Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul Page B

result of choice. Some might also regret that some heterogeneous voluntary groupings are the result of choice. Such is life under liberty.
    If we could see only the individual and not groups of individuals, it wouldn’t matter whom people associated with as long as no force or prohibitions were imposed by government. This is the way all civilized people should think. Unfortunately, friction remains among the various groups because of the call for forced integration based on political priorities. This replaces the proper goal of seeking equal justice before the law and making skin color, age, sex, and sexual orientation irrelevant. Outlawing discrimination has made for a less free and less prosperous society without bringing the various groups closer together.
    The argument is sometimes made that because of past injury, racial or otherwise, even hundreds of years ago, privileges and special favors are fair compensation needed to make up for past injustices. The problem is, those who must pay are not themselves guilty parties, and making up for some earlier injustice merely discriminates against another group. This only exacerbates hostilities between groups and ends up working against the desired goal. Falsely and loudly accusing someone of racism or anti-Semitism if the person is not in agreement with reparations is the worst form of bigotry. Such hypocrisy has destroyed a lot of people’s reputations and lives and does great harm to any effort to bring people together voluntarily.
    If reparations are available, it’s hardly a surprise that the line of eager recipients grows quickly. Even those who don’t qualify under the rules get in line. Many times those demanding reparations were never personally injured. The result is that undeserving recipients demand financial benefits for something they did not suffer from people who had nothing to do with the injustice. It doesn’t sound very fair to me.
    Behavior quickly changes when government benefits are offered. The mere offer of financial giveaways to victims of hurricanes, for example, invites every manner of public corruption; it creates a moral hazard as well. Government financial programs also benefit financial and business interests the same way. It’s not only the welfare poor who line up for benefits, whether after a natural disaster or during a financial crisis. Government force, illegally and illogically used to stop all discrimination, results in a multiplicity of unintended consequences, altered behavior, and fraud.

Epstein, Richard. 1995.
Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws
. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Sowell, Thomas. 1995.
Race and Culture
. New York: Basic Books.

E DUCATION
     
    I t’s quite clear that there’s no constitutional authority for the federal government to be involved in education, regardless of what the Supreme Court has claimed. Ideally, education in a free society would be the responsibility of the parents or the individual or local community, not the government. There is no constitutional prohibition for states or local communities to be involved in education, and up until the mid-twentieth century, education was the responsibility of the church, the family, and the local community.
    In the past sixty years especially, the federal government has become very much involved in financing and directing education at all levels. There is no evidence that quality of education has improved. There is evidence that more people go to college and that the cost has skyrocketed. At the grade school and high school levels, where local schools and parents have ever less control over the curriculum and administration of schools, there’s definitely been more violence, more drugs, and more dropouts associated with more centralized control.
    Competition is helpful in any endeavor. And this is truein education. The near monopoly control over the indoctrination of young people in our public school systems is