The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently announced funding of $113 million for the Family Self-Sufficiency program. The program is a part of HUD’s “economic justice” agenda. When she announced the program, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said,
We’re looking at everything through a lens of equity and how we address systemic racism. We’re giving people who have historically been left out and underserved the resources to take a chance on their futures – to improve their credit, save resources for homeownership and other needs, and build wealth. That’s what this is all about.
Fudge didn’t bother to explain why individuals need the government’s help to improve their credit score or save money. Like most of the political Left, Fudge wants to blame systemic racism for causing individuals to use credit unwisely or fail to save money. They want to absolve individuals of the consequences of their poor decisions.
The fact is, each individual can choose to spend less than he makes. Each individual can choose to use credit wisely. Each individual can choose to take responsibility for his own financial status. Or, an individual can spend more than he makes, take on an unsustainable debt load, and blame others for the consequences of his poor decisions.
This is not to say that the racist policies of the past, including those of the Federal Housing Administration, denied blacks and other minorities the same housing subsidies that were given to whites. And those policies undoubtedly contributed to the wealth gap between “people of color” and whites. However, past racist policies do not absolve individuals of the responsibility to make good decisions today regarding their own life and finances.
The solution to past racist policies is not more racist policies. It was wrong for the government to offer subsidized housing loans to individuals based on their skin color. Fudge’s proposal would subsidize housing loans to individuals based on their skin color is equally wrong.
Racism, Ayn Rand wrote,
is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Fudge proposes to give preference to individuals, not because of their character and virtues, but because of what happened to their ancestors. HUD’s “economic justice” agenda isn’t about justice. It is a policy of rewarding some because of their skin color. And that is just as vile and unjust as the FHA’s policy of “redlining.”