Reginald Kaigler — NeoCons Dominate 2016 Race! Obamacare Collapsing! UnitedHealth May Exit Exchange!

My commentary on the latest controversies of the Trump campaign, how Clinton and most of the GOP are pushing for the agenda and why Obamacare is failing.

Jonathan Blanks — Reflecting on the 150th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment

via Cato Institute

On this day 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, thus officially ending chattel slavery in the United States. America’s original sin—its birth in freedom based on human slavery—was no longer sanctioned by American law.

To get to this historical moment, the United States wrestled with its heinous contradiction in its homes, cotton fields, courtrooms, public streets, legislature...s, Bleeding Kansas and, ultimately, the many battlefields of the Civil War. The racism that supported slavery was so ingrained in our national character and economy that it cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives.

Of course, America’s racial wounds were not healed with Abolition. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments went further to ensure racial equality (for men) before the law—on paper, anyway. Years of Jim Crow and state-tolerated white terrorism after the end of Reconstruction showed America’s laws and purported ideals could still be subverted by the enduring legacy of racism throughout the country.

Today, black Americans are far freer than ever, but still face unequal treatment by law enforcement. Certain police practices are almost exclusively deployed in black neighborhoods—the neighborhoods themselves remnants of de jure segregation—reifying not-yet-equal status for too many black Americans. And the aggressive application of our criminal laws has led to mass incarceration, which disproportionally imprisons African Americans across the country.

Read the full article HERE.

Randall Kennedy: Sellout

Author Randall Kennedy grapples with a stigma of our racial discourse that is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in black America: "selling out," or racial betrayal. The new book, which comes in the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, shows how usage of the word "sellout" bedevils blacks and whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.

  

Fabrice L. Lohadie — To Millennials’ Supporters of Bernie Sanders: Curb your enthusiasm

via Afro-Libertarian.com


As a fellow millennial, however, I don’t look at Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign with rose-tinted glasses. His policies have been tried elsewhere, and they failed. To tackle his country’s dismal youth unemployment rate, Francois Hollande, for example, started a youth job initiative to subsidize employers in order to hire and train young people between 18-25. The program has not relieved France’s youth jobless rate, however. When Hollande started this $3.7 billion (3.5 Billion Euro) initiative to provide up to 75% of young workers’ salaries, France’s youth unemployment rate was around 25%. Two years later, things have not changed much, as illustrated below.

Instead of tackling the root cause of the problem, Bernie Sanders’s proposals will simply paper over it. For instance, youth unemployment rate in Urban America is quite high due to regulations such as minimum wage laws and occupational licensing, which discourage employers from hiring young people on a market rate basis, and keeps many from gainful employment. Therefore, his youth job initiative to subsidize up to a million jobs for disadvantaged youth will fall short, à la française. So, it is imperative for millennials and others to ask critical questions, and not just abide by herd mentality.

Even though millennials’ attachment to Bernie Sanders baffles me, I empathize with them. Many have graduated college with large debts, face under-employement, unable to rent or own a house like their parents before them, etc..In addition, they have been indoctrinated by society and the media that praise government intervention in the economy. It is difficult not to fall into this trap. Even many free market thinkers also fell for this vision.

Read the full article HERE.

Dr. CHE Sadaphal — On the Minimum Wage

The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour. President Obama, in his 2014 State of the Union address, called for this wage to be increased to $10.10 per hour. The rationale is that increasing the minimum wage will benefit workers, lift people out of poverty, boost the economy through increased spending, and correct the diminishing value of the current minimum wage by adjusting for inflation. On a federal level, efforts to raise the minimum wage have stalled, but such efforts have progressed in many states (e.g., Vermont at $10.50 an hour by 2018 and Connecticut at $10.10 an hour by 2017) and municipalities (e.g., Seattle at $15 an hour rolled in over time and Los Angeles at $15 an hour by 2020). In some instances, local groups have taken even bolder steps. The Micah Institute, for example, launched the Real Living Wage NYC Campaign this month that seeks to secure $20 per hour for all New York City workers. This figure is not arbitrary, but is the wage required to meet basic needs without government subsidies in Manhattan. MIT has calculated that a genuine “living wage” for an individual living in New York City is $14.30 per hour.

