[dennisw]

Do you know where it came from ? As deindustrialization hit urban America, legitamite job opportunities in the ghetto dried up. They seemed puny and next to the much larger sums that could be gotten dealing drugs. To a drug dealer, an honest salary was "chump change".

Truth!!! Urban areas in the NorthEast used to be full of light industry that employed people of all races. On the highway to Manhattan you saw the huge neon sign for Swingline staplers etc. etc.  My dad owned a light industry. Sheet metal.

[dfwgator]

Did somebody say Swingline stapler?

[Tokhtamish]

Those were the days, Dennisw.

Whatever respect I had for Walter Williams has evaporated. If he thought as a black conservative (or black anything, for that matter) instead of as a corporate whore he might have seen some connection between deindustrialization and the black community's greatest problem; the absolutely awful rate of black male incarceration and the consequent identification in white eyes of blacks with violent crime. Without stable jobs you cannot have a stable community in which law abiding people control the streets, not street hustlers, and in which families can control their children.

Libertarians don't understand that their is such a thing as a community. And a community has a moral character for good or for ill. External factors (like pervasive joblessness. after all, their low-semi skilled jobs are jobs America can afford to lose, aren't they ?) can destroy that moral character by disempowering the good people and empowering the bad.