Affirmative Action Should Be Dissolved

I apologize beforehand if my later arguments are not that great as I have a busy week but this topic is interesting to me. I would like to narrow the debate and go to an extreme and call affirmative action a form of racism and not a form of socialism or a progressive redistribution of wealth . Affirmative action for this debate is based just on race. Therefore my definition of Affirmative Action is; Affirmative action refers to policies intended to promote access to education or employment aimed at a historically non dominant race What you ask? Someone is defending racism? There are plenty of arguments one can make about equality and liberty and progressive/regressive policies which Id rather not address here. We are debating whether segregation by race in certain circumstances can make the U.S better off. 1.Equality of Opportunity My main points all stem from one main argument. We do not have equality of opportunity in America. We also do not have luck equality or luck egalitarianism but I'd rather not debate the luck aspect as I don't see it coming into play in this debate. My opponent should prove that we have equality o opportunity in America. The burden of proof is generally on the instigator of a debate but I will try and take that burden on myself. According to Wikipedia, "Equality of opportunity means that every person is afforded the same access to a benefit as every other person." I am going to go with mostly educational examples in this debate. Many state colleges charge exorbitant tuitions for out of state students. A college near me charges about 35k a year for tuition and these high costs are the norm for many places. Assuming everyone can get college loans and assuming that everyone gets the same low interest rate regardless of price discrimination, one might argue that there is equality of opportunity in this situation. Everyone can afford this college and everyone can get the same loan rate. Not only does this not happen in real life as loan rates are subject to discrimination, but a dollar is worth more to someone who can least afford to spare it, than to someone who can most afford to spare it. Wasting a dollar now has a greater opportunity cost to a poorer family who may have to put that dollar on credit or sacrifice some heating that night compared to someone who just can't get the vente starbucks latte and must get the grande version. My point is that even in the best of circumstances, treating people with different income levels the same does not guarantee that they are being treated "equally". A dollar lost from one person can do different amounts of good if gained by another person. Therefore, not everyone "is afforded the same access to a benefit as every other person". Is there access? Yeah, but not the same as 35k to one person is a lot more expensive than 35k to someone else. Income is just one example of how there is a lack of opportunity amongst different groups of people. I know I said I would deal only w/ race. Here is how the two connect. Using race as a factor is a way to gauge income. It is not the best nor most efficient way, but it works better than chance. According again to Wikipedia, in 2005, the average "white" household makes about 50k a year while the average Asian household makes a bit below 60k . Hispanics are a bit below 35k and blacks are at about 30k. http://en.wikipedia.org... There is a significant income difference when race is taken into account. I showed above how income differences make opportunity differences inherent. Therefore there are opportunity differences if we segregate by race. 2. Merit So I have proven that equality of opportunity doesn't exist. Why have Affirmative Action at all then? I consider myself to be pretty utilitarian so the idea of a meritocracy makes sense intuitively. That is until I realized that merit is a fluid measurement. The more opportunity one is given, the more one can increase their own human capital and become more useful to society. Why should we take away resources from one group and give it to another unless there are benefits? I think that different races are equal to each other in potential merit. Taking money from someone who must sacrifice a cup size at starbucks an giving it to someone who would be gaining the ability to heat their home a bit imo increaess net utility. For the same amount of money a rich person is spending going to a private college instead of a state one (about 30k in many places) we could send two other people to state college. For the price of one private college education we could send three people to state college!!! Net Utility is added in this situation at least imo. Average "merit" goes up, etc. Why not transfer some goods from the rich kid to the poor kid if all we want to do is maximize utility or future merit? We simply divided resources in a way that increased future merit and utility instead of allowing the current system to be totally meritocratic. In my example we discriminated on income. If Race is a better than chance way to discriminate based on income, why not let us discriminate by race as opposed to not discriminating on anything? Net utility and net merit still go up. I argue here that to maximize utility we must discriminate. Though income is a better way to maximize utility the pro advocated removing this discrimination altogether. Discriminating by race may be a less effective way of divvying out help than discriminating based on income, but it is still more effective than not divvying out help. Merit is fluid. We can advocate policies which limit merit now only to increase it later. That is what affirmative actions does at its best. Certain examples or systems can be vastly improved but the idea of taking from the rich and giving to the poor is still not only effective, but needed to maximize utility and merit.