On Reading Mises’s Omnipotent Government

 

From his new home in New York, in 1944, having fled his old home in Austria, via Geneva, Ludwig von Mises published a remarkable book entitled Omnipotent Government. Reading this book today provides a rare window into Mises’s world at the time he wrote it, as well as into the significant historical trends that characterize the roughly two centuries that led up to that time, the cataclysm of two world wars, a worldwide economic depression, Nazism, the holocaust, and the rise to prominence of the Soviet Union.

This book remains a source of information, amazement and satisfaction for those interested in the history, politics, economics and sociology of the times. I, and my generation, grew up in the shadow of World War II. Recent generations, will not feel the significance of those turbulent times as keenly -  and less so as time goes by. It will become an esoteric experience for those who read books like this.

Bear in mind that the book was published in 1944, before the conclusion of World War II in 1945, and much of it was written in the few years before that, while the war was raging. The full extent of the destruction and brutality was not yet widely known (it is not clear from the book whether Mises knew, for example, of the magnitude of the holocaust – the death camps and extermination of around ten million people, including six million Jews, one third of the population of world Jewry).  So, having fled the Nazis himself, leaving behind a lifetime of work and accomplishment, for a strange new world, writing in a foreign language, he passionately records his understanding of the deep forces at work that explain the descent into barbarism of European civilization. Without taking note of Mises’s perspective at the time, one does not appreciate the full power of the book.

To be sure, Mises is difficult to read for some. His style is assertive and dogmatic, and impersonal. One frequently encounters phrases like “There can be no doubt that … ” and rarely any humility. He confidently discerns the cultural tectonics underlying historical developments. He presumes to know the mindsets of millions of individuals over vast swaths of time. But, that being said, the reader need not hazard a judgement on these assertions to appreciate the quality of the intellect at work, and the earnest attempt to come to grips with the horrors that have personally affected him and his entire generation. He shines a bright light to illuminate the complex and mysterious. Having read this book one cannot but come away much less perplexed by all that happened, and much better equipped for further investigation.

At one level, Mises’s story is a simple one. The decline of European civilization to the abysmal depths of Nazism was the result of the eclipse of Liberalism (classical liberalism, the kind that Adam Smith believed in). Ideas matter, big time. The rise of the total state and total war (the subtitle of the book) was the result of the steady abandonment of a general commitment to the Liberal principles of individual rights and free markets. Liberalism arose, first in England and the British Isles, and then in western and central Europe and America, in the middle of the 18^th century and lasted roughly a century, before being pushed out as the dominant worldview. It was the spark that ignited the Great Enrichment. And in this book we find perhaps Mises’s best statement of its content and significance, and one of the best statements on Liberalism to be found anywhere. Mises provides an account of what Liberalism is, and is not, and why it is so important in the grand scheme of things.

Two broad alternatives to Liberalism as the dominant view emerged toward the end of the 19^th century, namely, Socialism and Interventionism, in different places, notably, in England and the newly emerged German nation state. Mises explains how both, in different ways, lead to catastrophe, the omnipotence of the state. Both are variations of the phenomenon of statism (or etatism, as Mises calls it). There is a direct line from Prussia’s Bismarck to Germany’s Hitler, from the decline of the European dynastic family principalities (the ancien regime) to the rise of all-encompassing nation states, with Liberalism in between as an unwitting conduit.  

In earlier work, Mises had explained in great detail the contradictions involved in Socialism as a system for achieving sublime human equality. Socialism is doomed to collapse into economic ruin and brutality. The central planning required by Socialism implies the abandonment of private property and market processes that are necessary to coordinate economic activity. Without them people starve, become desperate and barbaric. This is explained again in 1944 before the full extent of Soviet failure had emerged, not to mention the numerous other failures of socialist experiments that followed.

