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Minorities don’t believe in DEI. Not when it counts.
I had dinner with a patient of mine a couple nights ago. He’s retired (of course — I work in Hilton Head), but he used to work as a general manager of casinos in Las Vegas. I’m fascinated by that industry for many reasons, and I learned so much from our conversation that night. He’s got an MBA from Harvard, and he spoke at length about how complex his business was — all the different sorts of gambling, of course, but also the hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and so on. Lots and lots of moving parts. Lots and lots of money, and tax laws, and local regulations, and union issues, and insurance concerns, and so on.
When he mentioned an Indian casino he was familiar with, I casually mentioned that it was great that the casinos offered opportunities for members of their tribe, such as being a general manager of a casino. He laughed and said, “Look, no member of their tribe is going to have the skill set or the drive to do this. They’ll hire a Harvard MBA like me. Everybody else will be Indians, but for leadership and other important positions, they don’t care. There’s too much at stake. Hundreds of millions a year. This has got to work. For the important jobs, they don’t care who you are.”
So America is using minority status to decide who to hire for extremely important positions, from who gets into medical school, to who gets the government contract bids, to who runs for president. And everyone agrees that affirmative action (or now, DEI) makes sense to help minorities. Well, everyone agrees except the minorities, who will hire whoever is most competent for their important jobs. I mean, they’re not stupid.
I am quite sure that when the casino’s board hired another general manager and released my patient from his job, there were no protests. No screaming, no name-calling, no riots in the street. After all, the board is just trying to get the most competent person in the job. If things aren’t going well, they’ll get somebody else. Perfectly understandable, and not a cause for emotional overreactions.
But it’s different when you hire someone because of their race, or their sex, or some other aspect of their identity. Then, when you fire that person, that will be taken as a personal attack. That person was hired because they are black. So if you fire them, you must be a racist. Obviously.
Hiring people based on competence not only leads to much, MUCH better results for everyone concerned, but it also reduces the conflicts, resentments, and jealousies that can tear a society (or any other organization) apart.
Capitalism is the greatest tool ever developed to create peaceful and just societies. We all get along better when we’re just trying to do the best we can.
If you can help me, I’ll hire you, and I don’t care who you are. Maybe I heard bad things about you before, but once we work together, we could end up being friends. Then multiply that by 350 million people.
Capitalism is an unimaginably powerful force, creating wealth, equal opportunities, and goodwill among people, wherever it is tried. Every single time.
I don’t understand the Democrat party. Neither do the Indians who run casinos.
Published in General
I think George Will used to say something about how the second-greatest event for race relations in sports was when a black guy was hired to coach or manage some baseball team (probably baseball, since it was Will); and the greatest was when he was fired, because it showed that they weren’t going to keep him around just because of his race.
Boy, isn’t that the truth. I can’t wait until DEI dies an ugly death. Hopefully, soon.
They left out the “white” part. Or maybe that’s what “Steve” was for.
There have been excellent Black pilots out there since the Tuskegee Airmen. Some were probably named “Steve.”
Having rigorous standards for pilots is always a good idea.
About a decade ago my director told us that he was not being forced to hire anyone who was not qualified for the job but that in most cases he was not being allowed to hire the most qualified applicant. (Not his exact words but close enough.) The damage this approach was causing across the company has been obvious for 4-5 years. It is now undeniably catastrophic…and, given the attrition wave coming in the next 4-5 years, mostly irreversible.
I have written here about the coming dark age of sorts. (Boeing may be the most visible evidence of this due to the unlucky random timing of a big failure or three. They are not alone or necessarily the worst case. More are coming.)
It’s not too much of an over simplification to point out that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws to stop the functioning of free markets. Sears, Montgomery Ward and others expanded across the country, and as far as these businesses were concerned, the only color that mattered was green. Competitors who mistreat half of their potential clientele aren’t much competition.
This gentleman’s discourse reminds me of James Jacobs’ comment about Robert Caro’s detailed biography of Robert Moses, that he managed to write well over 1300 pages about a man who had to deal with the Mafia every day (as the Mafia controlled every union in NYC at the time) without ever mentioning the mafia.
