diversity and the free market?

thefederalist | The bromide that brings out the most sanctimonious chest pounding in American life is the demand for greater diversity in the most diverse country in the world. Liberals are especially adept celebrating their own virtue, while obscenely flashing, and thereby shaming, the barbarians they deem less sophisticated, cultured, or progressive. Using the garret of political correctness to silence critics, and employing the bludgeon of institutional authority to beat subordinates into submission, liberals have created a culture that takes a good concept and mutates it into a monster of social repression, censorship, and political shrinkage.

The machinery of liberalism mechanizes the media and academia to undermine diversity, all in the name of upholding it. Tyrannical limitations on acceptable speech, otherwise known as political correctness, make people less likely to interact with those of different races, not more, for the same reasons a pedestrian out for a stroll is likely to avoid a minefield. The liberal conception of diversity is also so narrow that it becomes silly and, in the process, loses all meaning. Universities that hire diversity czars and do everything to ensure a more diverse student population, short of lowering tuition, rarely advocate intellectual diversity, because that might cause students to question the presuppositions of liberal dogma. No one will ever catch the campus bureaucrat bolstering behavioral diversity, because that would require a critical examination of the gender codes (masculinity is bad), green codes (eating meat is bad), speech codes (jokes are bad), activism codes (anything conservative is bad), consumer codes (too much shopping is bad) and other codes that dictate exactly how an educated person is supposed to behave.

Intellectual diversity opens minds and behavioral diversity presents alternative options for lifestyle comfort and happiness. Liberals neglect, and often attack, those forms of diversity in an effort to reduce the concept of diversity to ethnic and racial bean counting. Diversity, according to the liberal vision, becomes as exciting as an average day of a census worker, and relegates potentially positive human interaction into the force feeding of medicine. The enforcement of quotas, both written and unwritten, expose the authoritarian streak in contemporary liberalism, and nothing demonstrates the we-know-what-is-good-for-you soft tyranny of liberals more than their suspicion, and often hatred, of the one force that creates and maintains maximum diversity in American life: the free market.


As Black History Month closes, it is timely to acknowledge that jazz music is one of the world’s greatest art forms. Created primarily and largely by black Americans in New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City, it was an attempt, in the poetic words of literary master Ralph Ellison, to “live with music” rather than “dying with noise.”

Close minded moralists speaking from the podiums of the State and the pulpits of the church condemned jazz for its sexuality and daring engagement with the romance of the urban night and city loner. If authoritarians won their battle against jazz music, the entire world would have lost the beauty and humanizing influence of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane. Jazz was able to establish dominance over the American airwaves, and establish itself as an art form, only because the free market provided an opportunity for jazz clubs, jazz radio stations, and jazz record companies to make large amounts of money by serving the consumer demand for jazz music. One of the greatest achievements of black Americans – the greatest achievements of American civilization – exists not because a college dean in a sweater vest listening to NPR suggested it, or because a political hack had his intern help him roll up his sleeves and then demanded it, it exists because of the laws of supply and demand, the excellence of the free market, and the incentive of profit.