Interventionism is commonly presented as a compromise between Capitalism and Socialism, but Mises disputes its sustainability and argues that, if not reversed, it leads ultimately to state domination of production no different in kind from Socialism. Nazism is Socialism in this sense, an extreme form of Interventionism that dominates all aspects of economic life (as he documents) and life in general. In the case of Germany, 1871 – 1944, it is the result of a push toward state-imposed autarky (discrimination against all foreign production) and the implied need for Lebensraum to feed the privileged German nation.

Mises is clear and adamant about the necessity to resist Nazism in the strongest possible terms and scathing in his condemnation of the western democracies in their failure to prepare for an effective opposition to Nazism (and Fascism in Italy and Spain). He attributes this lack of will to the abandonment of Liberalism, to a loss of understanding of its significance, and to the rise of Socialism in the world and in Britain in particular (Fabianism).

His final chapters on the future of Europe and the world are necessarily uninformed by later developments, notably the formation of the United Nations, and the closing of the iron curtain, but can be read nevertheless as remarkably prescient.

I studied history as an undergraduate, as a joint major with economics.  I have retained an abiding interest in it, including in European history. I remember studying the history of the unification of Germany and remembered enough of it to relate to Mises’s account in a way that deepened my rather superficial understanding. Most English speaking readers are much more familiar with the history of Britain and America than of Germany, France and other European countries. But, in order to understand, the modern era in which we live, it is necessary to understand it all. One could do no better than to begin with this book.

From my FB page - of note. 

On the pathology of anti-discrimination policy. 

Peter Lewin

lmDtdssdeeceSfpmbeolnsrrg 6s aocmgrset 9:Sa48uosd AgM  · 

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Does it constitute progress that we have moved from state mandated racial discrimination to state mandated affirmative racial discrimination? Yes, it probably does.

The different motivations probably do have some moral significance. It is good that we have put behind us the mindset that motivated slavery and Jim Crow apartheid and that there is an honest desire to own up to that history. But that does not make affirmative discrimination right morally speaking - just because it may be motivated by good intentions. [I leave aside the self-serving hypocrisy associated with it.] After all if racial discrimination is morally wrong how can affirmative racial discrimination be morally right? It operates the same way and hurts innocent people. It is not only wrong, it is very wrong.

This conclusion is substantially reinforced by the fact that such attempts to use group discrimination to remedy past sins ends up not eliminating prejudice and discrimination but perpetuating it. It is horribly counterproductive and is a significant part of our current identity politics pathology.

Well so much for a real discussion about policy.

 

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Well so much for a real discussion about policy.

I think the pattern is now pretty clear. There are 6 groups – broadly speaking.

1. The "liberals" who hate Trump so much that nothing else really matters. To the extent that they consider policy at all they either think Trump's policies are wrong or they think that anything good that happened during his term is something that just happened and would have happened regardless of who was in the WH, or that they were the result of Obama's actions. (See Alan Blinders ridiculous article in yesterday's WSJ). Many in this group spend their time perseverating on Trump's utterances and missteps and pouring their nervous energy into caricaturing and mocking him to their endless satisfying amusement - an easy target. 
2. The woke “liberals” (progressives, socialists and left-wing fascists) who want to remake (aka destroy) the free-enterprise,  capitalist system and the Western culture that made it. This group includes the antifa types who believe there are no limits to the means that can be used to achieve their revolutionary ends – they are fanatics every bit as dangerous as the right-wing variety and right now more numerous and they regard the liberal majority as useful idiots to be manipulated for the worthy cause. 
3. The Republicans who like Trump's policies but whose aversion to the man is so great that they cannot vote for him. This includes those who are afraid of what he might do that could be fundamentally damaging to the body politic - though my efforts to extract anything specific along these lines has so far failed. 
4. The independents who voted for Trump last time, but who have soured on him for one reason or another – perhaps because they did not realize just how toxic his personality actually is. Why not, one wonders? What did they expect? So because of their newly found aversion and fear of him they have switched their vote. It is this group – many of whom voted against Hillary Clinton – who will determine the outcome of the election. 
5. Two kinds of Trump supporters. One, those who will vote for him in spite of his toxic personality because they value the policies that have resulted during his first term and believe these are likely to continue and extend into his second term – though how these policies actually resulted is both unclear and not very relevant. The point is they benefitted tens of millions of people, many of them poor – and on foreign policy achieved unprecedented breakthroughs. This group, of which I am a part, lives in fear of how a Biden/Harris administration will squander all of these achievements and then plunge further into the Obama regulatory agenda – on steroids provided by the ever more influential woke elements in the remade Democratic party.
6. The second group of Republicans (“conservatives”), those who can see nothing bad in Trump and wax apoplectic at any criticism of him. They includes the “deplorables” the right wing racists and fascists as well as decent folk who just want to believe, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, that Trump is a savvy, down-to-earth regular guy who instinctively knows what to do and deep-down cares about them and about America.

