Towards a Libertarian Theory of Anti-Racism
2020-12-06 · Guest: Michael Tanner (Cato Institute Senior Fellow) · 52:10
Libertarian perspective on systemic racism and policy
Bob Zadek and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute discuss the libertarian perspective on systemic racism. They explore how government policies like zoning, minimum wage, and occupational licensing create disparate outcomes for minorities, arguing for the removal of these regulatory barriers rather than top-down social engineering.
Topics: Systemic Racism, Libertarianism, Minimum Wage, Occupational Licensing, Education Reform, Criminal Justice, Zoning Laws
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Michael Tanner
Defining Systemic Racism [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are, of course, live as we always are.
This show is in some ways a public service. I would like to spend the hour preparing my friends and listeners this morning for a phrase you will be hearing ad nauseam, perhaps, for the next four years. It was a dominant phrase in the election. Both sides—well, more so the progressives—used it a lot without any really common understanding of what this phrase means. The phrase is “systemic racism.”
Is there racism in America? If so, what institutions are racist? And if there is racism in America, is it systemic? And by the way, what does “systemic” even mean? And what does “racist” even mean? These words are used all the time in public discourse without any common understanding of its meaning.
To help us understand this, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Michael Tanner. Michael is a Cato Institute senior fellow who works extensively on issues of public policy, welfare, Social Security, healthcare, and poverty. Michael, several months ago, wrote a book which we will be discussing a bit towards the end of the show. Michael has joined us previously to discuss his book. Elements of the information gleaned from his book will be relevant to this morning’s conversation. But we must understand systemic racism so we don’t allow those in public office, or those who aspire to be in public office, to pull the wool over our eyes and run on a platform somehow related to systemic racism without taking the trouble to explain to us what in God’s name they are talking about. Michael, welcome to the show this morning.
Michael Tanner: Well, thank you. Of course, it’s always a pleasure to be with you.
Bob Zadek: Thank you kindly. And what our friends out there will learn is that when we libertarians discuss phrases such as racism, we have perhaps a far less emotional, more rational, and more careful use of the terms. Because after all, as I am fond of saying in my professional life, words do matter. So, first, the phrase: systemic racism. I can’t ask you what others mean when they use the phrase—they will have to do that. But when you hear the phrase and you want to help somebody understand the objective meaning of systemic racism, what people should be addressing when they use the phrase, what does the phrase “systemic racism” mean? And if you will, Michael, answer it one word at a time: racism, and then systemic.
Michael Tanner: Well, I think it’s commonly misunderstood, and it really gets divisive because people hear the term “systemic racism” and they think that that means that therefore the system and the country are full of racists and that they are personally being accused of racism, of having ill will towards people of color. And that’s sort of almost the opposite of what systemic racism actually means.
It’s not—I mean, most people when they go out there are not racist. Their friends and family are not racist. They sort of know that racists exist; they see them on TV, the far right marching in Charlottesville or David Duke doing an interview or something. But by and large, they recognize that those people are on the fringes of society, not really accepted in polite society. So they say, “Look, there’s not a lot of racism in my life. I don’t see it. And therefore, to say that I’m part of a system of racism is wrong.”
But the reality of what systemic racism is talking about is not racism of intent. It’s not about people going out and trying to do harm to people of color. What it is, is that there’s things that are baked into the system because of our history. And that history developed certain stereotypes, certain laws, certain behavior. And that those laws, system, and behavior, and the legacy from the history of those behaviors, means that the playing field today is not level. It is simply an acknowledgment that you can’t have, say, a ten-lap race, and for the first nine laps, you weigh down one of the racers with chains and weights, and then the last lap you take them off and you say, “Hey, from here on out, it’s even.” That’s just not the way the situation is today.
Intent v. Result in Policy [02:42]
Bob Zadek: So therefore, systemic racism really can be addressed—you can break it down a bit and examine whether a policy, whether behavior, has the intention of harming one race v. another, or whether it has the result of doing so, even though that’s not the intent. Isn’t that an important distinction to make: the result v. the intent? And is one more benign than the other, or not?
