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Notes -
I have my own hypothesis which is that the way that we’re trying to solve the race problems tends to make the racial disparities worse.
Taking Affirmative Action as an example. Well, there are two problems here that actually hurt the black community. First, it essentially creates a siphon of any marginally talented black person. If he’s smart enough to get through school and hard working enough to hold down a decent job, he leaves the inner city ghetto. Furthermore, almost none of the money he makes goes back into that community unless he makes a special effort. On top of that, the profits of his labor go, again, outside of this community. This creates an effective brain drain for the community. The people with the smarts and work ethic get sucked out to greener pastures. I5 also removes their positive example in that community. No one living in a community like that knows anyone who made a good life for himself by study and work — those people are in the suburbs. What’s left behind are the thieves or drug runners who make good money, or the wage slaves that struggle to feed and clothe their families.
The other part is that there aren’t a lot of black owned businesses. Part of this is simply the modern economy in which large companies can so easily leverage economies of scale that it’s hard to get a new business started. Part of it is the difficulty especially for the relatively poor to get loans to start businesses. Part of it is that people living there don’t have the skills. But the reason that black owned local businesses are important is that locally owned businesses are one of the few ways for any community to get money into the community and to stay in the community once it gets there. Immigrants use this to great effect. They open an ethnic restaurant hire local immigrants to do the work, feed a bunch of yuppies, then the immigrants use their wages in the local ethnic shops, as do immigrants who don’t work in the community. In other words, money comes in and stays in. This creates a wealth base, and as they pay taxes they’re more respectable to local government. They’re setting an example of hard work and study that kids can see paying off.
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