What "Invest in Opportunity" Means

I’ve been going back to something in my mind for the last few weeks. Sometimes something sticks because it has larger implications than it seemed to have at the moment. Nobody’s really talking about this anymore, but I’m still thinking about what I heard at the DNC convention last month.

Julian Castro, Mayor of San Antonio
photo from Wikipedia

There was a talk by San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the keynote address on Tuesday of that week. He and his twin brother, a candidate for congress, are a success story, and he told it fairly well. His grandmother Victoria came to this country from Mexico as an orphan, to live with relatives who were willing to take her in. She had to drop out of school after fourth grade to help contribute to the family income. But she worked hard all her life to give her only child, the Castro twins’ mother, a better life.

He does not mention a father or grandfather, so I turned to Wikipedia. No mention of a grandfather, and their grandmother apparently raised their mother alone. Their mother, Rosie, made a living as a political activist, helping to establish the radically leftist pro-Hispanic group La Raza. She ran unsuccessfully for city council three years before the birth of the boys. She separated from their father when the boys were eight. The father, Jessie Guzman, is described as a political activist and retired math teacher. The story in the keynote address has these two hardworking women raising the boys on their own, working heroically to give them a better chance at success.

Both graduated from Stanford, through affirmative action, and then Harvard Law (presumably also through affirmative action).

Some of the story sounds like it could have been delivered at the RNC convention, maybe by Ted Cruz (except for that somewhat glaring absence of fathers in the family story).  Castro says this:

My grandmother's generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances. They believed that opportunity created today would lead to prosperity tomorrow. That's the country they envisioned, and that's the country they helped build. The roads and bridges they built, the schools and universities they created, the rights they fought for and won—these opened the doors to a decent job, a secure retirement, the chance for your children to do better than you did.

And that's the middle class—the engine of our economic growth. With hard work, everybody ought to be able to get there. And with hard work, everybody ought to be able to stay there—and go beyond. The dream of raising a family in a place where hard work is rewarded is not unique to Americans. It's a human dream, one that calls across oceans and borders. The dream is universal, but America makes it possible. And our investment in opportunity makes it a reality.

Now, in Texas, we believe in the rugged individual. Texas may be the one place where people actually still have bootstraps, and we expect folks to pull themselves up by them. But we also recognize there are some things we can't do alone. We have to come together and invest in opportunity today for prosperity tomorrow.

The highlights are mine; they identify the Obama “you didn’t build that” message couched within the American Dream message. Some of it, like expecting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we can agree with. “Investment in opportunity,” however, is a phrase he uses for some other purpose. In the next minute or so he says opportunity two more times and some form of invest two more times. And he repeats the theme later in the speech.

Then he turns on the Republicans, particularly Romney, referring to a speech he’d given where he opened up possibilities for paying for college beyond government grants, and included borrowing from parents, where that was possible. I found it a positive message, but Castro mocked it:

Some people are lucky enough to borrow money from their parents, but that shouldn't determine whether you can pursue your dreams. I don't think Governor Romney meant any harm. I think he's a good guy. He just has no idea how good he's had it.

Hmm. Romney doesn’t know how good he’s had it. And how did he have it? His father immigrated to the US from Mexico, during ravaging war there, in abject poverty. His father never had the opportunity to go to college, but he worked hard and eventually became head of GM, and then was elected governor of Michigan. So by the time Mitt Romney came along, his parents did see to it that he got a good education through a private prep school.

Mitt Romney got accepted to Stanford on his merits, without any kind of affirmative action. Then, after a church mission to France, that he paid for, he transferred to Brigham Young University (to be with Ann) and graduated from there, again on his own merits and his own dime. Then, with a wife and two children, he graduated with honors from a dual program of Harvard Law and MBA.

Mitt Romney didn’t need affirmative action, because he prospered on smarts and hard work—smarts and hard work that were significant enough that having a father who never went to college and couldn’t grease the skids didn’t stand in his way.

Mitt Romney, just like Julian Castro, is just a generation or two from immigrant poverty. Castro says he values his grandmother’s hard work and effort that would lead to their success, if not her own. And while his own smarts would have given him scholarship opportunity at many good schools (granted, not Stanford and Harvard, but maybe University of Texas or Rice), he thinks affirmative action was necessary for his success, regardless of hard work or smarts. Yet somehow Romney’s success without affirmative action is because of privilege.