Michael Tanner: Sure. Well, I think obviously having the intent to harm somebody is more evil than doing it by accident. I think we acknowledge that in the law; we acknowledge that in a lot of ways, that intent does matter. But if you’re on the receiving end of it, it doesn’t really matter whether that car ran over you by accident or whether somebody aimed at you. You still get hit by the car. So from the point of view of people of color, I think they see the results as the key here. But I do think we need to take into account the fact that people don’t intend, by and large, to be racist.
Bob Zadek: And an example—an obvious example, almost too obvious to spend time on, I’ll just mention it without belaboring it—is, of course, the Jim Crow laws in the South. They had the intent of being racist. “No coloreds here,” “whites only drinking fountains.” Obviously, obviously, those had no intent other than to denigrate blacks and therefore elevate by comparison whites. So there’s an example of intentional racist laws.
But many of the racist laws on the books—and this is where libertarian understanding really shines—many laws on the books seem to have a non-racist purpose, some other social purpose, but they are in practice racist. And you mentioned many of them in the book. Just so the audience can understand, give us one stellar example of a law which is not obviously intended to punish one race and elevate another, but has that effect.
Michael Tanner: Sure. Take zoning laws, for example. Now, you can go back—if you want to go back into the 1950s, for example, housing was explicitly segregated. Levittown, the famous first suburban community—that had explicit in the deed that no person of color could actually live in that community. And we still see that many communities that were created in California and elsewhere in which that was the practice; they were explicitly segregated.
Now, those laws against blacks living in suburban communities have long since been thrown out. We have the Fair Housing Act; we have other laws where we’ve basically taken those covenants and made them unenforceable where they still exist. But now we have zoning laws which—people got in with government help, a government which was explicitly blocking African Americans from loan programs. They bought those houses. Their kids and grandkids now live in those houses, which property values have gone up because of the passage of time and because of the type of zoning that’s gone on, that they’re limited. And now African Americans simply can’t afford to move into those suburbs. So that we still have huge racial segregation in housing; it’s just no longer done because of an explicitly racial motive. It’s a neutral law in terms of zoning, but it still has the same impact of perpetuating the segregation in housing that used to go on.
The Question of Reparations [04:22]
Bob Zadek: So that makes the problem of discussing systemic racism far more difficult, because here we have laws which were clearly racist when enacted. So the laws get repealed, but there is a residual result, so that blacks are measurably as a group—you can’t identify obviously a specific black who was harmed; it’s too hard, it’s impossible—but you can make an accurate economic conclusion that as a class, blacks were harmed by those laws, and that harm visits upon the grandchildren of the blacks actually harmed today.
So that becomes—we don’t have systemic racism today in housing, but we do have the adverse results of it. So there it’s a lot murkier because today, while we accept that government was racist in enacting those laws, what do we do about it now after we acknowledge that economically, it is a fact that blacks as a race were harmed by laws generations ago? What do we do about it today, if anything?
Michael Tanner: Well, I think what we have to do is just start by acknowledging the fact that the playing field is not level and not equal. And I think a lot of libertarians in particular, and conservatives and moderates, are reluctant to do so because they think that as soon as you acknowledge that the playing field is not level, it means you have to endorse some sort of big government program and all that goes with it—a lot of social welfare spending and a lot of new bureaucracy and all of that.
But that’s not at all the case. In many cases, you can simply undo the policies that are holding up people of color from advancing, get those policies out of the way, reduce the actual impact of government, and then you’re going a long way towards rectifying the problem. It is not necessarily an invitation to say that we need bigger government; it’s simply a recognition that the playing field is not level today.
Bob Zadek: Now, of course, many in the audience will observe that I was inching towards—I seemed to be inching towards, but I of course am not—but inching towards, it sounds like Bob is talking about reparations. That is, we did it with the Japanese internment in 1943 when, to his shame, President Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans, and to their collective shame, the Supreme Court found that to be constitutional. Shame on them, shame on him forever. But am I talking about, Michael, reparations, just like we did with the Japanese? And of course, there are profound differences. We knew the specific Japanese people who were interned, and they were alive, so it was easy to give them reparations. But you are not at all suggesting, Michael—and clearly you didn’t say so—but let’s give some discussion, minor discussion, to the issue lurking around in the background of reparations, and where a discussion of reparations fits into historical systemic racism, but not current systemic racism.
