It's a Big Brother atmosphere in the U.S. these days with all the government agencies collecting data on us. The latest news on this front comes from NYpost.com about the government drive to get information that might be used by the government or civil rights lawyers to prove disparate impact. From Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database:
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
Go to the article to see the various agencies doing this. But the most interesting is the HUD database and the administration's goal of ending housing segregation.
It seems that Obama has determined that people should live in neighborhoods that have the correct racial diversity. Do people live in neighborhoods with people of the same race because they're racists? No, segregated neighborhoods exist because of a natural tendency of people to be around people like themselves. People are free to live where they want. And they've chosen to live in the neighborhoods where they live.
Now it's true that housing prices have a lot to do with a prospective home buyer's choice. But the idea of moving people who couldn't otherwise afford it into an expensive neighborhood doesn't accomplish anything except satisfy quotas.
The problem with initiatives like Affirmatively Further Fair Housing is that no-one among its adherents is able to anticipate the negative consequences. Or if they are, they are just fine with them. This is what we get when a majority of voters in swing states wanted a community organizer for president.
If only we had a government that wanted everyone to have the same opportunities to achieve an outcome rather than one that wants to skip the steps in between and simply supply the outcome.
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