One Nice Thing About Living In Berkeley Is That You Can Be Sure That God Agrees With Whatever You’re Thinking

Excerpts from a trip report on four days spent in the East Bay by Philip Greenspun:

For roughly 60 years, Berkeley has offered more services to its residents than virtually any other city in the U.S. The schools are expensively funded. Welfare programs have been lavish. People can borrow a full set of tools from the public library. There is a non-profit organization on every block. Yet Berkeley has a poverty rate of 21 percent, higher than the state average of 12 percent (source). The school system tracks student performance by race and ethnicity so that they can reveal to local employers that “white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse” (source). Anywhere else in the country one would be considered a vicious racist for claiming that black and Latino high school students are intellectually inferior to white and Asian students, but in Berkeley broadcasting this information marks one as a concerned liberal. Sixty years of failure had not daunted any of the East Bayers with whom I spoke; all were in favor of even bigger and more expensive government. ...

I had breakfast with two white males. One founded a mobile phone tech company and mentioned that they are soon to go public. He is already pretty rich but stands to make tens of millions of dollars in the IPO. Our entrepreneur grew up in the U.S., attended the best private schools, and then went on to the most elite universities. His family happens to come from Argentina. I asked the other white male at the table, a wage slave for a big company, how he would feel if his own daughter were rejected from college in favor of the rich entrepreneur’s kid, due to that child’s Hispanic status. This turned out not to be a tough question. Of course he wanted his daughter to go to the most prestigious school, but Affirmative Action was important and his own daughter would surely get into at least some college somewhere. So on balance he thought it would be fair for his daughter to be rejected. ...

At a CVS in Oakland, we bought sundries from a 70-year-old working as a cashier. I asked my local companion if he thought it was moral for the government to tax this poor old working person and hand the money over to a comfortable 50-year-old retired former public employee, which is essentially how California is now set up. He had not thought about the question.

Comments

[LydiaREYNOLDS35]

I opine that to receive the personal loans from creditors you ought to have a firm motivation. But, one time I have received a bank loan, just because I wanted to buy a building.