Michael Tanner: Yeah, I think you need to make a distinction here between private reparations and public reparations—reparations out of the public purse. I think those are much more problematic. In terms of private reparations, you can identify to some degree people who benefited from slavery—certain banks, certain insurance companies that started by selling insurance on enslaved property, universities like Georgetown and Harvard whose legacies were largely built—their endowments were built on the sale of slaves and so on. And they can take steps to rectify that by giving scholarships to descendants of some of the slaves that they know that they bought and sold and things like that. So the private reparations is one thing.
In terms of public reparations, you get into a much harder question of who’s entitled, how do you prove that somebody’s descended from slaves—there’s very poor record-keeping—what about people who immigrated to this country post-slavery but then had to go through Jim Crow? What about people who—who has to pay? Do people pay whose forefathers were not involved in slavery? What about those who just immigrated recently? What about people who are descended on both sides because of such widespread rape during slavery—many African Americans have white ancestors—are they going to pay themselves? So I think on a practical basis, you have to rule out the idea of reparations. But there is a moral debt that we sort of owe to African Americans for 400 years of mistreatment, and that’s something we should keep in mind.
Bob Zadek: Of course, keeping it in mind sort of in a minor way says, “Okay, that’s not compelling immediate legislation.” That’s what you’re really saying—that’s an appropriate topic for continued conversation. It’s not a call to action, as I hear you say it.
Michael Tanner: Yeah, it’s not something you solve by legislation. A moral debt is something that we just have to remember that as a society—I mean, it was only recently that we got around to actually issuing an apology for slavery. So I do think there’s a lot we can do in that regard of recognizing the problem, of memorializing the problem, of understanding that there’s still continued results of the problem. That that’s still out there, but it does not call for something for government to do.
Systemic Racism in Education [06:15]
Bob Zadek: The progressives primarily—others of course, but progressives primarily—complain that if you hear the more extreme fringes of their rhetoric, they are claiming that America is rife with systemic racism. It abounds. Now, I of course rail in protest; of course we are not clearly widely systemic racism. But there are examples of laws today on the books today—not history going back to the Eisenhower years, but today there are laws on the books that are, from their effect—and you have talked about many of them in your book—today, there are laws today that are today systemically, that is governmentally imposed, racist in terms of their effect.
You mentioned one which was historical: zoning laws. But you have mentioned many in your book where there are laws today that appear to be non-racist, but man, are they really racist in their effect. Economic laws. So give us one or two examples of that, if you will, just so we understand that while we will look around and we will say, “I haven’t heard anybody saying anything racist, I don’t see any racism, I don’t experience racism,” but we have to remind our listeners that yes, there are laws that have an inherent bias and harm, in this case, blacks. Give us one or two economic examples of that, if you will.
Michael Tanner: Well, let’s talk about education, for example. The fact that in most places it is illegal to go to a school outside the district you’re assigned to, which is based on where you live. If we go back again to the fact that our housing is highly segregated in this country, the fact that African Americans have historically been ghettoized, pushed into low-income neighborhoods where housing values are much lower, where often there’s environmental problems—they build African American neighborhoods on top of brownfields and all the problems that go with that sort of environmental problem—you have much lower property values, and schools are funded primarily, in many places outside of California at least, on the basis of property taxes. So schools in African American neighborhoods are inherently less well-funded.
And then we make it illegal—in fact, in some places it’s a crime, it’s a felony in New Jersey, for example—to send your child to a school outside of the district in which they live. That sort of thing—I mean, it’s ostensibly racially neutral, but it clearly disadvantages African American children and condemns them to a much worse education than white children.