 Because of group number 4, I believe that Trump will lose the election – even though I hope for a miracle that he won’t.

 I am deeply disappointed that the Trump campaign has not been able to make the conversation about policy – domestic and foreign – that Trump has not been willing and able to lay out systematically the facts on the ground in a manner that would appeal to those who want to hear an analysis without rancor and rage. “This is what I am about, this is what has happened, this is what I promise, regardless of what he says or promises, think about what is better for the American people and vote for me”. But, clearly that is naïve.

 If Reagan was the swing back from Carter (a low point in America), and Trump was the swing back from Obama and Hillary, who will be the swing back from Biden/Harris? That will have to be my focus.

Trump is the end result, not the cause.

Today's musing minute:

Certainly high up on the list of Trump's flaws as a leader, is his inclination to divide rather than unite. He thrives off the negative energy of confrontation - turned always into a commentary about him and his achievements. Certainly he appears to be missing an opportunity to nudge people away from division toward unity in a crisis.

Having said this, I am compelled to point out that this pervasively hostile environment has its origins long before the advent of Trump. Trump is not the cause of it. He is the result, the latest reflection of it. It has been brewing for over a decade in the escalating stirrings of the racial justice movement in their many diverse projects aimed at creating racial, ethnic and social conflict - apparently for various reasons, some political (to get federal money) some ideological (Marxist). Certainly Obama was an instrument in this (you did not build that!), and it has slowly but surely infiltrated deep into the Democratic party.

The distortion of history, the provoking of resentment about statues and establishment names, the fostering of white guilt, the promotion of race consciousness everywhere and in everything. MLK.s dream of a race-blind society is now openly scorned and repudiated. Trump is the spear-tip of the right wing reaction to this. And unfortunately he is serving the purpose of the racial justice warriors perfectly.

Puzzling is the readiness of the Democratic party to go along. Like Trump its leaders appear to be missing the opportunity to call for unity, to reach back to our common American-ness in spite of all the tragic horrific divisions that punctuate our turbulent history and to point out that we have arrived at a time when in the richest and most powerful nation in history there is so much more that unites than divides us. But to do this they must repudiate the social justice movement and its racist agenda and affirm an America that has never been less racist or more inclusive than it is now.

Systemic Racism, Police Brutality and All That - Part 4

Finding discrimination in the data 

The observation of racial disparities is not, by itself, evidence of racial discrimination in any meaningful sense of that term. I have discussed a number of likely causes of the incidence poverty that disproportionately affects black communities in the US. 

More sophisticated investigations try to account for the various causes of any observed racial disparity. Consider, for example, a difference in pay. Clearly, a comparison of average earnings without adjusting for factors like educational qualifications, training, and experience are inappropriate. If one wants to isolate the effect of racial discrimination one needs to compare apples to apples. Some studies have attempted to make such adjustments, using available, though imperfect, measures of labor-relevant characteristics, like education, qualifications and experience. And some have found that the adjustments do not reduce the gap between black and white earnings for equally qualified and able workers to zero. This “residual” is then attributed to discrimination.

As another example, a similar study corrected for buyer  characteristics other than race, finds a persistent disparites is housing prices paid by blacks and whites, a premium that blacks had to pay for the same/similar houses under similar conditions – and concludes that this must be because of discrimination. 

