A good article in City Journal: Welcome to the World of Minority Contracting: Government goals and set-asides for “disadvantaged” firms breed corruption and fraud, deepen racial divisions, and cost taxpayers billions, by Judge Glock, Spring 2023.

It’s about the government’s favoritism to women and minorities:

Affirmative-action plans in schools or workplaces get the headlines, but the practice of favoring minorities in government contracts is almost as old, and even more far-reaching. Such favoritism—in the form of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE), or Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE) programs—exists across all levels of government and in states and cities of every political hue.

Many have written about how Buy American requirements or labor deals drive up the cost of infrastructure. More should look at the vast reach of minority-contracting laws, which also increase costs and encourage fraud. My latest for @CityJournal magazine https://t.co/SYxiD1NJIu

— Judge Glock (@judgeglock) May 25, 2023

At Instapundit, David Bernstein writes:

When writing my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America (currently, btw, at its lowest price on Amazon to date), three things struck me about MBE affirmative action. One is that the Supreme Court issued two pretty strict rulings against it in 1989 and 1994, everyone thought this would be the end of minority contracting quotas and preferences. As it turned out, government at all levels was so committed to these programs that they exploited loopholes in the decisions and took advantage of the limited resources of preference opponents, such that racial preferences in contracting are more prevalent than ever. Which shows, in turn, that if SCOTUS want to get rid of such programs, whether in education or contracting, they need to hold them unconstitutional, period.

The second is that these programs were instituted in the 1970s to help black Americans integrate into the national economy, but the vast majority of such contracts go to post-1965 Hispanic, Caribbean, African, and Asian immigrants and their descendants, and to people with distant Native American heritage. Very few MBE contracts to descendants of American slaves. I tried to get some hard data on this from friends in the Trump federal Department of Transportation, but word came back that the statistics were so embarrassing that no one would ever release them. Meanwhile, given immigration and intermarriage rates, within a few decades eighty percent or more of Americans will be eligible for an MBE preference. If almost everyone gets a preference, does it still count as affirmative action? [Emphases added]

This last bit about ”eighty percent or more of Americans” being ”minorities” sounds a bit like the Great Replacement, which I am assured is a conspiracy theory.

But of course, while it’s fascinating that blacks, who this program was intended to help, are losing out to immigrants, the real Invisible Victims of this are white businessmen.