Why ‘affirmative action’ doesn’t work

This week’s truism: all top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing rather more misery and injustice than the misery and injustice they were designed to alleviate. This is chiefly because they come up against that most un-leftie of things, reality – but also because liberals are incapable of looking at actual outcomes and are able only to wring their hands in despair and wish for stuff. The world is not an ideal place and attempts to pretend they can make it so are always misbegotten.

The most obvious example of this is in that most explicitly iniquitous of things, affirmative action – or, as we call it over here, ‘positive discrimination’. The American media and our own, reliably stupid, BBC were beside themselves with fury when the US Supreme Court recently ordered that race should no longer play a part in deciding if a candidate should get into a decent university.