The Week

The government is removing import restrictions on shoes, but is considering new restrictions on imported tobacco. You could try smoking the shoes, but the Surgeon General has probably determined that it is dangerous to your health.

The President got a cool, cool welcome from the NAACP when he spoke at its national convention in Denver. He called the welfarist approach “a new form of bondage,” for which he was duly denounced as insensitive and all that. Oddly enough, the NAACP only a couple of years back seemed on the verge of a supply-side approach itself, with its chairman, Margaret Bush Wilson (who gave Reagan a sarcastic introduction in Denver), arguing that no-growth economics froze blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder. Black unemployment stands at about 13 per cent—high, but the obverse is that 87 per cent are working. Instead of emphasizing black dependence on Washington—and inadvertently reinforcing the welfare-bum stereotypes—the NAACP should stress that what blacks need is an expanding economy, and more jobs. As witness a New York Times report that blacks are now flocking southward, where the jobs are. It should be clear that blacks figure heavily among the marginal workers—helped by boom times, and hurt when high taxes boost employers’ overhead and increase unemployment.

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The government is removing import restrictions on shoes, but is considering new restrictions on imported tobacco. You could try smoking the shoes, but the Surgeon General has probably determined that it is dangerous to your health.

The President got a cool, cool welcome from the NAACP when he spoke at its national convention in Denver. He called the welfarist approach “a new form of bondage,” for which he was duly denounced as insensitive and all that. Oddly enough, the NAACP only a couple of years back seemed on the verge of a supply-side approach itself, with its chairman, Margaret Bush Wilson (who gave Reagan a sarcastic introduction in Denver), arguing that no-growth economics froze blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder. Black unemployment stands at about 13 per cent—high, but the obverse is that 87 per cent are working. Instead of emphasizing black dependence on Washington—and inadvertently reinforcing the welfare-bum stereotypes—the NAACP should stress that what blacks need is an expanding economy, and more jobs. As witness a New York Times report that blacks are now flocking southward, where the jobs are. It should be clear that blacks figure heavily among the marginal workers—helped by boom times, and hurt when high taxes boost employers’ overhead and increase unemployment.