The Racist History of Minimum Wage [08:05]
Bob Zadek: And what about minimum wage laws? Aren’t they inherently racist in their effect—not in their words of the statute, but in their effect? Aren’t they a perfect example of governmental systemic racism, although proponents of minimum wage laws would vehemently react that of course we are not racist, because it’s the same group that is complaining about systemic racism? But isn’t that same group inherently systemically racist in their increased enthusiasm for higher and higher minimum wage laws? Explain how that works.
Michael Tanner: Well, sure. We should recognize the fact that minimum wage laws, first of all, were historically—were in many cases intended to block African American participation in many labor fields. If you go back to the people who sponsored this legislation, in many cases they were explicit about the fact that they were trying—they were worried about African American laborers undercutting white wages, many ways the same way that people now worry about immigrants undercutting wages. And they wanted to prevent African Americans from getting into these labor fields. So they created occupational licensing laws, they created union shops where African Americans couldn’t belong to the union, they created minimum wage laws that simply priced out a lot of African Americans from the labor market.
Now, today, advocates of minimum wage certainly are not racist. Nobody’s out there saying, “I’m trying to keep African Americans out of the labor force.” But it still has the same impact of doing so, particularly for young African American men, particularly those who don’t have a lot of attachment to the labor force or to a big skill set. It blocks entry-level into the labor market, and that’s a big problem in the African American community.
Bob Zadek: And it’s a problem because minimum wage laws—and by the way, to support—here’s an interesting exercise for you folks while you are locked at home and find yourselves dying of boredom as you cannot leave your house. But here’s something which you can do. It’s kind of—it’s fascinating and it’s easily done. In my preparing for shows on minimum wage laws, I found it is available on the web, pretty easily obtainable. There was a hearing, I believe in 1948, at the—in the Senate, US Senate Labor Committee. And in this hearing, for which there is a record, an oral record, an audio you can listen to, there was a discussion among JFK when he was a senator—I believe it was ‘48, but I’m not positive of that—JFK and Jacob Javits, who was a Republican, but a very progressive Republican at a time when there were such things.
And they were discussing a federal increase in the minimum wage, and JFK insisted the minimum wage be increased because his constituents—the Irish in Massachusetts in general and Boston specifically—his constituents were complaining that blacks were taking their jobs. And he said, “I need an increase in the minimum wage laws to protect the white people’s job.” That was JFK, kind of a liberal icon in sorts, although he probably would be a Republican today if he was running for office—another issue.
So minimum wage laws clearly had the subliminal or the purpose buried in the statute of preventing blacks who were willing to work for less because they needed the money more and had less skills and knew they weren’t worth so much—blacks were willing to work for less, undercutting the whites who were not willing to work for less. And the best way to get rid of that competition is to keep the minimum wage laws high. Because the theory was, if an employer had to pay $3 an hour, then he might as well pay a white person rather than pay a black person and overpay, because the black person then was only worth $2.50. So there’s a perfect example of a systemically racist statute on the books today, which ought to be complained about by those people who complain about systemic racism, but of course they don’t.
Standardized Testing and Opportunity [09:17]
Bob Zadek: Now, Michael, it gets—the conversation gets even more difficult when you look at college admissions. And I like to use this as a discussion point between you and I because it raises so many interesting issues about systemic racism. If we were to examine the SAT, which is a test designed to help colleges figure out who among their applicants are going to make it through four years of college—it’s a tool. And the SAT is a test.
Now, Michael, first question to you—the obvious one, to build your confidence—is, if you were to examine white v. non-white—well, I should say white v. black performance in the SATs, simply as a statistic, I’m going to ask you the easy question but then a follow-up: which group does better as a race, whites or blacks?
Michael Tanner: Oh, well, there’s no doubt that whites in general outscore African Americans on the SAT and the ACT and other similar standardized tests.
Bob Zadek: Does that mean that SAT itself is inherently racist? Is the test itself racist? After all, the result is blacks can’t compete, they don’t get admitted into college as much as whites do statistically because of the SAT. Does that mean the SAT is itself racist, or is the concept of systemic racism a bit more complicated than that?
