Shorter Chris Bertram:  Give us your poor, your hungry, your desperate, your adventurous, and your toughest and we'll prop our poor, our desperate, our depressed and our weakest with extra cash and services.

repeats. here and here.

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. Opponents, including Johnson, raised the same arguments that would be marshaled against affirmative action programs a century later, but well more than the necessary two-thirds of Congress concluded that the 13th and 14th Amendments authorized race-conscious legislation to ameliorate the social condition of blacks.

"to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts."

The road to hell.

Comments on Bertram's post link to Rawlsian bullshit: liberal idealism founded in idealist formalism, and the authoritarianism of schoolteachers.