Yet, another example, involves the observation that, despite having applicant pools of equally qualified people, men vastly outnumber women in certain lucrative, prestigious professions, like engineering and computer science. [Notably these observations do not control for the number of offers made and accepted.] 

The details of these studies are not important for this discussion. What is important are the following two questions. 

1. Is it legitimate or sensible to attribute the “unexplained” disparities to discrimination (prompting the corollary question: what does that mean)?

and

 2. What follows from that; what do these remaining gaps imply for policy? 

With regard to question 1 much depends who we imagine has the burden of proof. When we observe a disparity that cannot be explained by differences in the background data are we justified in concluding that discriminatory behavior must have occurred, or will we require that such a conclusion be proven by further evidence of actual discriminatory behavior? This will turn out to be very important when we consider the way the criminal justice system works in deciding accusations of discrimination. 

Question 2. Is the more important one. What should be done about racial disparities that can with greater or lesser confidence be attributed to discrimination? To be more specific the possible scenarios include disparities in pay, hiring, firing, promotion, training and working conditions. To explore this we need to examine the economics of discrimination. 

Discrimination is immoral, but should it be illegal? 

In a free society people will be free to do some immoral things. Clearly freedom has been an indispensable part of the growth of our society and the achievement of prosperity for many. But, many will argue, if left unchecked it will produce gross inequality and injustice. For example, the argument goes, people with power to hire and fire, to pay more or less, to promote or not to promote, who have racial biases should not be free to exercise those biases with impunity. We need laws and regulations to check that behavior. Such is the justification for the extensive regulatory apparatus designed to counter any suspected bias that might lead to labor market discrimination. 

The extent of the anti-discrimination, diversity promoting, bureaucracy and regulatory framework is formidable. In economic terms it constitutes a significant proportion of our GDP. Every company above a minimum size must devote considerable resource to diversity monitoring, ensuring that minorities are not being disadvantaged in any way. Besides the various and varied state agencies tasked with advising and monitoring such matters, there also exist powerful federal agencies for the purpose, notably the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and the OFCCP (Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs) – which is the watchdog for the implementation of affirmative action, that is preferential treatment for “equally qualified” minority workers and job applicants). This regulatory bureaucracy, besides its operating cost, imposes significant indirect costs on businesses as they try to ensure that no complaint is filed with the EEOC against them or that no deficiency is noted in their affirmative action plan (required by all federal government “contractors” – those who directly or indirectly do business with the federal government, which may be the majority of businesses in the economy. It is hard to overstate the reach of the anti-discrimination, diversity-promoting, micro-managing bureaucracy. 

But, what is it all about? Is it simply a matter of trying to counter the consequences of labor market bias? And if so, does this make any sense? Like all regulation, labor market regulation faces serious knowledge and incentive problems. There are always unintended consequences and costs. 

We may examine this by using the example of pay. Presumably the objective of the regulations is to ensure that racial bias does not result in lower pay for equally qualified workers. To construct a regulation to ensure this one has to provide a way of deciding who is “equally qualified”. More specifically, when a complaint of pay discrimination is lodged with the EEOC, the agency must decide whether the complainant is equally qualified in comparison to those who are receiving higher pay. Or, more simply, are doing the “same job”. The agency will have to insert in place of the judgment of the employer its own judgement to decide whether the pay gap is justified. But, clearly the agency cannot know as much about the business as the employer. How can the agency know how much of the gap is due to the legitimate judgment of the employer about differences in the productivity of the worker and how much is due to bias? 

To complicate matters, should the issue come to a court of law, the procedure followed will be, as described above, to use “experts” to control for productivity factors as much as possible, and to observe if any pay gap still remains. If, after this exercise, a gap remains, it is common in such proceedings that such finding will be regard as sufficient for the plaintiff to have established a prima facia case of discrimination, and then the burden of proof will shift to the employer to “prove” that he has not discriminated. The presumption of innocence is now removed. 

