What one finds when reading congressional legislation is invariably surprising. Take the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, which was created by merging Senate and House bills. When the Senate returns from recess, one of its first actions will be to vote on the bill, which passed the House on June 30. I was searching the bill for a provision about derivatives. What did I find but Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major power grab, the bill inserts race and gender quotas into America’s financial industry. -IBD
Inserting sweeping new regulations into a law covering something completely different has become such a habit in America that it’s a practice almost never commented on. In fact, it’s a practice older than America. For instance, Haman asked the King of Persia to kill off all the Jewish people so he could kill one Jewish person, Mordecai. The primary role Esther played towards the Persian King was to point out the unintended consequences of such a sweeping law —that the King, by implementing this law, would not only lose one of his chief advisers, whom he’d just recently honored, but also his Queen.
What we need is another Esther. We need someone who will show us, in the light of day, the unintended consequences of focusing debate in one place, while taking action someplace else. Do we really need more “affirmative action,” also known as racism, in this country? Can anyone really claim that the government needs to regulate the number of women and “minorities” hired at financial services firms, or the firms they contract with (which would include law offices to doctors to insurance companies to office supply stores, presumably)? To the tune of 20 new “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion?” Or is it we think that women and minorities will be “more honest,” and hence more likely to blow the whistle on bad dealings in a world that is already heavily regulated by the government?
This is a sop to the “social justice crowd,” rather than serious financial regulation. The American Government must be seen to be doing something in the face of the recent —and coming— financial meltdown. What’s the solution? Pass a huge bill full of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with enforcing fair dealing in the financial industry, or stopping fraud, but rather creates new discrimination in the name of ending old discrimination.
