Young African American men are not employed. What is particularly sad in the US is that our President, who identifies as African American and looks African American has not stepped forward in the six years in office to take the bully pulpit on this issue. Many who voted for him hoped that we could turn a corner on this most intractable issue.
Jude Wanniski boiled down the major problem of our time as balancing the tension between income growth and redistribution. During the 1992 riots, he identified a scarcity of capital relative to labor as a major problem for the black inner city and a major source of tension in race relations. He noted, “When there is no capital available, the price of labor must drop to uncivilized lows to clear competitive levels.” Certainly, until the scarcity of capital relative to labor is addressed, the American empire will remain vulnerable to the violent eruptions that have befallen Ferguson.
During the early 1990s, Jack Kemp’s pursuit of enterprise zones in the inner city was a clear attempt to bridge the gap between growth and redistribution. The promise of enterprise zones was that their tax exemption on capital gains could attract the investment capital necessary so surplus labor (largely African American) could be pulled out of the streets and into increasingly productive, legal uses.
Today, it is Senator Rand Paul, who has visited Ferguson, who sounds like Kemp with his outreach initiatives to the black community. Similar to Kemp, he champions enterprise zones in the inner city. But he has taken the script further.
As veteran political columnist Ronald Brownstein noted this summer, Paul “has moved beyond the economic arguments that anchored previous outreach efforts to embrace criminal-justice reform with a passion unprecedented in modern Republican politics. Few Democrats, in fact, have matched the fervor of Paul’s case against drug laws that have disproportionately incarcerated minority men.”
Jim Webb, a one-term Senator from VIrginia and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, also addresses this issue. He is putting out feelers for the democrats’nomination in the early part of 2015.
