Some racial groups are better at making money than others - unfairness is irrelevant

You'll have gathered by now that I’m a bit of a fan of the American economist, Thomas Sowell. He's a beacon of rationality in a deranged political landscape. Today, he's on sparkling form at Townhall.com, writing about the weird Liberal belief that economic inequality between racial groups must be the result of unfairness (you can read the whole article here). I was going to wrap the Great Man’s thoughts up in a bundle of my own observations – but what’s the point? He expresses it perfectly:

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

Nor is this simply an opinion. Businesses have been sued by the government when the representation of different groups among their employees differs substantially from their proportions in the population at large. But, no matter how the human race is broken down into its components -- whether by race, sex, geographic region or whatever -- glaring disparities in achievements have been the rule, not the exception.
 

Later, he says:

Higher achieving groups -- whether classes, races or whatever -- are often blamed for the failure of other groups to achieve. Politicians and intellectuals, especially, tend to conceive of social questions in terms that allow them to take on the role of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.  

This can be a huge disservice to those individuals and groups who are lagging behind, for it leads them to focus on a sense of grievance and victimhood, rather than on how they can lift themselves up instead of trying to pull other people down.

And, of course, Sowell knows what he's talking about: he’s a black man who has achieved great eminence in his field entirely on his own merits.

I can't help including one personal observation. Just ask yourself: if positive discrimination is such a good idea, why does no mainstream politician ever suggest there should be demographic fairness when it comes to airline pilots? Could it be because politicians fly a lot, and therefore, rather than just strutting around feeling good about themselves, they might actually be putting their own lives at risk in the name of social justice?