Needless to say, since it is very difficult to prove the negative of no discrimination, many of these cases are resolved with costly settlements. Even more likely, employers will work hard and spend significant resources to avoid such lawsuits by ensuring that minorities are paid sufficiently to deter such complaints even if it means paying them more than they are worth in terms of unbiased business judgments. In other words, this kind of regulation, in trying to prevent pay discrimination causes discrimination against non-minorities The same logic applies to hiring in an affirmative action environment where less qualified minority workers are likely to get hired in order to avoid any presumption of discriminatory bias. Affirmative action is actually affirmative discrimination. If discrimination is immoral, one wonders how it can be justified in this context.   

A particularly stark manifestation of this is the preferential treatment given to black student applicants to college. Black applicants are in many institutions admitted with test scores a few hundred points below those of their white and Asian counterparts. The result is that many underprepared black students are admitted to programs in which they are likely to fail and to attract attention for doing so. This program is thus doubly counterproductive in, first, failing to benefit the people it is designed to benefit, and, second, in increasing discrimination and race-consciousness by discriminating against whites and Asian students. In addition, it fails to address the fundamental reasons so few black students are unprepared for the colleges to which they apply. By targeting diversity of admissions (notably not of graduations) the focus is on the symptoms not the causes. 

All in all, in similar ways, anti-discrimination regulation is a problematic bag of tricks with unpleasant surprises. Which prompts the question, is it even necessary? A brief look at the economics of discrimination suggests it is not, in fact, suggests that such regulation may actually retard the erosion of discrimination. 

In any reasonably competitive labor market, competition works to erode discriminatory behavior (and also discriminatory attitudes as a result, because if people behave in a non-discriminatory way they interact with a greater diversity of individuals and often overcome their initial biases and prejudices). No system has ever been more successful in reducing the effects of bias in race, class and other such designations than competitive capitalism. 

To understand this, consider again the example of pay discrimination. Imagine an employer who will hire black workers only if they are paid less than whites (or hired into lower paying jobs for which they are overqualified) In a competitive labor market such an employer pays a price, and it could be a heavy price. If blacks have to discount their wages in order to get employed in equally qualified jobs, non-discriminators will have a cost advantage if they hire blacks and have an incentive to do so in large numbers. Over time such cost advantages will translate into higher market shares. In the long run discriminators will have to adapt or go out of business. 

The same applies to hiring, promotion, training, work conditions, etc. Those employers who are color-blind will make better use of the resources to economic advantage and outcompete discriminatory behavior.[1] This applies as much to black employers as anyone. 

This story is well known. Some find it unconvincing because they think, incorrectly, that it depends on the employer having “perfect information” about the qualifications and productivity potential of black and white workers. If this were the case, then the story would be just a nice theory, applicable to a world where knowledge was perfect and there was no uncertainty. In fact in such a world there would never by any discrimination at all, as long as there were sufficient non-discriminators, though there might be segregated work forces. 

In the real world discrimination is a fact of life. The question is what system minimizes discriminatory behavior or minimizes the existence of racial bias. And the answer is a competitive unregulated labor market. To think that regulation, like the current affirmative action regulation, can improve on it is to ignore the very heavy regulatory costs I have enumerated above[2], and to assume that somehow the regulation results in a better match between qualifications and employment regardless of race.[3] Establishing that a free market would not bring about a perfect outcome is emphatically not to establish the case for regulation, which far from being able to make things better, is very likely to make things worse. 

Conclusion. 

In this four part essay I have tried to show why the current race-loaded narratives are not helpful but are, rather, destructive of understanding, empathy and progress. My recommendation is to talk about how we individuals of all races and creeds can work to improve lives in general, and the lives of the poor in particular, a significant proportion of whom are black. 

Appendix: Biographical note. 

My decision to write this extended blog was provoked by the precipitous deterioration of the already abysmally low level of our public discourse, particularly around race, inequality and public policy. Such discourse shows less and less evidence of knowledge about the workings of markets, of American history and of the workings of government. In addition, myths and distortions abound in service of an unprecedented radical public policy agenda, one that, sometimes consciously, targets the very foundation of the American free market system and the freedom and prosperity with which it is associated. 