Castro says his San Antonio high school was full of students just as bright and hard-working as he and his brother, who could have succeeded except they lacked the opportunity. This was the early 1990s, in Texas, where Hispanics are plentiful and successful in every walk of life. And he’s claiming affirmative action gave the Castro brothers their opportunity but did not give it to all those other bright, hard-working friends. Why? What made the Castro brothers the recipients and not their friends? Their mother’s activism, possibly? I don’t know; I just don’t understand what he’s trying to sell. That everyone is smart and hard-working and deserves to go to Stanford and Harvard, and therefore everyone should receive that opportunity?

Let me get this straight: the real belief is that if someone succeeds, it may have involved hard work and brains, but it couldn’t have happened without some intervention to grant opportunity. In Romney’s case, just having a father with wealth, whom he could have turned to had the need arisen, disqualifies him as a regular person. But Castro, receiving the deus ex machina of government affirmative actionwhen equally deserving friends did not, is somehow virtuous.

He claims that it is government’s obligation to “invest in opportunity,” meaning take money from some earners to give largesse to favored others—that this is virtuous, even the very purpose of government.

Who decides who receives the “investment in opportunity”? Some bureaucrat? Hmm. Doesn’t inspire confidence, at least for me.

Here’s the reality I see. I have three very bright children, but let’s look at Political Sphere, as a comparison, since I’ve mentioned him before. He worked through college on his own, graduated with honors—and huge debt—from a state school where he was considered out-of-state for three years (while illegal aliens were given in-state tuition rates). He has the same color skin, the same dark hair and eyes, that Julian Castro has. But he has the disadvantage of coming from married parents descended from currently non-favored northern European heritage. (My grandfather immigrated in poverty as well, and found relative success in a single generation. A story for another day.) We gave Political Sphere the best education our middle-middle-class income could provide (including gifted schools in public education, and then homeschooling). He chose the university based on its program, but it turned out there was no placement program, and no one in his graduating class got a job in the field. Some went on to a graduate program at that time, but the debt load made that impossible for our son.

As a family, we stepped in and did what we could: PS and family lived with us for 3 ¼ years, rent free, while he worked two jobs that were much lower paying than he was qualified for. Now he has begun law school—not Harvard, but at a very good private school, that he got accepted to on merit, including some scholarship money. We are so proud of him.

But, since government isn’t “investing” in his “opportunity,” must we assume that “he didn’t build that success”? We’re just not admitting how good he had it?

I don’t feel angry that his opportunities are less than Mitt Romney had; they are enough. They would have been more easily obtained if government interference hadn’t brought down the economy at a crucial point. We’ll persevere, but we’re really hoping for better times following this election. What we really don’t need is government deciding we don’t give enough toward the education of the next generation, so government should tax us higher and disperse that money to those it deems deserving. The very idea seems ridiculous under the circumstances.

There’s something I noticed during the Castro speech.  At about the 11-minute point, his facial expression changes. Suddenly, he’s no longer positive; suddenly he’s angry and attacking. It reminded me (don’t laugh) of the moment in Ghostbusters when we see the monstrous Stay Puft Marshmallow Man suddenly turn from benign to menacing. Castro is angry and aggressive, possibly forgetting that it’s his party and his candidate that has brought us this ongoing mess. He attacks as though the GOP, and Romney in particular, has been purposely dismantling the economy, with especial efforts to prevent people, and maybe particularly people from his ethnic group, from getting educated. It’s a malicious lie.

So let’s be honest about what “invest in opportunity” means. Government doesn’t invest; government doesn’t produce; it taxes to acquire revenue and then spends it. So referring to the process of government taxing producers and then spending on those the government deems fit to “invest” in is nothing more than saying, “Government should have access to your money and decide how to spend it.” That’s how you know you’re listening to a Castro at the DNC convention rather than a Ted Cruz at the RNC convention. That’s the difference between democrats and republicans right now, and coincidentally the difference between socialists and constitutional conservatives.