Nonsense

“The disparities between black and white Americans remain consistent, nagging and substantial,” League president Marc Morial told Reuters.

“The next (U.S.) president has to take the bull by the horns and change the nation’s priorities and focus on domestic initiatives,” he said in an interview.

No, the next President does not have to take any bull by the horns nor does the office of the Presidency have the power to resolve such an issue. Wealth is not an entitlement. When are people in this country going to figure that out? Government cannot “fix” equality problems - it can only attempt to guarantee equal opportunity. I say attempt because racism can only be battled where it can be identified. Some people seem to find racism almost everywhere but that is part of the problem. As for wealth disparity, it should not be battled by government at all.

Here’s the 10-point plan

“Our nation has had enough of poll-driven focus-group tested drive-by-politics as usual,” Morial said. “We need concrete detailed proposals to get our urban communities back on track to economic prosperity. If we don’t close the equality gaps existing between minorities and mainstream America now, we threaten to lose our advantage on the world stage and undermine our standard of living for generations to come.”

This is nonsense. It is not siginficant to the country’s prosperity which groups of people attain wealth. If that were true, this country would have disappeared from the map long before now. It is only significant to those groups unable to achieve it - and more precisely, those individuals. Identity politics is part of the problem. There’s nothing wrong with the National Urban League working to increase the equality in wealth between blacks and white. It becomes wrong when they try to institutionalize it with government entitlement. Most of this 10 point plan is precisely that.

More importantly, trying to define the broad spectrum of the black community into a single group is injurious to blacks as a whole. The National Urban League and groups like them preach diversity as a powerful tool in business and society and then proceed to destroy that diversity. There is diversity within the black community that is stifled by this kind of thinking. Black children learn from early on that they have no fair chance in this country because of the color of their skin. Most of that hopelessness today does not come from whites but from blacks and it is rooted in this type of group thinking and group labeling.

There’s no space to get into every point of this plan but some of this stuff by itself is just plain garbage. Indexing the minimum wage to inflation for instance. This is equivalent to taking a fishook, inserting it into your ear lobe, tying the hook to a rim on your car and proceeding to drive down the block. Increasing the minimum wage does not increase wealth for people who make it - it decreases the number of jobs available at that rate. Rich people and businesses do not provide jobs as a benefit to the community, they do it to accomplish a business objective. When that objective becomes more expensive, they survive by cutting costs. In other words, those making minimum wage are more likely to lose the job they currently have. This is not racism, it’s a simple economic fact.

The funny part is when we get to step 9:

“Changes in the government contract landscape - more subcontracting, bundling and coding errors — have resulted in pushing more and more small firms out of the market. In 1996, minority firms received only $0.57 for every dollar they would have been expected to receive based on their availability.”

Small firms are driven out of the market precisely because of government intervention and regulation - the minimum wage for instance. Big businesses like MacDonalds or WalMart can sometimes absorb the increased costs of employing minimum wage workers at a higher rate or being forced to cover employee health care. What do you think happens to smaller businesses? If you said “They go out of business”, take a cookie.

And then step 10:

“Minority-owned business development has been hamstrung by lack of access to capital, business networks and intergenerational wealth that helps their white counterparts get off the ground.”

This is an excellent point about intergenerational wealth. The study at the core of this call to action finds that the black community has less wealth collectively than the white community. That translates into much less opportunity for someone born into a black family from ever having the opportunity to amass enough wealth to go into business for him or herself. So then, how is drastically increasing the costs of starting and running a small business helpful to the black community at all?

The answer: It isn’t.