Government’s ‘idiotic’ policies block African Americans
Everyone seems to be concerned with affirmative action Â
the supposed solution to the troubles facing black Americans which
is being so hotly debated.
Advocates of affirmative action see the small number of African
Americans enrolling in colleges, their puzzling absence from the
list of Fortune 500 CEOs and their general underrepresentation in
the ranks of the successful and come to a single, tidy and
attractive explanation: racism.
That explanation seems a little too simple, and it is not
supported by even the most dramatic racial disproportionalities
described in various surveys. Yes, the numbers (the income,
educations, etc.) are skewed, but they define only an associative
relationship between race and "success."
Despite what activists would have us believe, the numbers can
never in and of themselves prove that racism is to blame.
But the lopsidedness between racial groups is there, so it seems
important to ask, "What causes the disparity between the
races?"
This is a very volatile question with some inflammatory answers
being thrown around. Notorious among these are social scientists’
Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein’s IQ theory which is outlined
in "The Bell Curve." Ridiculed as it was, it did challenge the
orthodox "racism" explanation and helped spark further debate.
Is the culprit truly discrimination or is it luck or race
itself? Do African Americans suffer from "past injustices," do
whites have a head start after so many years of discrimination?
Could there be different cultural tendencies and mental skills
which give whites an edge in a capitalist society (a dubious theory
supported by many progressive African-American academics who claim
that science, math and reason are strictly white endeavors)?
It is very hard to say. It could possibly be one of these or a
combination of several. I think it is more likely that it is
something else entirely: non-racist yet destructive government
policy.
In the late ’60s, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the
rate of out-of-wedlock births in the African American community was
frighteningly high and growing. After almost 30 years of Great
Society welfare programs, which encourage out-of-wedlock birth and
erode incentives to work, learn skills and pass them on to the next
generation, the number of illegitimate births among African
Americans has exploded.
There is a permanent underclass of African Americans with grim
prospects. The government is subsidizing the destruction of the
African American family and the result is a majority of children
being born into broken or incomplete homes.
You can imagine how hard it would be to raise children in, say,
an inner city, but can you imagine doing it alone? Trapped in a
bureaucratic nightmare of perverse disincentives to invest or
succeed, without fathers, without a family structure able to pass
down paternal values or heritage, and living in a community of
similarly fated individuals, they often have little to look forward
to.
And we think this suffering is the result of racism? We’ll see
how racist this situation really is as the rate of illegitimacy
among whites today is higher than that of African Americans 30
years ago and, exacerbated by the same welfare policies, is growing
much faster. (It promises a surge in the underclass that will dwarf
our current problems.)
What little chance many young blacks might still have for
success is effectively destroyed by yet another government program:
public education. No matter how much money, no matter how many Head
Start or charter school programs we throw at inner cities, the
government’s monopoly on education ensures disastrous results.
Reduced to little more than search-and-seizure day care, "inner
city" (PC code for what used to be called "the ghetto") schools
offer no hope. Teachers’ unions and politicians resist all attempts
to free up private resources and allow the market to provide
alternatives to a dismal public education system.
The last best hope for financial success is crime, thanks to our
insane War on Drugs. Is it surprising that fatherless children with
no education, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, so often
turn to a life of well-paying violent crime?
On Tuesday, the president called for another government policy
 a higher minimum wage. Wonderful. Watch as unskilled
minorities start losing their jobs as they must compete against the
middle-aged, white housewives who will be induced to enter the
labor market by the higher wage. This is great for Clinton’s
"middle class" but lousy for the poor.
And we wonder why so few African Americans enter college, why so
few are successful  why so many are in prison? They’re not up
against racist judges, cops or laws; they’re up against the
government’s own idiotic policies.
For some reason it is to this same government that we look to
for the solutions to African Americans’ problems. We call for more
programs  for preferential (racist) hiring policies and
educational opportunities  for racially biased contracting
policies.
As if coaxing about a few, well-placed disingenuous results is
going to stop the steady decline. As if recasting the
once-righteous Civil Rights Movement into a racially defined battle
between the "haves" and the "have nots" is going to "end" racism or
remedy past injustice. What about the present insanity?
Racial populists of the new civil rights movement have created
an extreme straw man  racist white America  and have
swapped it with what once was and still is the real problem: bad
government policies.
The more heated and divisive their rhetoric, the more respect
they win from the disadvantaged and the more privileges they can
bestow upon their constituency. This is how their system of racial
spoils works. But the obstacle blocking black Americans is the same
one it was 30 years ago  not past injustice, not a hateful,
conspiring white America, but government.
Wenman is a junior economics student. His column appears on
alternate Fridays.