Capitalism: An Alternative for Inner-City Gangs:R. Reiland

And so on. If prices are free to fluctuate, and if traders on the market are not prevented from economizing when it seems advisable, any amount of money will be sufficient to fulfillmoney's two basic functions-as pur chasing power and as a means for comparing relative market values. As a matter of fact, when monetary inflationis resorted to in the attempt to compensate for changes, the monetary unit loses both its purchasing power and its use as a standard for compar ing values. The consequences of a govern ment-induced inflation-in the attempt to keep pace with changes in population and production-will always be much more di sastrous than any short-run benefits it brings to its relatively few early beneficiaries. D CAPITALISM: AN ALTERNATIVE FOR INNER-CITY GANGS by Ralph Reiland T he much-publicized gang peace summit in Kansas City last summer produced some good ideas. The Crips and the Bloods are right that voting is better than drive-bys, but that's nothing that the rest of us didn't know all along. While there's little debate about police brutality being wrong, what happened to Rodney King is chump change compared to what the Los Angeles gangs dish out to African-Americans every night.

In Los Angeles County, shootings occur Ralph R. Reiland is a Pittsburgh restaurateur and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Robert Morris College. He has been published in Barron's, USA Today, and Minorities and Women in Business. every hour, with gang murders now running at 850 a year, primarily black-on-black. Nationally, the top cause of death for young African-American males is homicide; more young blacks are murdered every year than were killed in a decade in Vietnam. A young African-American male in Harlem is less likely to reach the age offorty than a boy in Bangladesh. Yet Ice-T is cashing in with his new weapons-theme clothing line: AK-47 pants, assault jackets, and M-16 jeans-back-to-school outfits for the pathological war zones. Still, some of the deadliest racist violence in Los Angeles isn't against African-Amer icans. In South Central, it's Korean store keepers who run a l-in-250 chance of being CAPITALISM: AN ALTERNATIVE FOR INNER-CITY GANGS 135 killed each year, about the same fatality rate our troops faced in Vietnam. But they're not victims of police brutality, so we won't see their victimization, on videotape, ten thou sand times on television. And none of us will notice the length of the jail sentences any of their killers receive. Instead, a nihilistic mob jumps to the music as Ice Cube pockets big bucks rapping about the slaughter in his song Black Korea: "So don't follow me up and down your market, or your little chop suey ass will be a target."

The recommendation at the gang summit that African-American parents develop their own separate school system has merit. Catholic schools regularly outperform the public schools, comparing equivalent enter ing students, at less than half the cost-and the female graduates of women's colleges regularly outperform their coed counter parts. The present administration, however, isn't likely to give back to African-American parents any of their tax money to fund their own schools as long as it continues to value the bloc vote of teacher unionists over upward mobility in the inner city. The idea at the summit of improved treat ment of women by gang members is signif icant too. In an environment in which gang members respected their girlfriends, wouldn't more guys marry their girls and forget about the Crips? What was best at the summit was the focus on economics. Instead of the old pleas for more government handouts, the vision was one of creating more small businesses.

The talk was of management programs in stead of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and jobs and economic develop ment instead of busing and victimhood. The key to wealth in America-for Ko reans, Cubans, Poles, Chinese, Jews, or Black West Indian immigrants-has always been small business. Today, over three quarters of the over-$200,OOO family in comes in the United States are earned by small business owners. Too often, however, well-intentioned church leaders and politicians have warned African-Americans to avoid the evils of the private sector. Jesse Jackson's only mention of business at the Democratic Convention was his story about how aNorth Carolina chicken plant chained in its workers and burned them to death. A life on the dole watching television soaps or selling dope sounds better than that racist, unfair, greedy, unequal, and deadly capital ism. That picture of capitalism is just as much a lie, however, as picturing all African Americans as Willie Hortons. Too fre quently, the loud speakers on the Left paint a false picture of capitalist evil and socialist salvation. They don't ask why Germans weren't shot trying to escape from the capitalist West to the socialist East-the wall climbingwas in the other direction-or why the thousands of Cubans paddling on inner tubes through shark-infested waters from Havana to Key West don't pass any one escaping in the opposite direction.

John Shipley Butler, black professor of management and sociology at the Univer sity of Texas at Austin, states: "Going back to the 1950s and the beginning of the civil rights movement, we began moving away from business to politics. The result is we have become too focused on fairness-what somebody is doing to us and not doing for us-and almost contemptuous of business, especially small business . . . a focus on rights practically forces you to think in terms of victimization. A focus on business forces you to look for opportunity. That's the main difference between us and, say, Vietnamese Americans." It's time for another summit, this time to lay the plans to unleash African-American entrepreneurship. It's time for African American professionals, church people, gang members, and small business opera tors to open stores all across this country and watch the profits and role models trickle down and create more stores, more jobs, more hope, and more pride. It's time for capitalism. D 'THEFREEMAN IDEASON UBERTY FREEDOM VERSUS FEAR by John Attarian F riends of freedom rightly see govern ment control as a threat. From this many have passed on to condemn government and tp call for anarchy, a minimal state, and so on. But while this line of thought has been fruitful of much insight, it risks engrossment in technical arcana of libertarian theory anarchy, public finance via lotteries, and so on-and quite forgetting that freedom's real enemy is not government itself but the frailties of human nature that result in its illegitimate use. Some of these weaknesses have received careful study. Envy, for ex ample, is the subject of a brilliant treatise by Helmut Schoeck. 1 But one of freedom's worst foes is, quite simply, fear.