The central economic claim: the racial wealth gap is a government-created market distortion, not a natural outcome. FHA underwriting criteria, GI Bill administration, Homestead Act access; specific federal programs built middle-class asset wealth and were administered in ways that cut Black Americans out of those same assets. A conservative who's serious about correcting state interference in markets has to reckon with the largest one on the books.
The transfer mechanism is Friedman's negative income tax applied directly: cash over programs, finite obligation rather than standing income, GDP-indexed so the number is defensible rather than arbitrary. The labor-supply panic gets the lottery-winner literature thrown at it. I don't wave it off.
Sowell, Loury, and Williams each get answered on their own frameworks. The constitutional argument is the unusual part: why a statute can't survive strict scrutiny but an amendment that names its own classification in the text sits beside the Equal Protection Clause rather than beneath it.
Genuinely curious whether anyone has a tighter way to bound the obligation's scope, because that's where I'm least confident.
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This is a policy argument: cash transfers as the corrective mechanism for a documented government-created market distortion, with the Friedman negative income tax as the structural model. The economics are the point, not the politics.