I am particularly sensitive to these matters because race and economics is an area of specialization for me as an economist. I was born and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. My father was an extraordinarily liberal and tolerant man and we experienced considerable dissonance living in the apartheid police state. But, though he was a very passive man in general, he was easily angered by any manifestation of racial bias or bigotry. I grew up with an appreciation of tolerance and of individual rights, in sprite of seeing manifestations of the very opposite everywhere around me. 

Upon leaving South Africa, I did my doctoral dissertation on the Economics of Apartheid, under the supervision of the famous economist, Nobel laureate, Gary Becker at the University of Chicago. Becker pioneered the field of the economics of discrimination. But he did not consider situations in which the government, supporting a white minority, imposed racially discriminatory laws. This was the case in South Africa under apartheid and in the Jim Crow south in the US. 

I realized that in such situations, governments serve to prevent, or retard, the process by which free markets erode discrimination. This leads to the prediction that, when such discriminatory laws are removed, allowing freedom of choice, including biased choice, discrimination and bias will gradually, if not immediately, disappear. This is exactly what has happened in South Africa and in the American south. The current discourse evidences no understanding of this or, indeed, of the negative role that government must play if it enters into the realm of what should be private decision making.

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[1] It should be obvious that, in a perverse way, labor market regulation gets in the way of this erosion process, by focusing on race and encouraging non-optimal use of resources.

[2] For the sake of brevity I have omitted consideration of the egregious violations of individual liberty that these regulations entail.

[3] Supporting such regulation, since it is coercive in nature, should carry the burden of proving that it does.

Systemic Racism, Police Brutality and All That - Part 3

Introduction – Racial disparities and what to do about them.

Part 2 dealt mainly with why the “legacy of slavery” cannot be the cause of the significant persistent racial disparities that we observe, namely, because these disparities have dramatically worsened since the 1960’s, suggesting that the policy environment that has developed since that time is the cause. Here I want to examine that in more detail.

First, a general point. The existence of group disparities is inevitable and is not necessarily a reflection of injustice. There are a multitude of reasons why the members of any population group (gender, race, national origin, age, ethnicity) will differ in outcomes from members in any other group. History, genetics (for example athletic ability), prior education, culture (family cohesion), etc. play a huge role. And these, and other, factors interact to produce outcomes in a complex way.[1] Most disparities are simply the result of spontaneous individual “sorting” and should signal no concern or need for remedial efforts.

But, in the case of black Americans, such disparities do signal some palpable pathologies to which we should pay careful attention. Simply attributing these disparities to systemic racism and discrimination, shaming all white people, most of  whom had nothing to do with them, and looking to sensitivity training policies and state mandated preferential treatment will not diminish these disparities. By treating the symptoms rather than the causes tihs actually makes the disparities worse and is likely to fuel racist attitudes. I will explain this in Part 4. For now I turn to a brief examination of the real root causes of racial disparities.  

Racial disparities as by-product of poverty

Black Americans are disproportionately poor. Many policies affect the poor disproportionately. Rather than focusing on changing racist attitudes, surely it makes sense to first tackle those social and economic policies that have a disparate impact on the poor – on those worst off in our society. Breaking the cycle of poverty should be a top priority.

Poverty is a complex phenomenon. But, basically, people are poor because they lack productive  resources. Productive resources include physical property, real estate, but, also, importantly, human capital, that is, valuable individual abilities, attitudes, and knowledge. So, obviously, education plays a pivotal role in this. So does the family in shaping a child’s capacity to recognize and use resources and to  dedicate herself to the acquisition and use of them. So, poor schooling and family dysfunction are two prime candidates for explaining the failure of any population group to achieve prosperity. 

