So I've been thinking and reading and reading and thinking, and letting myself get disgusted and inspired, and hopeful. And there are a lot of thoughts, and I don't know if I'll get to all of them, or if they'll come out in a way that they make a difference, but out they come.

Libertarianism

I spent some time recently with an article called 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice. The 75 things fell roughly into four categories: criminal system reform, "see something, say something," learn/expand your horizons, and make it right.

So this article is a specific view of the how to make it right, starting with how we've made it wrong: it seems to me if we'd been a little more libertarian in our outlook, we might never have built so much of the system that has such an unduly negative effect on the black man.

To give this a little context, I was listening to a talk between Peter Robinson and Milton Friedman yesterday Take it to the Limits: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism. He suggests there are two strains of Libertarianism, and groups himself in the second camp:

1. The more extreme version has one central principle: “It is immoral to initiate force on anyone else. ” So the coercive power of the state is immoral in and of itself. All you need to know to know that something of the state is immoral is whether it involves the initiation of force.
2. Consequentialist Libertarianism: The maximum possible freedom for the individual, but also recognizing the need for certain government functions. A libertarian wants the smallest, least intrusive government consistent with the maximum freedom for each individual to follow his own ways, his own values, as long as he doesn't interfere with anyone else's doing the same.

As I read it, the basic tenet of libertarianism is “your rights end where they begin to do violence to my like rights;” what's more the state's doing of violence is always at least suspect of being a corrupt act.

Criminalization of the Black Man

Inside of this mindset, there would never have been Nixon's “War on Drugs,” an initiative that did not follow the recommendations of his own Blue Ribbon Commission on the topic. I suppose we could do a whole book on presidents/governors/mayors/folk in power seeking support for their positions, and then when the report comes back against them, doing whatever they wanted anyway.

The point is legal drugs (of all types, yes I'm that radical) would have obviated the war on drugs. Look at alcohol, or tobacco: taxed, bringing in revenue, the profit centers of many businesses (mostly bars and convenience stores), essentially non-violent, and since recent relaxations of regulations on manufacture, the source of thousands of new businesses, and of the jobs that go with them.

And now compare that model to the War on Drugs. It looks like prohibition did with alcohol, but that was child's play in comparison. The amounts in play are so big that the drug business destablizes whole countries, turns parts of our inner cities into war-zones, and unnecessarily makes an inordinate number of our young black male population into criminals, most for below minimum wage jobs.

The obvious institutional fix here would be to legalize all drugs, regulate for basic safety only, and tax. There wouldn't be a heck of a lot of illegal profit left to motivate the crime and violence that comes with the current system. Instead, if you wanted a piece of drug profits outside of their regular flow as a commodity, you'd need to be an innovator in the area.

And those who are currently involved in dead-end (sometimes literally) work would have to make their way otherwise, but the War on Drugs certainly wouldn't be making criminals out of them.

Minimum Wage and Child Labor

I mentioned drug-dealing as a below minimum wage job. Just like all other businesses, the profits fall into the hands of a relative few. Visit freakonomics to see how this is so. The truth is most street-level dealers make less than minimum wage, for a job that can prove fatal, with very little in the way of job security or benefits.

This suggests two things. One, work is tough to find. Two, people are willing to work at below legal wages just to be making a buck.

A possible problem here is that people can't get to the first rung on the economic ladder. With movements to push minimum wages to $15 an hour, and age limits on work, people just can't get started.

Carl Sandburg relates that he worked on a milk-wagon when he was seven years old. I lied about my age to get my first job (as a paperboy) when I was eleven.

And if you think back to agrarian times, from the moment that kids could help out, they were expected to. In other words, people started building life skills, and the skills of their trade, from the moment they could collect eggs, muck out a stall, milk a cow, pull a weed, or care for a younger sibling.

And while I don't want to suggest a return to children working 12 hour days in dangerous jobs just because they have the right sized hands, it might make sense to liberalize laws so that people can become economic actors and develop valuable skill sets earlier in life so that they are actually worth $15 and much more an hour as they move forward.

I didn't get paid a lick for the summers I spent on my cousin's farm (where we ate moose and elk because beef was way too expensive), but I got pretty strong throwing hay bales, learned a bit about operating and fixing farm machinery, handling and even slaughtering animals, working in a team, and I'm sure a bunch of other lessons I can't put my finger on at the moment.

Along these lines are also the kind of jobs that require apprenticeships to reach a level of proficiency that a person can actually ply a trade. And if that means working for free, or for room and board, maybe that's a price worth paying to be able to make a living later, whether that's to be a blacksmith, electrician, architech, accountant, or lawyer.

A child starting at age 12 or sooner (at whatever wage, or none) working after school and summers could have the practical portion of many trainings under his belt, and even the academic portion under the right circumstances, by the time he is eighteen.

And that young adult would be worth much more in the labor market.

I suggest this as a way our government might have gone too far in trying to protect us. If, when trying to save us from being exploited, our government keeps us from getting started as economic actors, we're set behind instead of ahead.

The libertarian approach would be to let people make their own agreements as to what they are worth so that they can get going. And once they get going, how far is up to them.

As it currently stands, it's probably cheaper, and a lot less hassle, to hire an illegally present person to do the work a neighborhood kid might once have done.

Get Government out of the Way

I don't know if I'm right, but I think it might be worth a conversation. It's possible that our current systems of "support" actually do more to harm.

For instance, we tolerate that 69.4% of black births are to unmarried mothers, despite knowing that the absence of a father figure correlates pretty highly with later incarceration rates and that marriage provides greater opportunity for economic security.

Are people somehow shackled by government policy? Do we somehow perversely incentivize this, especially if it's been made it hard to become an economic actor in the first place? It's possible. It might be worth looking into.

What I do know is that if you give people the space to create their own solutions, they will surprise us. But if we lock them into certain patterns in the name of helping them, all our good intentions will just be doing more harm.