Disempowering America.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

These days, social-policy analysts on both the right and the left push "empowerment." Democrats David Osborne and Elaine Kamarck stress welfare reform and community-based policing; Republicans Jack Kemp and Jim Pinkerton back enterprise zones and want public-housing residents to own their homes.

Empowerment advocates seek to give individuals--even poverty-stricken ones--more control over their own lives. These advocates believe that if you treat people as adults they will make competent decisions, benefiting from their wisdom and learning from their mistakes.

Bill Clinton apparently disagrees. Despite the president's strong civil-rights record, and the genuine rapport he has developed with community leaders outside the civil-rights establishment, his policies clearly favor disempowerment. The Clinton agenda limits the choices individual Americans can make to those approved by union bosses and the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., state capitals, and city halls.

Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, the most loquacious member of the cabinet (and the one Clinton lets speak freely in public), is the administration's most visible opponent of empowerment. Consider these Reich-backed proposals to empower institutions over individuals:

* Reich overturned a Bush administration plan to temporarily suspend the Davis-Bacon Act. Davis-Bacon requires construction workers on federal projects to make union wages. Non-union workers, many of them African-Americans or Latinos, rarely get these jobs. Bush officials believed suspending Davis-Bacon would help South Florida recover from Hurricane Andrew; Reich sided with the unions, upheld Davis-Bacon, and kept non-union workers unemployed.

* Reich also rescinded Bush's orders to implement the Supreme Court's Beck decision. Beck requires unions with government contracts to disclose how much of their dues they spend on lobbying and other political activities. When union members oppose these political uses, the...