Education. As mentioned in Part 2, the quality of public education for black children has declined monotonically since the abolition of forced segregation and the adoption of forced integration. More fundamentally, it is the public school monopoly that is holding back black education. Public education is a system in which education is both subsidized and produced by the state (the government). There is no good reason why education should be produced by the government. It could still be subsidized. But parents could be given the power to decide where and how those subsidies are used. Parental choice in education is a bi-partisan issue. Allowing and requiring parental involvement in their children’s education would galvanize the education system overnight and produce a sea change in black education achievement, and this would, in turn, dramatically serve to break the cycle of poverty. An unfortunate culture antagonistic to educational achievement and the discipline and dedication that it requires has developed within many poor black communities, seeing the education system as an oppressive “white” institution – a culture particularly debilitating for boys and young men. Parental choice could go a long way toward combatting this culture.

Crime. Lack of education implies lack of opportunities, lack of vision and hope, and fosters an environment in which violence flourishes. Add to this the availability and profitability of hard drugs. The drug war has adversely affected black Americans disproportionately - addiction, gang violence, drug-related police corruption and brutality, are manifestations of the multiple problems produced. 

The so-called “war on drugs” has lasted more than half a century. Instead of eradicating the use of drugs it has provided organized crime with massive profits, corrupted our police forces (who cannot compete by adequately compensating the men and women on the front line for the danger they face in a futile attempt to stem the flow of drugs), violated people’s individual rights as police use the extraordinary powers and resources they have been given to pursue suspected drug offenders (and to abuse those in a corrupt was for their own advancement), commanded massive budgets at all levels of government that show no signs of diminishing and more. It is a failed policy. And one of its most devastating affects has been to perpetuate and extend the cycle of poverty and violence in the lower income black communities of America. Any serious discussion about racial disparities simply cannot ignore this. 

The two most urgent policy changes on the racial disparity agenda should be to facilitate universal school choice[2] and decriminalize drugs[ 3]. 

Though these two are the most urgent policy reforms, there are many other counterproductive policies that should be abandoned or reformed. Minimum wage laws destroy jobs mostly for those at the bottom of the income scale, throwing them onto welfare. Unemployment is generally higher for the unskilled and untrained, and minimum wages makes it worse. 

Incentives matter. Dozens of welfare policies subtly and not so subtly blunt the incentives of young black people to work and achieve, tying welfare payments to unemployment and poverty. Perhaps the most egregious is the subsidization of teenage pregnancy which has mushroomed with these subsidies. All of this should be reformed to provide welfare assistance that does not significantly diminish the incentive to be employed. A variant of such a policy is the negative income tax, proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1950’s (resurrected in a different guise as a universal basic income), though the level of income that could realistically be guaranteed is dependent on replacing all of the dozens of different existing welfare programs for this one simple program. That this is not politically possible is attributable to the dramatic loss of power and earnings that it implies for all those now working at some level in the extensive “poverty industry” who have a perverse vested interest in the continuation of dependence through poverty. Ironically, in this sense a formidable barrier to poverty eradication is current poverty policy, which, doubly ironically, works to exaggerate and perpetuate inequality.

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[1] This is a complex subject, which I have studied my whole academic career. The literature is vast. A good starting point is the comprehensive work of Thomas Sowell. A recent book is Sowell 2018.

[2] For starters requiring children to attend the school for which they zoned should be abolished. Let parents decide. The allocation of resources to schools should follow the demand. Charter schools are a first step toward this. But they are hopelessly over-demanded by low income parents. Providing parents with vouchers redeemable at accredited public or private schools would solve this. It would introduce competition leading to educator accountability, innovation, diversity of educational methods, as educational entrepreneurs entered the sector. There is widespread popular demand among low-income parents for greater school choice. The chief and likely only obstacle to its implementation is the teacher-union movement. The unions are desperately afraid that their guarantied jobs will be threatened if teachers and other educators are held accountable subject to the choices of parents who have options.

