David McElroy

This is the time in the election cycle when I’m starting to hear from a lot of people asking for support in the 2014 election. Some people want moral support. Others want money. (Well, they all want money.)

Many of them are good people and I like a lot of them. But I can’t support any of them in good conscience, because I can’t support the system they’ve chosen to join. To save myself from having to reply to every candidate personally and explain the reason, let me explain to everybody all at once.

If you’re running for office, I don’t necessarily oppose you personally, but I oppose the entire system of coercion that majoritarianism represents. You’re probably a decent person. You probably mean well. But for anything to change, the entire structure of the system has to change. Just electing you — or even hundreds or thousands of people like you — isn’t going to change anything.

If you grew up in this country, you were probably taught to revere the political system that’s in place. You heard propaganda in school about how great the system was. You were taught that “democracy” and “freedom” mean the same thing. (You were lied to.) You were taught the fiction that if honest men (and women) would just “do the right things,” the system would produce peace, prosperity and freedom for all. After all, it worked in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” didn’t it?

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Do you have enough neighbors whose skin color is different from your own? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed new rules that are aimed at forcing changes to neighborhoods that it deems to not be racially mixed enough.

When I first read something about this a month or so back, it was just on a few conservative fringe news sites, so I was hesitant to take it seriously. Surely the Obama administration couldn’t think it had the legal power or even moral right to decide where people should live. If mostly working class whites live in one neighborhood and mostly middle class blacks in another, so what? Nobody would be insane enough to think the government should force people to change their voluntary decisions about where they want to live and who they want to live around.

But now that U.S. News and World Report is writing about it — and confirming the gist of what I’d read before — I have to take this insane story seriously. The busybodies in Washington really have decided to use your tax money to socially engineer where people live. Here are the proposed rules, which are currently in a 60-day public comment period.

The Obama administration doesn’t think it’s reasonable that people tend to choose to live around people who are a lot like them. Those social engineers think it’s OK for them to rig the system in ways that will produce neighborhoods with mixes they like — when it comes to both race and income levels.

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After slaves were freed in the United States in the 19th century, how much really changed for them? For the most part, they worked on the same land, did the same labor and worked for the same plantation owners. How exactly did their lives change when they were told they were free?

The slaves in the United States had worked hard and had nothing to show for their work. When we look at the sharecropping contracts they signed after they were allegedly free, it’s clear that their lives were just as controlled as they had been before. The only difference was that they now had a piece of paper that said they were free.

If you look at the typical sharecropping contract they signed, it’s clear that they didn’t have a chance to change their lives. They were leasing small tracts of land from the plantation owner. They went into debt — to the plantation owner — for the tools and animals they needed to work the land. They were required to mill the cotton at his cotton gin at a specified price. They were required to pay back the money for the tools out of the first cotton of the season. If there was anything left over, they could buy their own food, of course. But the plantation owner had the right to end the contract and kick them off any time he wanted.

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