Why Liberals Oppose Ben Carson
Trump has tapped a nonpolitician to clean up a mess created by politicians and bureaucrats.
Do yourself a favor and hold off on joining the liberal outrage over Donald Trump’s cabinet choices—or at least better understand what’s happening.
Critics say the president-elect is tapping individuals who lack experience or who want to eliminate the very agencies they will be tasked with running. But the real concern on the political left is that the incoming administration will be all too competent at shifting the priorities of some federal agencies while reining in others.
The main objection to school reformer Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s pick for education secretary, is not that she’s never been a classroom teacher but rather that she wants to expand school choice, which threatens union control of public education. Green groups don’t want former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to become energy secretary because he opposes federal subsidies that facilitated boondoggles like Solyndra. And they don’t want Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt anywhere near the Environmental Protection Agency due to his history of fighting efforts to impose through executive fiat environmental regulations that Congress has rejected.
One of the best examples of liberals using personal attacks as a pretext for policy disagreements is the campaign against retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who has been selected to head the Housing and Urban Development Department. The New York Times depicts Dr. Carson as an antigovernment ideologue with a “warped view of housing.” The Daily Beast chides him for criticizing government efforts to help low-income minorities by sprinkling them throughout wealthy suburbs where they couldn’t afford to live without government subsidies.
As a child, Dr. Carson lived in public housing in Detroit and Boston, an experience that he chronicles vividly in his memoir, “Gifted Hands.” His upbringing doesn’t make him a housing expert, but like the general who knows war and is therefore less likely to venture recklessly into a new one, Dr. Carson’s background does make him better able to empathize with the plight of the poor.
Besides, if the state of inner-cities is any indication, the last thing low-income residents need is more of the same so-called expertise that Dr. Carson lacks. New York City is home to the nation’s largest public housing program, writes Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute, “and the average resident has spent 22 years living in a subsidized home.” Are HUD’s policies helping these people or trapping them?
HUD is an outgrowth of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and its original goal was to address the housing needs of America’s poor. Today, it serves as a blunt tool for social engineers who are hellbent on achieving “racial balance” in residential housing patterns—whether the intended beneficiaries want it or don’t. Surveys going back decades show that blacks and whites alike are more concerned with a potential neighbor’s income than they are with his skin color. Most people don’t have a problem with families from different racial or ethnic groups moving in next door, so long as the newcomers can afford to live there.
Polling done at the national level as well as in cities like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Omaha also reveals that a large majority of blacks strongly prefer to live in a neighborhood that is at least half black. Despite these findings, the idea that a neighborhood’s racial imbalance could be caused by something other than racial discrimination never seems to occur to the experts at HUD.
The housing expertise that Dr. Carson lacks also played a role in the housing market collapse in 2006 and the subsequent Great Recession. HUD imposed requirements on government lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide affordable-housing loans to low-income borrowers.
Under threat of a discrimination lawsuit or the imposition of more regulations, even nonbank lenders were pressured into issuing loans to people who were poor credit risks. HUD and other agencies equated racial disparities in loan approvals with racial discrimination, even if there were no actual complaints of racism from would-be borrowers. To keep the federal watchdogs happy, lenders came up with ways to meet the government’s numerical targets. All of this was of course done in the name of helping minorities. But when you make it possible for people to receive loans they can’t really afford, you also risk saddling them with foreclosed homes and bad credit ratings.
There are few if any federal agencies in greater need of a makeover than HUD, and that makeover is unlikely to come from the type of “expert” at the helm who would appease Dr. Carson’s critics. It’s HUD’s view of housing that is warped, not Dr. Carson’s. Mr. Trump has tapped a nonpolitician to clean up a mess created by political pros and bureaucrats who have an agenda that often differs from the needs of the poor. Let’s see if Dr. Carson is up to the job.
Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Dr. Carson lived in public housing as a child.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal