Regulating Britain's banks
The devil's punchbowl
Curbing Britain's dangerous banking system
A NEW hiring frenzy in the City, with bonuses guaranteed for “only” the first year; investment-banking results for the second quarter likely to top those of the first; an innovative securitisation by Barclays to get bank loans off its balance sheet. The term “business as usual” normally delights tradesmen and their customers. Applied to the banks that plunged Britain into economic crisis, it strikes fear to the heart.
Promised reforms to bank regulation, meant to curb the excess before it starts all over again, are in limbo. On Wednesday July 8th Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), unveiled plans to make banks hold progressively more capital, the bigger and more complex they are. Banks will be required, in effect, to add capital if they pose especial risks to the system, including higher capital charges if they pay bonuses that encourage short-term risk-taking.
This all sounds plausible. But Mr Darling failed to explain how those varying capital requirements will be assessed and applied. In fact their calibration will depend not on Britain alone but also on work being done in Brussels for the European Council (a draft law is expected in October). And rules to increase the money banks must hold for liquidity are coming from the Basel Committee, a club of rich-country bank supervisors.
He also failed to change the outfit in charge of bank supervision. The much criticised “tripartite arrangements”, designed to help the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) act as one in a crisis, are hardly touched. The trio failed in its first big test, the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007, prompting calls for authority over banks to be concentrated in the Bank of England, as it was before Labour took power in 1997. Instead, Mr Darling wants the FSA to impose the varying capital charges; the Bank of England is to assess the systemic risk on which the charges will be based but will not have the power to enforce them. Overseeing it all will be a Council for Financial Stability, chaired by the chancellor himself.
Mr Darling’s long-awaited white paper sets out a blueprint of sorts for how the current regulatory system might be adapted to more perilous times. It ducks the big questions, however. In particular, a lively debate over whether risky “casino” investment banking should be split from “utility” commercial and retail banking, guaranteed by the taxpayer, has been cut short. The hope seems to be that, as their activities demand more capital, riskier investment banking will be reduced or spun out of banking groups. More pressure to shrink may come from an insistence that banks demonstrate regularly how they would wind down their affairs in an orderly manner in the event of failure.
The European Union (EU) may also have a stick to wield, though it is not yet clear how big. On June 30th Neelie Kroes, the EU competition commissioner, declared that Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), one of the two large banks the British government rescued and took a stake in, was too big, too complex and “highly dangerous to the European single market”. The EU has the power to demand the restructuring of a company that has received state aid. It has already done so with German banks.
Yet there is little sign that the government itself has the appetite or the will to confront such big banks head on, despite their huge size relative to GDP (see chart). UK Financial Investments (UKFI), the agency that runs the government’s stakes in rescued banks, seems interested only in preparing to sell them, not in getting the banks to serve the economy better. Moreover, its acquiescence in a £9.6m remuneration package for Stephen Hester, the chief executive of RBS, tied to the bank’s share price hardly discourages the resurgence of the old bonus culture. Exhortations by Paul Myners, the Treasury minister who oversees UKFI, to end short-term share-price targets ring hollow.
Indeed, the pay culture that rewards bank bosses for short-term risk-taking has barely been touched. Bonus pools, which in some firms scoop up as much as 50% of trading revenues, are a hangover from the days of private finance houses, when partners shared losses as well as gains. A draft review of corporate governance in banks is due on July 16th. It is chaired by Sir David Walker, a senior adviser to Morgan Stanley, an investment bank.
Understandably, the government is scared to risk further erosion of London’s position as a global financial centre. The earnings from financial services in a good year add over £25 billion to government revenues, and the financial sector employs over 1m people across the country. Against that is the loss in economic output from a full-scale financial crisis, which averages around 20% of GDP, according to an IMF working paper.
Adair Turner, the chairman of the FSA, expects no certainty on financial regulation until after the general election, to be held by next June. The opposition Conservatives, who are likely to form the next government, will produce their own white paper later this month. Apart from a promise by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, to rip up the tripartite structure and give prudential supervision to the Bank of England, not much is likely to be proposed that would affect bank size, complexity or bonuses. Only Vince Cable, financial spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, argues for splitting up banks and making them lend more.
Stirring in the underbrush, however, is the Bank of England, which is beginning to provide the kind of analytical leadership that might have blunted the crisis had it come earlier. An analysis of the crunch by Andrew Haldane, the director for financial stability, has been described as “brilliant, but two years late”. More recently Paul Tucker, a deputy governor of the Bank of England, has spoken of a new “social contract” between banks and society, which would impose more realistic costs on banks for the taxpayer’s implicit guarantee. Why were those costs not priced in or even considered before? And, given the government’s fear of upsetting the City, are they likely to be priced in now?
75 Years of Housing Fascism
On June 28, 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934. Hugh Potter, president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) called it "the most fundamental legislation … ever enacted affecting real estate and home ownership." While federal intervention in housing had begun in 1932 under the supposedly laissez-faire Hoover, Potter's assessment was correct in the sense that the act broke new ground in terms of the range of public-private collaboration — and the unintended destructive consequences of such.
Let's get the boring housekeeping facts out of the way first: NHA 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured private lenders against losses on loans; made loans to lenders; "insured" lender mortgages meeting certain criteria (including much longer loans up to 20 years in length, periodic payments by a borrower "not in excess of his reasonable ability to pay," and interest ceilings); established national mortgage associations that purchased and sold mortgages and issued securities funding such activity; and created the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), which insured savings and loan (S&L) deposits. (Recall that FSLIC — pronounced Fizz'-lick in the industry — after repeated bailouts, fizzled into insolvency for the last time before being abolished in 1989.)
The insuring of much longer mortgage loans is key here. In 1930, about 33% of American households owned their own homes and by 1990 that figure had risen to about 67%.[1] The typical mortgage was 5 years in length ending in a balloon payment (principal plus interest). Even though these loans were usually renewed for another 5-year term and were a better reflection of natural scarcity, the system still drew accusations of favoring the upper middle class and the wealthy.[2] The government solution, beginning with NHA 1934, was 20- and 30-year fixed-interest-rate mortgages repaid in small amounts over time to greatly boost house affordability.
This writer, who studied the private-interest dynamics of the time in graduate work, found little evidence, to his surprise, that the class-based criticism of the old mortgage system came predominately from progressives. All the evidence examined clearly revealed progressives desiring more state intervention in terms of housing for the poor, but none asserting that the only suitable dwellings for the poor and lower middle classes were detached houses and some sort of government-given right of affordability to such. (Of course today's progressives in the Obama administration and the Heather Booths of groups such as ACORN are a different matter. Some of them certainly do assert beliefs bearing some resemblance to the latter.)
The most powerful interests pushing the bill were the usual selectively free-market Republican-leaning bankers, realtors, builders, building-materials manufacturers, and even some architects. One of the most powerful interests at the time was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). Leonard Freedman wrote that
these antigovernmental crusades [waged by NAREB against public housing] were hypocritical. No industry has received more help from government than the business of housing. NAREB had advocated a federally chartered mortgage discount bank in the 1920s and early 1930s and was strongly supportive of the Federal Housing Administration and other agencies which employed the resources of the federal government to underwrite the credit structure of the housing industry. To the Home Builders, FHA was indispensable. They were also firm believers in the Federal National Mortgage Administration and the VA mortgage program. While the savings and loan leagues had no use for most of these programs, they had promoted and supported the Home Loan Bank in the 1930s, and it became one of their main props.[3]
While the S&L leagues may not have had much use for some federal programs, the S&L industry would eventually come to be destroyed by the replacement of the 5-year mortgage with the artificial 20-year amortized mortgage, plus regulatory and tax incentives that encouraged S&Ls to load over 80% of their asset portfolios with the new longer-term mortgages.
It is amazing how long the system remained stable before calamity struck. In legend at least, from the end of World War II to about the mid-1960s, the sleepy and idyllic world of the S&L executive conformed to the rule of 3-6-3: pay your depositors 3%, earn 6% on their home loans, and be on the golf course by 3:00 p.m. Even though it was released early during this period, the 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life and its beloved protagonist George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), who operated an S&L in the fictional Bedford Falls, propagates this wholesome apple-pie, church-steeple, red-white-and-blue small-town narrative. While there could have been at least a little more than a grain of truth to this story, Martin Mayer reveals the part that resembles Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery":
[d]espite its lovely reputation … the old fashioned S&L was a nest of conflicting interests that squawked for sustenance from the customers' deals. On its board were the builder, the appraiser, the real estate broker, the lawyer, the title insurance company, and the casualty insurance company. (Also the accountant: One mutual S&L in Ohio that lost virtually all of its depositors' money was audited by an accountant who sat on the board, and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that.) Plus there was somebody from the dominant political party and from one of the churches. Many little mouths to feed. It is not unfair to say that nobody controlled what this board did.[4]
The beginning of the end came in about 1965. The rise in interest rates in the two decades after World War II posed little threat to S&Ls. The interest rate on 10-year T-bonds was 2.8% in 1953 and 4% by 1963. The yield curve remained normal throughout this period (i.e., short-term rates were lower than long-term rates). The years between 1965 and 1982 were a different story. By 1982, the rate on 10-year T-bonds was 13.9% and, even worse for S&Ls, the rate on 1-year T-bills was 14%.[5] Not only had rates risen dramatically; the yield curve had inverted as well. The Fed had struck again. For S&Ls, the rule of 3-6-3 had turned into 8-6-0, quickly sinking them into heavier and heavier losses.[6]
To bring a quick end to a long story, the Fed used Regulation Q (its authority to set maximum rates on time deposits given to it by the Banking Act of 1933) for the first time to lower (instead of raise) deposit rates in 1967. FDIC and FSLIC extended the rate ceiling over every institution they had jurisdiction over. Along came Henry Brown and Bruce Bent in 1971 with an innovation known as the money market fund (MMF) that was not subject to Regulation Q. Fidelity, Dreyfus, and Merrill Lynch quickly followed their example.[7] Funds poured out of banks and thrifts into MMFs.
The "deregulation" wave in the 1970s began under Gerald Ford (not Jimmy Carter, as is commonly asserted) with the railroad industry in 1976. Carter was involved in enacting the first financial "deregulation," the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) of 1980. The Garn-St. Germain Act was enacted in 1982 during the Reagan administration. Neither was truly deregulatory. DIDMCA raised the deposit-insurance ceiling to a whopping (at least in 1980) $100,000, increasing the moral-hazard problem. Both allowed thrifts only limited diversification of their asset portfolios. Both completely failed and in 1989 the industry was bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Parallels to Today
Back to NHA 1934. In terms of the unforeseeable and destructive effects of government regulation, it's difficult to find a better example of a time bomb: it was set in 1934 to explode in $147 billion (about $239 billion in 2008 dollars) of damage 55 years later.[8] Then, to top it all off, the free market received the blame! Alan Blinder (kind of the Paul Krugman of the late 1980s) would write in his Keynesian College economics textbook that
[t]he rash of bankruptcies in the savings and loan industry in the 1980s seemed to support those who claimed that deregulation had gone too far … [as the] industry began to be populated by financial cowboys … [so that] much imprudent risk-taking and mismanagement was tolerated, and the industry was beset by an outrageous amount of fraud.[9]
It's a hilarious assessment, as only about 4% of the cost of the debacle resulted from private fraud (and this because state regulators left the S&Ls' vault doors open). The largest portion (29%) consisted of the state fraud of $43 billion in interest costs accrued because zombie S&Ls were kept on life support by regulators hiding their balance-sheet deficiencies with accounting gimmicks.[10]
On the current economy and housing debacle, Paul Krugman, writing just last May, blames everything on Garn-St. Germain, pretending as if DIDMCA and all the problems of the previous decades leading up to it never happened. This is not to defend the Republicans, who created havoc as well as the Democrats did, but to point out the holes in Krugman's "salvation through regulation" demagoguery. His portrayal of the "responsible" New Deal is laughable.
For NHA 1934 didn't just help create the S&L crater; it helped — every bit as much as the Fed and other factors — to pave the way for today's acre upon acre of half-cleared land and half-finished subdivisions, and street upon unlit street of vacant homes with for-sale signs in front of them with few prospective buyers in sight. (Environmentalists would seem to be natural enemies of the true cause of miles upon miles of ugly suburban sprawl, yet they overwhelmingly fix the blame on the "greed of the free market.")
Rethinking Robert Taft
While the establishment Left is certainly horrible on the issue of housing, the Right has its own shameful legacy as well. In 1943, the National Resources Planning Board had already been anticipating the end of the war and drawing up extensive plans that were so ambitious for socializing US housing markets that they were practically communist. So alarming were the board's plans that the House of Representatives ended its funding for fiscal year 1944. Little better over the long run was the board's de facto successor, the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Redevelopment, led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio.
Taft declared that housing was an exception to laissez-faire and that restoration of urban areas was impossible without federal intervention. This represented a huge victory for advocates of government intervention since it blurred ideological differences on the issue of government involvement in housing markets. Out of Taft's committee came many ideas that were eventually implemented in the Housing Act of 1949.[11] (Bewilderingly, Taft still seems to be included in the history of notable free-market politicians. Yet it would seem unthinkable for Ron Paul to participate in anything close to what Taft did.)
The current housing debacle wasn't caused by "eight years of cowboy capitalism ushered in by George W. Bush" and there was never any real deregulation of any sort at any time. It was a project created over three-quarters of a century by fascists from both parties.
"It's Discrimination!"
If there were a prize for the most boneheaded thing that one hears very frequently, it would have to be the astonishment and revulsion that is commonly expressed at the existence of discrimination. You are likely to have heard this horrified expression before: "It's discrimination!" Heavens above! Alert the authorities!
Quite often, this tiny statement, without any elaboration or explanation, is enough to provoke looks of shock or revulsion from others, or at the very least, solemn looks of concurrence and disapproval. In many cases, it will provoke fervent denials and apologetic defensive maneuvers from those accused of this heinous act, even if the accuser has made no attempt to deliver his case. The mere charge is enough.
People do not often realize it, but when they disparage "discrimination" without any attempt to elaborate or justify what they are talking about, they are disparaging an abstraction. Moreover, they are disparaging an abstraction on which they rely to think — an abstraction without which they would be docile vegetables unable to make sense of the world around them. When someone shrieks "It's discrimination!" the irony is usually lost on them, but without their own discrimination they would not be able to establish that others are discriminating, and be offended by it.
If one does venture to ask questions about why discrimination is to be condemned, one may be treated to a slight elaboration as to what is upsetting people. One may be informed that so-and-so is discriminating on the basis of race, sex, age, sexual orientation, political affiliation, attractiveness, or some other factor that should not be a part of his decision making, and that just settles the matter, consarn it!
But what is relevant to rational thinking, moral conduct, and justice is not whether discrimination has occurred, or even whether such discrimination is made on the basis of some particular set of purportedly prohibited criteria; what should ultimately be at issue is the reasons why the factors used in a decision were used, and whether these factors do indeed form a rational basis for the inferences that underlie discriminatory decisions (by which I mean, all decisions). In assessing the rationality, irrationality, morality, or immorality of particular instances of discrimination, it behooves us to ask the reasons for discrimination and to assess these reasons in the light of the logic of inference. This may sound trite, but it is a step rarely taken in the rush to disparage the ghastly abstraction of "discrimination."
Discrimination and Statistical Inference
Discrimination is ubiquitous. It is not some conceptual defect or manifestation of hatred or stupidity. In its widest and most proper sense, discrimination is merely the drawing of distinctions between things, which is the basis for all concept formation and human knowledge. Whenever we form concepts from observations of the things around us and attempt to integrate these concepts into a consistent whole to form a sensible view of the world, we do so by differentiating between different things on the basis of their observable characteristics. In particular, when we form anthropic concepts — concepts pertaining to man — we do so by discriminating between different types of people on the basis of their observable characteristics. Discrimination between people is the basis for all anthropic concepts and all knowledge about man. It is the means by which we are able to condense all of our many experiences with other people down into some economized conceptual units that can be used to predict the unknown characteristics and behavior of others.
One of the reasons that discrimination is of such predictive value is that, like it or not, human beings have characteristics that are statistically dependent, meaning that, for whatever reason, these characteristics tend to occur with one another or tend not to occur with one another (as opposed to occurring statistically independently of one another). Sometimes these characteristics are causally related, and sometimes they are merely correlated,[1] meaning merely that they tend to appear together (or in the case of negative correlation, tend not to appear together). Discrimination on the basis of observable characteristics can be rationally justified in any situation in which there is a statistical dependence between these characteristics and some other characteristics of direct interest to us, given whatever information is available. In such cases, the predictive characteristic gives us information on the characteristic of ultimate interest to us, even if there is no causal relationship between them.
I'll give you an example: A study by the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under the Law found that taxicab drivers in Washington DC are less likely to pick up young black males than other people, and are less likely to drive passengers of any race to areas of the city with larger proportions of the black population.[2] Does this mean that cab drivers — including many black cab drivers — are incorrigible racists who see blacks as being genetically predisposed to crime? Not at all! To a cab driver in this situation, it doesn't make a lick of difference whether a particular race of people are genetically predisposed to commit crimes or not. All that matters in this context is that race and crime are correlated — they tend to occur together for some reason. And because these things tend to occur together, in the absence of having some more detailed information about a prospective passenger, the driver is correct to use the passenger's race, sex, and age as factors in his decision. He is correct to conclude that picking up a young black man in his cab (as opposed to picking up someone else) will increase the probability that he will be a victim of assault or other criminal conduct. The rational cab driver knows this, and acts accordingly, avoiding fares that he thinks are high risk, based on those characteristics he is able to observe about his prospective passengers.
Discrimination on the basis of predictive characteristics which are correlated with characteristic of direct interest is a form of rational discrimination. While it is often slandered as an injustice, rational discrimination is both rational and morally proper. In fact, since justice is the rational assessment and treatment of other people, rational discrimination is a necessary requirement for justice and the refusal to engage in such discrimination is itself an injustice.[3]
Even sex and race discrimination, the coup de grande of modern taboos, often involve little more than the recognition that these characteristics are correlated with qualities and behaviors that are of legitimate interest in many decisions. When taxi drivers in Washington DC discriminate against young black men in their choice of passengers, they do so because they know that sex, age, and race are all correlated with violent crime, which they wish to avoid. These people are not bigots or morons — they are intelligent people who are implicitly applying the lessons of the science of statistical inference, even if they are only aware of these ideas on an intuitive or "common-sense" level.
Is it a breach of a person's civil rights to be denied taxi service on the basis of their race, sex, or age? According to civil rights groups, it is.[4] But unless one has some inherent right to service from others, then it cannot be a breach of rights when this service is denied, no matter what the grounds for the denial. Indeed, if rights are understood to be grounded in the nonaggression principle, then this must include the right to use one's property in a discriminatory manner, a fortiori when that discrimination is rational.[5]
A cab driver who operates his cab without engaging in rational race discrimination, sex discrimination, or age discrimination does the world no favors. While he will probably end up giving service to people who are not criminals, and who may have been avoided by other drivers, he is also more likely to give service to those who will rob and assault him. If he ignores his own rational inferences then he will weigh the risks against the rewards incorrectly, playing into the hands of violent thugs.[6]
Unfortunately, the cab driver has another set of violent thugs to contend with, since he is the target of the coercion of government and its activist minions. The government who punishes him for his rational inferences not only does the world no favors; it violates his rights and entrenches a system of mandatory irrationality that compels him to ignore relevant information in the decision problem he is faced with. Its antidiscrimination laws not only involve an unwarranted aggression, but they involve aggression in the pursuit of mandatory irrationality.
The absence of discrimination between people would make it impossible to gain a conceptual understanding of man and would force us to operate at a purely perceptual level, either treating people as interchangeable blobs without differentiation, or treating each person as a completely new and exceptional phenomenon. It would put us in the position of starry-eyed infants who observe each new thing as a unique and unknown phenomenon to be stared at in vacant wonderment.
Trite allegations of discrimination, usually made without any elaboration, completely ignore the relevant issue. What is crucial in evaluating other people is not whether we discriminate on the basis of this or that characteristic but whether the characteristics we use form a rational basis for our inferences. Are the distinctions that we draw sensible inferences based on genuine causal or empirical relationships between observed characteristics, or are they arbitrary judgments based on spurious ideas with no basis in reality? In short, the relevant issue is whether the discrimination we engage in is rational or irrational, not whether it is discrimination on this ground or that.
Notwithstanding the shrieks of horror that one is likely to encounter from the equity-and-diversity intelligentsia, this applies as much to race and sex discrimination as to any other form of judgment and discrimination. What matters is not whether characteristics like race, sex, and age are used as means of differentiation and judgment but whether they are used rationally to infer other characteristics of interest on the basis of some known correlation or causal relationship between them.
The Antidiscrimination Paradigm
When you hear someone express with indignation that "It's discrimination!" — without any attempt at elaboration — you may be sure that they have absorbed the basic ideas of the antidiscrimination paradigm which forms the basis for modern "civil-rights" legislation and the attendant drive for political correctness. At its root, the antidiscrimination paradigm asserts the abhorrence of discrimination per se, not merely discrimination on particular grounds. Article 26 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights makes this clear when it directs that "the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."[7] This explains why no further elaboration is thought to be needed once discrimination has been established. "It's discrimination!" is all that is needed to establish a breach of civil "rights" and the consequent moral outrage.
To see the complete implications of the antidiscrimination paradigm, observe that, although race and sex are often used as the thin end of the wedge in public discussion, antidiscrimination laws and the accompanying moral crusade for political correctness both continue to expand to outlaw discrimination on the basis of more and more of the characteristics of man. From initially narrow and innocuous beginnings, antidiscrimination laws in most Western countries have now expanded to prohibit discrimination (including rational discrimination) on the grounds of race, sex, age, disability, sexuality, marital status, pregnancy, potential pregnancy, breastfeeding, and family and career responsibilities. There is no end in sight to this expansion, with calls to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of attractiveness[8] and social status[9] receiving serious attention.
The sole impediment to this expansion has been the normal inertia of political change, with each new expansion meeting withering resistance until it becomes a normal and allegedly indispensable part of antidiscrimination law. Throughout this process, the general philosophical principle that implicitly or explicitly forms the basis for change is that discrimination on any ground is abhorrent. This is what is said, and this is precisely and literally what is meant.
Unfortunately, many libertarians who oppose antidiscrimination laws accept the false position that discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, age, and other demographic criteria is necessarily morally abhorrent.[10] While one may commend the delineation of moral and political issues that this entails, this position understates the seriousness of the issue. Antidiscrimination laws should not be seen as bad methods in the pursuit of good goals. They are bad methods in the pursuit of a tyrannical goal.
In fact, the only possible logical goal of the antidiscrimination paradigm is the complete elimination of discrimination and the institution of an all-pervasive quota system in every field of human activity.[11] In such a context, it is not enough to remain agnostic about moral issues involving discrimination. One must fully analyze the inferential foundations of discrimination and defend the moral legitimacy of instances of rational discrimination from knee-jerk attacks.
One often hears the assertion that discrimination is based on ignorance and prejudice. While this is certainly the case for some forms of irrational discrimination, it is not true for discrimination that is based on a rational assessment of the relationship between observable characteristics and unobservable characteristics of legitimate interest in judgment and decision making. As I have explained elsewhere,
The antidiscrimination paradigm, which holds all discrimination to be irrational, is contradictory to basic principles of rational inference and prediction. Far from identifying irrational behavior based on ignorance and prejudice, the antidiscrimination paradigm is itself irrational and is itself based on ignorance and prejudice — ignorance of the principles of rational inference, and a baseless prejudice that there must be empirical equality among racial groups.[12]
One often hears of the great danger of irrational discrimination based on false ideas like racism. But there is also a serious danger in the refusal to acknowledge the inferential and moral legitimacy of instances of rational discrimination. If instances of rational discrimination are falsely understood to be manifestations of bigotry and hatred, then this can only create and sustain acrimony and hostility between groups of people, a trend which has manifested itself in a repressive system of coercive planning known as antidiscrimination law.
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