What Should Become of Preferences For Minorities Contractors?

What should become of preferences or set-asides for minority enterprises? With a President of mixed race and with the black man and white woman on the Supreme Court soon to be joined by a wise Latina has the 8(a) program reached it's useful end? If it is our intention to reward success based on merit while letting the content of our character and not the color of our skin be the basis for our interracial actions then the 8(a) program should be allowed to slip quietly into the abyss and the sooner the better.

There is no constitutional basis for giving anyone preferential treatment particularly when the cost of the preference is paid for by everyone else who should have the equal right to chase business based on capability not genetics. There is a legitimate argument for separating contracts into categories along the lines of big and small business and maybe even along the lines of big, small and micro. Certainly micro and small business can't compete for airplane contracts or even enterprise class information systems but there is a well identified, historic market for the things they can provide.

Restricting competition to business size would allow the competitors to be judged on their capability within various domains not by arbitrary happenstance or other skewed criteria. If you are capable of providing best value to the government and the taxpayer at a real and reasonable cost then no other standard or basis for award should apply. After all, the court decided that race or gender wasn't adequate grounds for denying promotion to the New England firefighters, shouldn't that bit of clear thinking be applied equally, to all of us? I believe someone had a dream about just that concept.