[3] Many will balk at the suggestion that hard drugs be decriminalized, as many did at the suggestion that the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s be lifted. As in that case, the “cure” is way worse than the “disease”. The drug trade is obnoxious and has horrible results. But the drug war is even worse. At least if trade in drugs were legal it would be visible and a fraction of the money spent on prevention could then be allocated toward education about addiction. Decriminalization would lead to less police corruption, less organized crime and gang violence, and maybe even less addiction.

Systemic Racism, Police Brutality and All That - Part 2

Introduction – Outcomes and Causes.

If we can agree that systemic disparities exist in economically and socially desirable outcomes like income, wealth, schooling, housing, job satisfaction, career advancement, wholesome family structure, low crime, etc,, can we also agree on the causes of these disparities? It would appear not. In fact, it seems that it is about causes that all or most of the disagreement regarding racial disparities is about.

There are large and persistent racial differences in those desirable outcomes. Specifically black considered as a group exhibit the worst outcomes. But, often, the causes of these disparities are not investigated – the question is never asked. It is just assumed that the disparities are the result of racial discrimination (though that too is mostly left undefined and unexplained).

In the current divisive political environment where the issue of race has been dramatically harnessed to cultivated grievance and resentment, the disparities ae simply assumed to reflect bad attitudes, bad behaviors and perverse historical-system effects (there is a strong element of Marxist ideology running through it, coupling racial injustice with the injustice of capitalism itself). Reference is often made to the “legacy of slavery” – something that recently became insidiously present in the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and is quietly entering the popular consciousness and the high school curriculum in places.[1]

No, it is not the “legacy of slavery”.

Before proceeding, let me note some salient historical facts. The troubles commonly associated with black lives in America today did not begin with slavery, with emancipation or with Jim Crow. They began in the 1960’s, during the civil rights era. They are the legacy of the liberal policies enacted at that time and of the war of drugs begun a little earlier. These served to slow the dramatic progress that black Americans had been making from the abolition of slavery until that point in time. We see this in al of the relevant evidence about desirable outcomes like education, wealth, housing, and low crime. This can be easily verified by consulting the relevant statistics. To hear Thomas Sowell talk about it, listen to this excerpt from an interview here. So in an important way, these disparities are not the result of widespread racist intent, or even anticipation.[2]

In 1960 approximately 80 percent of black families were headed by two married parents. Today the number is approximately 20 percent, about 80 percent of black children are brought up in young single parent household. In particular fatherhood is rare. Families are dysfunctional and unstable, with predictable psychological effects on children. In examining black lives and how to make them better it is imperative to exam the causes of this.

The same is true of educational quality and achievement. Dating from the abolition of forced  school segregation until now, schooling for black children has continued to deteriorate and is now absolutely abysmal in the poorest districts. The abolition of forced segregation was morally and legally desirable, but its replacement with forced integration has been a total disaster, making black education significantly worse than it was before Brown v. Board of Education.

And the same is true of black crime. Until the escalation of crime from the 1960’s onwards, many the high-crime black neighborhoods of the country were not that different from their lower crime surroundings. Harlem was a place accessed by subway and frequented by many white people without fear – to go ballroom dancing, attend restaurants, etc.

The pattern is clear.,

Despite all this, racial justice warriors cling to the myth that slavery is to blame for a large portion of the racial disparities that exist. They embed it in the narrative of progressive, post-modern, anti-colonialist, Marxist inspired, jargon to suggest that prosperity in America has been achieved in large part on the backs of the slaves, and the quasi slaves that followed under the system of "oppressive capitalism." (see the 1619 Project).  

[1] The 1619 Project is a horribly distorted ideologically loaded work. See Magness here and here and 1776unites.

[2] There is some evidence that in enacting the ‘war of drugs’ the Nixon administration was aware of the effect it would have in marginalizing black Americans and considered that a feature if not the objective of policy. No president since Nixon has used the knowledge of this to even come close to suggesting decriminalizing drugs, probably for fear of widespread opposition, opposition which surely cannot be all about marginalizing and victimizing black Americans. It seems most Americans consider the drug war to have other “noble” objectives.