Michael Tanner: Well, it’s definitely more complicated than that. The idea of the SAT itself, for example, is not racist. The SAT questions are much better than they used to be. There were certainly problematic things in the sense that the type of questions they ask on literature or the type of analogies they make tend to be things that are essentially middle-class white educational things that are taught in their schools, as opposed to things that African Americans might be more apt to learn. But we’ve done a lot of stuff to change that. We’ve put more Maya Angelou in there as well as Shakespeare, for example. So there’s been changes that have made it a more inclusive test.
The bigger problem, though, than the language on the test is the fact that African Americans, as we mentioned earlier, are ghettoized into poor schools that have fewer resources, that don’t have the ability to prep for the SAT, that aren’t able to go out and find the people who will take these extra courses on how do you take an SAT test. They are in many ways disadvantaged before they ever go into the room to take the test. Not that the test itself is the problem.
Bob Zadek: So therefore, it gets more complicated, my friends. It gets a lot more complicated. Because do you adjust the SAT, which is a tool used by college admission officers to force more blacks into higher education, even though if the test is competently prepared, it means less competent college students will be admitted into college? Or is that not an example of systemic racism, but it merely shows that other areas of society created the problem?
And that’s what makes a discussion of systemic racism so difficult. Because it’s too easy—it’s a cop-out to say, “Let’s change the SAT. Let’s have affirmative action, for example, in a simply statistical sense. Let’s just allow more blacks into college, and that will even everything up because once you go to college, you have an advantage in the labor market.” But that doesn’t fix the problem; it just kicks the can down the road. So now the problem may be fostered upon society or upon employers who cannot sort out who is a good employee and who is not—assuming college admissions are itself a good example of that, which they’re not, but I’m assuming that.
So therefore, what Michael proposes, and Michael’s book gives us so many examples of it: we have to drill down and we have to fix at the individual level the root cause of the problem and do the hard work of fixing areas like school choice, areas like minimum wage, and there are many, many others, as Michael explains in his book, that will fix the core problem so that then, over time, the SATs and other objective tests will not have a disproportionately negative effect. And is that really the issue, Michael—that systemic racism simply reflects the result of these historic costs, and we have to fix the root problems, not just fix on the surface, like what California has done with statistically acceptable board representation of women and minorities, which just fix the surface problem but don’t fix the core problem?
Michael Tanner: Yeah, and I think that’s a very good way to understand it. I think both sides in these debates often oversimplify and kind of miss this point. Simply throwing out the SAT or mandating that a minimum number of African Americans go to your college or whatever does not make African Americans more prepared for university life and university classwork. And we do know that there have been problems with the number graduating and so on as a percentage of admissions.
On the other hand, I think that far too many people on the other side of this simply say, “Well, if they don’t do as well on the SAT, that’s their problem. That’s somehow reflective of African Americans or simply not working hard enough, not trying hard enough to get into college.” And I think that that’s wrong too, because you do have to go back and look at the core problem of how society has underserved the educational needs of African Americans historically and continuing on to today. So you do have to go back and sort of get to the bottom of the problem and work from the bottom up. Working from the top down may make us feel good because it’s symbolic and it makes us all feel warm and fuzzy, but it’s not going to over the long term fix the problem.
Criminal Justice and Police Reform [11:12]
Bob Zadek: Now, there’s been a lot, obviously—I’m going to state the obvious with apologies—there’s been a lot in the news in the past six months about police—white police behaving violently v. black suspects and alleged perpetrators of crime. George Floyd and the like. We have had that throughout 2020. Is that—and of course, immediately it has been shown to be yet more objective proof of “systemic racism”?
Now, you and I both know, but help our audience know, how that is profoundly not an example of systemic racism. And if systemic racism does exist in police behavior—which it probably does not—but if it does exist, how bad an example of it that is when we look at the George Floyd-type events?
