CONSERVATIVES ARE CHAMPIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE: IT IS TIME THAT WE SAID SO

Once again, the City of Chicago is reeling over the violent death of a child. The savage beating death of Fenger High School student Derrion Albert, caught on video and broadcast by YouTube, has shocked and outraged the entire world. 

Youth-on-youth violence is among the most destructive manifestations of the endemic poverty in American cities. Such violence perverts the “invisible hand” that usually drives children to achievement. Among urban poor, the drive, ambition and hard work of children is too often channeled through criminal enterprises into violence. As a consequence, the hard work and ambition of the perpetrators becomes a cost and not a benefit to society, while the potential of the victims is forever denied.  

Such tragedies give rise to questions:  Why did this happen? How can we stop it? The answer always seems to be sought in government largesse. Tragedy is met with the same expensive government programs and curtailment of civil liberties that have repeatedly failed to solve the problem.    

The sad truth is that we know why these tragedies occur:  People make choices, choices have consequences and some consequences are tragic. The fact we often ignore is that people generally choose the best options available to them.

When I hear of such tragedies, I cannot help asking, “Why did those children choose a life of crime? Why didn’t they choose to attend a good school, earn a quality education and lift themselves out of despair?” The answer is distressing:  These children did not choose to pursue an education because that choice was not available to them. These children were forced by an unjust education system to choose between two failing options - attend the dysfunctional and non-performing school that their parents and grandparents attended without educational benefit, or make their own way. Like any other red-blooded American, these children choose, time and time again, to make their own way rather than to rely upon a senseless government bureaucracy.

As conservatives, we know there is nothing wrong with the people who make up America’s permanent underclass.  They respond to incentives and make choices in the same way everyone else does.  When government restricts liberty by removing the option of quality education, people respond by choosing from among the alternatives available. If those alternatives do not offer a better future, it is a reflection on the low quality of government-controlled education, not the capabilities of those making tough choices.

Conservatives have long advocated school choice. This system empowers America’s poor to choose quality education and directs resources to schools that provide our communities with educational excellence. School choice initiatives incentivize poor children to direct their hard work and ambition toward education, prosperity and, yes, social responsibility. 

As conservatives who advocate limited government and individual liberty, we may not be accustomed to speaking in terms of social justice, yet that is precisely the end served by our beliefs. As the economic weaknesses inherent in big government liberalism send Americans reeling from double-digit unemployment and eventual inflation, we conservatives must learn to speak in terms that convey the human side of our beliefs to new constituencies. It is time that we conservatives seize the language of the high ground occupied by our philosophy:  limited government, individual liberty, and, oh yes, social justice.

For Liberty!