and aid based solely on the fact that they were white … programs that were appropriately challenged in courts and rescinded by Congress.

And it’s not just privileged “white” who become casualties along the equity trail.

In higher education, for example, we have witnessed Harvard, in its desire for diversity, turn away ''excessively large numbers'' of highly qualified Asian-American applicants for admission based upon egregiously prejudicial personality assessments that blanket-rated them comparatively lacking in de-meriting traits such as courage, leadership and likability.

Nor is Harvard alone.

Texas A&M University and six Texas medical schools are currently facing lawsuits for racially discriminatory hiring and admissions practices — all of which are premised on “equity.”

Under today's prevalent woke identity politics, such social equity programs — marketed as sine qua non doctrine of “diversity” — are also taking increased precedence over individual merit-based versus hiring and reward criteria throughout other nongovernment entities.

Consider this compromised and dangerous employment trend the next time you travel on a commercial airline or require serious surgery.

All you should care about — entirely irrespective of race, gender preference or creed — is confidence that they have competent knowledge, skills and experience to bring you back alive and healthy.

History has demonstrated that a society devoid of rich opportunities afforded in America might well be more equitable, but not a more just or preferable society to experience.

My great grandmother, an indigenous American Indian, could hardly have imagined the freedoms and opportunities her native land has subsequently afforded me and more recent generations.

As Black social theorist Thomas Sowell, a Stanford University Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, warned, "any search for cosmic justice'' that demands existence be made fair and equal in every respect can lead only to totalitarian hell.

America’s foundation of equal justice is not served when false promises of equity are applied as a putative vehicle for government bureaucrats to divine class remedies for unfair treatment of previous generations, or perhaps disadvantaged childhoods, at the expense of individuals with greater merits and needs.

Who would you trust to develop a righteous formula to determine which individuals and groups are privileged too much? How much must be taken away and given to those who have too little?

Broadly applied across government, only tyrannically intrusive overreach could presume to specify such equity rules and enforcements for every business, public institution and civic organization.

Such universal equity goals were never intended by our prescient forefathers to be the determinate role of government. Moreover, any government attempt to do so runs entirely antithetical to precious American freedoms and liberties our Constitution — now under attack — was expressly designed to protect.