Michael Tanner: Well, I think there’s very little doubt, if you look at study after study at every level of the criminal justice system—from the type of things that we make illegal in terms of the war on drugs and the war on sex work and other victimless crimes and so on, many of them were explicitly started off for racial reasons. Go back and watch Reefer Madness, the 1940s film on how terrible marijuana was that led to a lot of marijuana laws—and what it does is it makes white college girls smoke pot and then they run out and dance with black men. And that was one of the terrible things that marijuana might do to people.
So you can go back and look at where a lot of these things originated in terms of the laws themselves. Then look at everything from the traffic stops to sentencing to parole, and at every level, African Americans fare worse in the criminal justice system. That does not mean that individual police officers are racist. Very few police officers go out today and say, “Gee, I hate African Americans. I really want to beat up an African American today.”
But what you have is the way police training works, the way you have in terms of stereotypes about the “black thug,” the way we’ve seen things portrayed in Hollywood and TV over the years that leaves an impression in people’s minds, it leads police reacting in certain ways to young African American men that they would not react to in my neighborhood with white middle-class older people. So you distinguish in conversations and in your writing individual acts that may be racist v. systemic.
And that’s an important distinction. And even if a police officer herself was racist, that’s an indication only that one human being, one ignorant human being, was racist. But you can’t jump from that to systemic racism, and then jump from that to “defund the police,” and jump from that to “don’t arrest people who commit crimes if they’re black,” or jump from that to—as Oregon has done—saying for minor acts of shoplifting and the like, because these people are poor and desperate, let’s not criminalize it at all and let’s say they can shoplift if they want. Let’s not jump to these global solutions to individual acts. So speak about that a little more, Michael, if you would, about individual acts and this absurd leap to systemic.
Michael Tanner: Well, I think you have to look at both sides of this. In terms of the individual act, you can’t generalize from an individual act to the behavior of all police. For example, if you have a racist cop, they should be thrown off the force. And I will say that we have too many—the police unions have far too much power; they block reforms, they block those types of officers from being thrown off the force. Civilian review boards are generally impotent and so on, so we don’t take the action against those racist police officers that we should. That said, they are individually racist police officers; it does not tar the rest of the force.
That said, we also have to take a look at the larger systemic issues, which are things like what is illegal, how do judges deal with African American defendants, what do parole boards take into account, how do we assess bail? Those things we do need to look at on a larger systemic front, but they’re different from simply saying that therefore police officers are all racists. We should try to avoid those types of generalizations as we recognize that for African Americans on the street, the criminal justice system is not a level playing field.
A Libertarian Path Forward [13:49]
Bob Zadek: And when you point out the police unions and the ineffective civilian police review boards, that’s an important point to make because what happens there is, assuming we have racist behavior by a single policeman in a single or several acts—assuming we start with that premise: “Yes, this was motivated by racism, that is clear”—well, that becomes solely an individual act until the system, as you have pointed out, protects that policeman.
Now the system, in protecting the police officer, now becomes appropriately subject to the accusation of systemic racism, because now the system protects the racist act. So that’s where the systemic racism comes in, but not from the act by the policeman in, for example, the Chauvin case in Minnesota. So the system makes itself racist when it doesn’t react appropriately to punish and discourage individual acts of racism. Then it’s appropriate to indict the system, but don’t indict individual police officers.
And we should point out more than once in this show that the most effective, in my opinion, racist organization is not a business, it’s not a private club—it is government itself. Most of the examples of heinous racism were governments: states, municipalities, and yes, the federal government as well. So it is governmental action, not individual action, that is the primary source of the problem. And that ought to be easier to fix once we understand, as Michael has pointed out with zoning and minimum wage laws and the like, that here is the problem: the laws themselves in their effect. That’s kind of easy to affect, to change—you just repeal the laws.
Now, Michael, you have mentioned movies, and that—you have taught me, as I follow your writing, how really interesting the effect of the entertainment industry has been in fostering racism. And you mentioned it—you’ve explained to me, but please explain to the audience how, by the movies and indeed by training films, policemen—because we’re talking about policemen right now—are almost embedded, if they didn’t come into the training program with racist tendencies, it gets embedded in them by the training and by mass media. So tell us the effect of media, because media doesn’t only instill negative feelings about blacks wearing hoodies, which I hope you’ll explain, but also real estate developers, attorneys, politicians. The media in their stereotypical portrayal of them, highly unrealistic, trains society to repel against these actors, such as blacks wearing hoodies on dark streets. So help us understand how the movies have made us individually, and perhaps collectively, more racist.