Same goes for someone running casinos in Las Vegas. At least not mentioned in this post. Not clear if the Mafia was mentioned during this dinner conversation.
For the record, I grew up in a small town outside of Las Vegas in the 1950s and 60s. Probably that was before this Gentleman’s time in Vegas. Remember that Kefauver’s hearings in Vegas were held in the very early 1950s. And it was those hearings the got Congress to outlaw anyone with mob ties from being involved with any casino in Vegas. Whereupon the mobsters declared themselves model citizens and continuing to run the casinos. Nothing changed. Except that Eastern banks wouldn’t lend to the mob to develop casinos. Into the breach leapt H. Parry Thomas, a Mormon banker from Salt Lake, sent to Vegas to help a struggling bank there. He wound up forming the Bank of Las Vegas, and, rushing in where others feared to tread, he began lending to the mob to build casinos. He got rich. He started his bank (with partner Jerry Mack, who was Jewish) with something like 750,000 dollars in capital, which grew to several hundred million by the time he sold the bank, then called Valley Bank, to B of A. His first loan was to Milton Prell to build the Sahara. And he never looked back. He wound up financing the building of Las Vegas, almost literally; he bought properties surreptitiously for Howard Hughes he got the Teamsters pension fund to invest in Vegas hotels he mentored Steve Wynn and he with his partner, donated the land for the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The Thomas Mack center is named for he and Jerry Mack. Their history is intertwined with the mob, with Nevada politicians,and power brokers like Oscar Goodman, attorney to the mob, who played himself in Scorsese’s movie “Casino”, ex mayor of Las Vegas, succeeded by his wife, who this year completes her third term as Mayor (between Goodman and his wife, they have occupied the mayorship for 24 years. Former office partner of Harry Ried.
It was Thomas who got the legislation passed that allowed the corporate era of Las Vegas to begin. That change would have impacted Dr. Bastiat’s patient, who would have worked in Vegas Casinos owned by corporations rather than mobsters, although mob influence has never really disappeared from Vegas.
As far as DEI among minorities. I find the comments about native Americans somewhat gratuitous. In light of the history of the Pequods and the Osage, a couple of the wealthiest groups in American history at one time or another, there is no real dearth of Native American talent in America. Consider Earnest Evans, a full blooded native American, who captained a Spruance Class destroyer in the action off Samar in WWII, who along with his fellow destroyer captains held off a much larger Japanese fleet, still firing from a motionless ship as it sank, giving his life in a desperate effort to save a major invasion (McArthur’s return to the Philippines). He was awarded the Medal of Honor. Or, the Native American attorney who managed to get in the clause that allowed only full blooded Osage to inherit mineral rights on their reservation (which led, unfortunately, due to greed of the non Osage in Oklahoma, to the Osage murders, subject of another Scorcese movie,’Killers of the Flower Moon”). Or the stealthiness of Chief Joseph, the abilities of Crazy Horse, the capacities of Cochise, the impact of the Iroquois league on the American founding. Ely Parker, and engineer who worked on the Erie Canal, the officer who was an adjutant to Grant, and wrote the articles of surrender at Appomattox, rose to the rank of Brigadier General, and became commissioner of Indian Affairs under President Grant; or Tecumseh, of such note that Sherman was named after him, although he opposed US expansion into Indian territory.
And consider that the Pequot’s casino at Foxwood is run by Jason Guyot, a full blooded Pequot, who has been CEO of that enterprise for more than 20 years.
Notice how badly companies are run when they use DEI as guidelines. I know I left a large company after a year because I could not take the monthly indoctrination classes that were mandatory. When merit is no longer the prime directive for raises and advancement, you will see companies implode (e.g. see Boeing).
Blackrock is responsible for pushing this crap in the corporate world. I hope their stock takes a dive.
I think his point was that the tribes recruited high level talent wherever they found it. They didn’t care if the CEO was a fellow tribe member, as long as he was good at his job. I may have been sloppy in my transcription of his exact words. Sorry about that.