Doctrine of Rights

I was reading a column by Charles R. Kesler, of Claremont McKenna College. Despite its location just outside of Los Angeles, it’s a somewhat conservative school, so take it for what it’s worth, but I found some good food for thought in it.

"The prevailing liberal doctrine of rights," he says, "traces individual rights to membership in various groups—racial, ethnic, gender, class-based, etc.—which are undergoing a continual process of consciousness-raising and empowerment."

I think the point has validity. Consider California’s new law concerning any corporation doing business within this state, which mandates that the corporation must have a certain number of females on its board of directors. It does not mandate that the board have any male members, only female ones, thereby giving more business rights to females than to males.

It is also an assumption by California that a business can be forced to configure its incorporation to comply with state laws other than the one in which it is incorporated, which is a question of federalism and is an issue of state rights rather than individual rights, but anyway...

When California was run by Republicans the state assumed that all persons had equal business rights and opportunity regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexual preference. Now that liberal doctrine is in charge, we seem to think that companies are better when they are run by women, having learned nothing from watching Carley Fiorina run Hewlett Packard into the ground, causing tens of thousands of people to become unemployed in the process.

Not sure how many of those tens of thousands who became unemployed were women. We weren’t sufficiently “woke” back then to be keeping track of such things.