My business…I’ve got a piece on Page 2 today commemorating the 20th anniversary of Len Bias’ death. Also check out the piece Scoop has on the topic. We thought it would be cool to both do pieces on this given that we’re of different generations, and I think it turned out pretty well.
Other folks’ business…check out this piece my man Jarrett Carter’s got on the BSN about James Blake. It’s a great piece of work, and I ask you all to check him out at www.jarrett-carter.com.
Speaking of Jarrett, I had the pleasure of sharing a plate of barbecue chicken from T&T’s Carry Out on Kennilworth Ave on my trip to the DC area last week. Since the tables were sticky enough to hold on to your plate, we ate in his ride. Good food, good folks, good story.
I went to DC with my summer gig. I work with the American Economics Association’s Summer Program, whose primary purpose is to prepare non-white students for graduate study in economics. It’s a good program, and I have to say that a free trip to DC was really good for enticing me into the job. DC is like my fourth home behind Houston, Atlanta and Durham. Many of my folks from undergrad are from PG and Montgomery Counties, and a few friends from way back live up that way. I always love going there and love the vibe of the area.
But see, the program decided to go to a few places I wouldn’t. Our trip to the NSF was okay. The trip to the Fed was cool if only for the food (and let it be known you’d be better off trying to rob a Brinks truck with a butterknife than trying to start a ruckus in the Fed).
The real fun trip was to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. People say a lot of things about the libertarians, mostly that they’re Republicans in disguise. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s undeniable that they’re really conservative. That doesn’t bother me so much. They can roll like that if they choose.
I must say that I do agree with some of the things they say. The problem I’ve got with them is that they’re views on economics only work if you assume that everyone started at the same level and all subsequent levels of inequality are market conditions, not market failures. Forgive me, but I ain’t buying that shit for nothing.
So we get to Cato, and a gentleman named David Boaz was the speaker. From what they said, he’s done a bit of television. That’s cool, I guess. But if they’ll put my black ass on television, then it really ain’t that difficult to get on. And if you’ve got a ski mask? Man, they got a show at 10 that’s always lookin for those niggaz.
Anyway, buddy started by explaining that what he thinks is rooted in the public choice literature. I’m okay with that. After all, I’m an alumnus of the Claremont Graduate University School of Politics and Economics. What they do is public choice. To this day, it’s the perspective I tend to default to when it’s time to evaluate a problem.
(To the non-economically inclined–public choice is a thought process that feels it’s impossible to evaluate the actions of politicians and policy makers without looking at their personal utility functions. While policy makers have concerns for constituents, they are also concerned with maximizing their own wealths, but only if that doesn’t prevent them from holding their office and maximizing more utility later.)
Boaz said the problem with government is that it’s based around “concentrated benefits, diffused costs.” That I agree with. Interest groups sway policy, and the costs of whatever initiative is brought forth is paid for by everyone. We’ve got countless problematic examples of that.
Then the dude started quoting Thomas Jefferson, and I started reading Friday Night Lights. Sorry, but you get nowhere with me by praising Thomas Jefferson. I can respect his intellect, but I am unable to ignore his blinding, spectacular racism. Check Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror and see Jefferson’s dreadful solution to blacks in America. I’ll give you a hint–it involves children and islands. But hey–at least he liked that black good good!
When I popped back up, someone must have asked the dude about income inequality. He then said that he has no problem with income inequality because it’s necessary to provide incentive for people to strive.
There’s a small bit of credence in that, but not much. First, that assumes that there’s necessarily socioeconomic mobility with this inequality. Sorry, but it doesn’t seem to work like that, and there’s a piece in the new issue of The Economist that discusses that.
Second, what’s the incentive for rich people to keep making money? Why didn’t Bill Gates quit his job much earlier?
To illustrate his indifference toward income inequality, buddy used Gates as an example. He said that if Gates made more money, the income gap widens and nothing’s wrong.
He must have thought we were stupid. That shit made absolutely no sense. Think of the law of diminishing marginal utility, which basically says that the more you have of something, then the less benefit you get from an additional unit of it. If you need an example to get that, imagine how much good a fifth car would do you compared to how much good a car would do you if you only had the subway.
But it just got to be too much, so I had to raise my hand. I was a bit apprehensive about this because, well, I hadn’t been listening that much. I don’t want to ask a question that’s already been answered and call myself out for not listening. That’s not the heat.
But I asked him how he could reconcile an indifference between income inequality and the idea of concentrated benefits and diffused costs. After all, income inequality is why rich people have the money to put toward their causes. And even though he used the AARP as his example of an interest group that could unfairly sway policy, the real damaging stuff comes from big money.
Further, it becomes a circular system. Rich people have the money, therefore they can sway policy to make more money, therefore they can sway more policy, etc.
So he tried to pass that same Bill Gates stuff on me. I then asked him to look to South America for examples of how problematic income inequality can be and the political unrest it causes (and all the World Bank and IMF money that’s had to go there).
He then said the problem was that Latin American countries didn’t have competitive capitalism, so the income inequality was unnatural and contrived.
So I asked him what he would say about the fact that the black/white wage ratio is the same now as it was in 1890. Not 1980. 1890. See William A. Darity and Samuel Myers’ Persistent Disparity for more on that.
You know what followed–bullshit. First, he mentioned that 1890 was the beginning of Jim Crow, so that was an inaccurate snapshot. Dude, it was just twenty-five years after slavery. And just 13 years after Reconstruction, which cripped the Southern economy. You know about the South. It’s where most black people lived then. That would affect them, I’d think.
then came the predictable–the problem is that while lots of black people do good things, we’ve got this black underclass bringing things down. This means Mr. Boaz is qualified to star in his own family sitcom!
But it also showed what I should have known was underneath it all–the same ol, same ol. I mean, it’s not like there’s a white underclass or anything, right? There aren’t white people drinking Crazy Horse in the trailer park, are there?
Nope, it’s just a bunch of niggaz drinking King Cobra in the ghetto. Those are all the poor people in this country.
Whatever.
All in all, it was a respectful exchange, and I enjoyed it. Not just because I got to shut him down, but because I did feel like he was saying quasi-intelligent things. They were just meant to be embraced by silly sheep. Guess I can’t blame him for thinking I was one of those people.
Just turned out he was wrong.
Afterwards, I tried to talk to him and tell him thank you for answering my admittedly long questions. He was talking to someone else and then started walking out the room, which mean walking past me. I wasn’t too keen on how close he walked past me without saying excuse me.
Then I saw him in the hallway and asked if we could swap cards. Without speaking, he pulled a card out of his wallet and placed mine in his billfold. I said thank you.
He turned his back.
Sounds like victory for me. Disrespect is the last resort for the defeated. Sad it had to end like that, though.
As someone that loves discourse, it’s disappointing when people behave like that. But at the same time, it feels pretty good.
June 19, 2006
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