Michael Tanner: Sure. I mean, in a sense, they’ve made a lot of improvements over the years, and we see them actively trying in Hollywood now to provide minority role models and people in non-traditional roles and so on, and that’s all steps in the right direction. But you go back—it’s not that far, certainly in my lifetime—I watched a lot of TV, I liked cop shows all the time. And inevitably, if you wanted to show that somebody was going to be a criminal, it was an African American young black man, you know, he’d wear a leather jacket or a hoodie or something like that.
And you watch enough of that and you begin to absorb those stereotypes. And people just sort of naturally begin to associate that, even for a fraction of a second. Even if it doesn’t linger with you, you have that initial flash in your head that that’s what a criminal looks like. Now, if you’re a police officer and you’re in a traffic stop and you’re worried for your life because these things potentially can go wrong, and you have a gun in your hand, and in that flash of a second you think, “Oh my God, this is probably a criminal because he’s a young black man wearing a hoodie,” you’re that much more likely to pull that trigger than if it was a white kid in a suit who got out of a car.
Bob Zadek: So therefore, these police officers to some degree are victims of the training and of what the media historically has done. It was trained into them to some degree. And of course, if their occupation was such that they had the benefit of quiet reflection on their behavior, they could adjust it. But as you pointed out in your example of a second ago, they have to react too fast. Therefore, they’re left to their instincts, and the instincts are the result of what they’ve been trained. So to some degree, when you rail against policemen who behave in what appears to be a racist way, you have to say, “Why are they racist, and has government, has society contributed to that? Are we collectively at fault?” Which is difficult because it’s a lot easier to say, discussing a police officer, “String them up, fire them, put them in jail.” That’s kind of easy and in a way satisfying. It’s more difficult to say, “Let’s drill down and let’s cause an examination of the training program.” That’s blocking and tackling and hard work and takes a long time. It’s a lot more satisfying to just say, “Throw them in jail and throw away the key.” So as a society, we kind of don’t have the time to drill down and really figure out the source of what appears to be, but is not, systemic racism.
Michael Tanner: Yeah, I mean, I do think that we often go for the headline-grabbing easy answer and to accuse individuals rather than to look at what I think is part of this larger system problem. As libertarians, we understand the consequences of bad laws, and we tend to react to understand that you’ve got to undo the bad laws and the bad policies and fix the fallout from those bad policies. When it comes to other things, somehow when it comes to race, we tend to get our hackles up and just be unwilling to look at race, or how we treat women for that matter, and apply the same standards that say that we need to actively deal with the consequences of these past actions.
Occupational Licensing Barriers [15:41]
Bob Zadek: So as libertarians, Michael, and borrowing from what you have learned in writing your book—and we’ll tell our friends out there in a moment the title of your book and how they can find it—but in your book on poverty and on working our way out of poverty, an impossible task, of course, but you have wonderful solutions. What are the libertarian suggestions as to how best to reduce what appears to be racism in America? What is the manual that libertarians would present to society about how to go about fixing whatever appears to be, but is not, systemic racism?
Michael Tanner: Well, I think that first of all, on the private side, we should cheer on private action. And libertarians have traditionally said that private actors can fix problems without government involvement. So when private businesses or private universities or private schools or Hollywood or whatever take action to fix these problems of racism historically, we should be cheering those on as that’s exactly the type of action that we want to see taken. We want to see private actors not relying on government to do things that are out there.
And then second, we should look at those government policies that, whether they were racist to begin with or whether they simply have a racial disparate impact today that disadvantage people of color, we should be striking down actively those policies. And we should put as much emphasis on policies that disadvantage minorities and women and the LGBTQ community and so on as we do policies that disadvantage businesses or wealthy people. There’s too many libertarians, I think, that are willing to say, “Oh, it’s okay to lock people up for marijuana as long as we lower the marginal tax rate by 1%.” Or, “We can have underperforming minority schools, but we really need to worry about the regulation of this particular business.” Look, individual liberty is as important as any other type of liberty, and we should be championing it across the board.
