Tuesday, July 28, 2020

How to Care about the Disadvantaged

You may be in the presence of mere virtue-signalers if they:
  • wring their hands about police brutality without ever calling for repeal of all victimless-crime laws, which create a poisonous dynamic between police and public precisely because the conduct being policed is consensual for each party to the illegal transactions;
  • bemoan the lack of growing black-family wealth without calling for the elimination of Social Security, which imposes a regressive tax to confiscate savings that would otherwise be heritable by the savers' children;
  • lament the inadequate economic mobility of people in minority communities without condemning occupational licensing, which prohibitively raises the cost of entry into many kinds of work;
  • condemn the inadequate economic mobility of people in minority communities without opposing zoning and other land-use controls, which inflate the price of housing in areas with superior economic opportunities;
  • decry the sad state of education for minority children without demanding parental choice in an entrepreneurial free market in schools;
  • denounce minority unemployment without acknowledging that the legislated minimum wage kills jobs for people with few skills and makes the surviving jobs more onerous than before.

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