A wide range of opinions exists on tinkering with the minimum wage, as does a lack of consensus about the overall effects of an increase in the figure. Moreover, politics, as usual, tends to taint the facts with agenda-serving biases, so it is very difficult to obtain an objective analysis on whether raising the minimum wage is in fact helpful or harmful.

The point that I hope to convey is that any way you go, someone is going to lose something in the minimum wage fight—it’s just a matter of what they loose and how much. What one chooses to do thus becomes a matter of what variable holds the most weight in their economic equation: profit, workers, or ethics.

On the one hand, full-time employment of 2,080 hours a year at the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour yields an income of $14,500 a year. This amount is above the individual annual income poverty threshold of $11,770 but below the poverty line of $15,930 for one adult supporting one child. Essentially, what the federal government is saying is that it has set the floor on what an employer can legally pay an employee while also recognizing that the same floor places that employee either just above or well under the threshold of destitution. Living in one of the boroughs of New York City, I am wholly incapable of imagining how a full-time minimum wage worker making $290 a week is able to survive. Honest work deserves honest pay, and $7.25 an hour is nowhere near honest. Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage was federally enacted, a full-time worker would still be making $31,200 a year, a figure significantly below the median 2013 U.S. annual household income of $52,250.

 

Read the full article HERE.

Reginald Kaigler — How My Philosophy Has Evolved!

I talk about how I began the man that I am today. I also discuss why so few black people want to become leaders in their community.

Akil Alleyne — Dear Yalies: Stop Asking to be Intellectually Pampered

College students should tackle prejudice through dialogue, debate, and direct action, not appeal to administrators to fight those battles for them.

Starbucks XMas Protests = Right-Wing Political Correctness

Dr. Fitz N Dinka — Bad Policymaking: A Recipe to National Asphyxiation

One of the most strategic driving forces behind the wellbeing of a society or an economy is policymaking. The various policies laid out by policy makers go a long way to either ameliorate different aspects of a society and hence the economy or hold it back.

Policymaking is the act of creating laws or setting standards for a government, organization or business. These changes usually come as a result of the identification, monitoring and evaluation processes where trends are uncovered, or as a direct result of a pressing situation within an organization or a society.

In an ideally running society, the government makes policies for the protection and wellbeing of the citizens and population at large, and to ensure a better and smooth running of the economy. Some policies however, especially within corrupt governments are passed for selfish reasons. Lawmakers generally are people of position, power and wealth. They may run or oversee businesses, whose interests naturally have to be protected. They are well in position to do so. Where selfishness and greed surpasses rational reasoning, policies will be made that will protect businesses even at the expense of the wellbeing and wishes of the society. It is a common practice worldwide.

Read the full article HERE.

Jonathan Blanks — To reach blacks, libertarians must begin to understand the African-American experience

Libertarians tend to think of freedom as either a means to an end of maximum utility—e.g., free markets produce the most wealth—or, in a more philosophical sense, in opposition to arbitrary authority—e.g., “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

Both views fuel good arguments for less government and more personal autonomy. Yet neither separately, nor both taken together, address the impediments to freedom that have plagued the United States since its founding.

Many of the oppressions America has foisted upon its citizens, particularly its black citizens, indeed came from government actors and agents. But a large number of offenses, from petty indignities to incidents of unspeakable violence, have been perpetrated by private individuals, or by government with full approval of its white citizens.

I would venture that many, if not most libertarians—like the general American public—haven’t come to terms with the widespread, systemic subversion of markets and democracy American racism wreaked on its most marginalized citizens. Consequently, libertarians have concentrated rather myopically on government reform as the sole function of libertarian social critique without taking full reckoning of what markets have failed to correct throughout American history.

Read the full article HERE.