Thomas Sowell devotes his latest column to the Obama administration’s efforts to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more housing for people with low incomes.

Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness — whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations — shows a “problem” that has to be “corrected.”

No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population — in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.

Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors. …

… None of this matters to politicians and ideologues who are hell-bent to mix and match people according to their own preconceptions. Moreover, like many things that the government does, it does residential integration more crudely than when people sort themselves out.