Glaring limits of the Civil Rights Act: We need to redistribute wealth (Yep, he went there)

Even if racism were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still need to address pervasive racial wealth inequality. Here's why.

Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating the economy, economic discrimination is still widespread, and anti-discrimination legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime. The Civil Rights Act was a mild reform, all things considered, but one conservatives fought with vigor and one many conservatives are still bitter about to this day.

When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, the primary purpose was to root out discrimination in public accommodations (like hotels and movie theaters) and in employment. The former purpose–eliminating public accommodations discrimination–has received renewed attention from conservatives lately who find it to be an infringement on the rights of racist business owners to be racist. GOP favorite Rand Paul expressed this view in 2010 and Cato’s Ilya Shapiro expressed it just a few months ago on MSNBC.

These aren’t new concerns, of course. One white Nashville resident interviewed at the time of passage said the same thing about the Civil Rights Act: “I also think that it is in violation to my civil rights if someone can say you must serve me.” Nonetheless, it is telling that the embarrassment attached to claiming it is the racists who are the real victims in all of this has sufficiently subsided within the mainstream conservative movement that even GOP leaders are willing to reinvigorate the claim. I suppose that’s par for the course for a movement that’s also pushed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and pursued an intentional campaign of voter suppression that disproportionately targets blacks and other people of color....

Wealth has not been redistributed. Poverty has become the equilibrium attained. It’s not about the have-nots, it’s bringing the productive Citizen down to the do-nots.
You cannot give wealth it is earned from some source either in the present or the past! Wealth in the present cannot be attained with out a Nation of jobs and flourishing business.
It won’t be long before Gov jobs will begin to decline. A tax base is needed to sustain those jobs. The scale cannot balance. Gov jobs created are actually a higher form of Welfare! The Great Society has turned into the Massive Slum!

ANY law that the feds make must be reasonably based on constitutionally express delegated powers. And the only delegated powers concerning protecting rights on the basis of race and sex are voting laws, evidenced by the 15th and 19th Amendments respectiely. Otherwise, the states are free to make laws which discriminate on any basis not expressly protected by the Constitution imo.

In fact, the Supreme Court decided in Minor v. Happersett that the states were free to prohibit women from voting regardless of the Equal Protections Clause of the then newly ratified 14th Amendment. The Court clarified that the 14th Amendment did not add any new protections to the Constitution, it just strengthened existing protections.

“3. The right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that amendment does not add to these privileges and immunities. It simply furnishes additional guaranty for the protection of such as the citizen already had [emphasis added].” —Minor v. Happersett, 1874.

And since women did not have suffrage before the 14th Amendment was ratified, they didn't have suffrage after it was ratified.

Note that the states responded to the Supreme Court's decision in Minor v. Happersett by ratifying the 19th Amendment which effectively gave women the right to vote.

Otherwise, the states are free to make laws which discriminate on the basis of anything that the states have not amended the Constitution to expressly protect, as long as such laws don't also unreasonably abridge enumerated protections.

The reason that many federal civil rights laws extend greatly beyond the rights that the states have constutionally authorized the feds to protect, just as corrupt Congress regularly oversteps its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers, is the following imo. Corrupt federal politicians will promise anything to low-information voters, voters who have never been taught the federal government's constitutionally limited powers as the Founding States had intended for those powers to be understood, in order to get themselves elected or remain in office.

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