Bob Zadek: Now, we can take a minute or two, Michael, in explaining how we can fix the problem in a way that is free to society. You mentioned in your book when we discussed it the licensing laws, occupational licensing, which is the—in my opinion, besides minimum wage laws, probably one of the best examples of how systemic racism does exist in society, but it’s hidden. Licensing laws seem on their surface to make sense—“Hey, let’s make sure people are competent to offer their services”—wrong goal, wrong solution. And speak to that if you will—we have a minute or so left—including the “good moral character” issue that you have written about so frequently.
Michael Tanner: Yeah, you look at occupational licensing laws, and they often make very little sense in terms of protecting health and safety. I mean, we think, “Oh well, you want your doctor to have a medical license.” Okay, that’s fine, we can argue about that later. But when you have things, for example, it takes longer to become a beautician than it does to become an EMT, you have to wonder what the logic behind that is except for a very strong beautician lobby in Sacramento.
Things like that don’t make a great deal of sense. And then in many cases, you go back historically and you look at the purpose of these laws, and you look at things like, in addition to being able to pass all the tests and prove that you know all the chemicals and all this sort of stuff and have gone through all the coursework, you have to have a, as you said, quote, “good moral character,” which sort of allows the board to kick out anybody they didn’t want. Those things were never applied in a race-neutral way, and they still today block entry-level into business, entry-level into the labor force. And of course, that tends to hurt people who have higher levels of unemployment. And in the wake of COVID, which is going to disrupt a lot of low-income, low-skilled jobs, we certainly should be re-examining that.
Bob Zadek: Now, another example which I read about just recently, although it’s anecdotal, but I’m sure it’s representative of a lot more examples, is I read a story about a prisoner in a state prison who was trying to turn his life around and acquire the skill of hair cutting. He was a barber in the prison, and he worked in the prison barbershop, and he was great at it. And he got released from prison and he set about, “Okay, I’ve learned how to do this craft, and it’s valuable, and I can sell my services, and I’m going to get to be a barber.”
But he applied for a barber’s license—why anybody needs a license to be protected so society can be protected against having a bad crew cut—but he applied for a license as a barber and was denied it because of “good moral character” because he was convicted of a felony. And there’s a perfect example of how licensing laws are racist, are systemically racist. So the problem exists, but focus on the right problem.
Now, Michael, tell us about your book, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor, because it’s relevant to this conversation. We have about a minute, Michael.
Michael Tanner: Yeah, essentially The Inclusive Economy looks at the problems of poverty in this country and why people are poor. We basically go right back to the beginning and say, “Look, you can’t fix the disease until you diagnose what the underlying illness is. You’re not just going to pop pills out to somebody who’s sick without knowing what’s ailing them.” So I go back and ask the basic question: why are people poor in this country?
And yes, some of it is individual behavior and individual choices and the so-called culture of poverty and all of that. But some of it is also structural issues such as racism and gender discrimination and economic dislocation that comes from various reasons. And too often, the culprit when you drill down on both sides of that equation, both in terms of individual incentives and in terms of larger structural issues, the culprit ends up being the government. And that if we really want to create the type of economy—one of fact, one of Joe Biden’s advisors the other day said he wanted a more inclusive economy—if we really want that, it means we have to get government out of the way, have government stop doing things that keep people in poverty or make it harder to get out of poverty.
Bob Zadek: Michael, do we want to follow Michael? It’s Michael Tanner at @MTannerCato. Follow him on Twitter, follow his writings at the Cato Institute. Michael, thank you so much. This hour went by painfully fast. Thanks a lot for all of your wisdom and insights into this important topic so our friends can follow the political discussion for the next four years. Thank you so much to Michael, and thank you to my friends out there. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a good balance of the weekend.