A couple of days ago a reader sent me a personal email (not a comment on the blog) responding to my June 30 post with the title “Reminder: How Progressive ‘Programs’ Keep African Americans Down.” The post discussed issues including that African Americans in the United States have lower recorded average incomes and wealth than the averages of other ethnic groups. The key point made in the responsive email was this (paraphrase): “You are full of criticisms for all the attempts to solve these problems, yet you never propose any solutions yourself.”

That is correct. I have not proposed “solutions” to these “problems.” And there is a reason for that. The reason is that no “solutions” to these “problems” exist; at least, no solutions exist if the concept of an acceptable solution consists of some government spending program or order or command issued to the people.

I have put the words “solutions” and “problems” in quotes for a specific reason. The reason is that characterizing things like group income and wealth disparities as “problems” in need of “solutions” fundamentally mischaracterizes the situation. A “problem” is something that a smart person, or group of people, can sit down and “solve.” If you characterize issues like these as “problems,” you inherently imply that “solutions” must exist and that people of good will should get to work and figure out the solutions and put them into effect right away. And then, in short order, the “problem” will have gone away.

There is no solution that is going to make issues like group income or wealth disparities go away any time soon. The things that governments can do to ameliorate these issues — things like providing equal opportunity under the law, equal protection of the laws, equal educational opportunities, and so forth — have mostly already been done. I’m not saying that they have been done perfectly. No human institution is perfect. So there is always room to improve. But no actions of this sort will ever achieve perfect fairness and justice in the world, or anything close to it. And then there are massive spending and redistribution programs. Those will only make disparities worse.

Neo comments on these issues in a post from July 9 with the title “Coleman Hughes on Black Lives Matter — and the election.” Neo embeds an interview of a very smart young (24 years old) guy named Coleman Hughes, recently hired by the Manhattan Institute. In the video, Hughes spends “about a half hour arguing against the premises of the Democratic Party” — and then at the end announces that he plans to vote for Biden. What? In the context of a discussion of the attempt to achieve more equal outcomes by use of affirmative action, Neo says the following:

[I]t’s another example of the quest for cosmic justice, a quest Thomas Sowell describes and then demolishes in his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Simply put, that is an impossible quest to fulfill. We cannot make such decisions because we don’t know enough. And in our attempts to pursue that goal, we inevitably commit other injustices. . . . The fact that Hughes still potentially favors some sort of affirmative action indicates to me that he has not abandoned the quest for cosmic justice. It’s understandable, because brilliant though he is he still is very young, and because that quest is incredibly difficult to give up. It is so well-intentioned that it is seductive – if only we could finally get it right! But we can’t. . . .

My bet is that Hughes will come around over time. If you ever wonder why young people seem so much more attracted to socialism than older people, it’s because older people have lived long enough to see many proposed simple solutions to complicated issues fail, and to figure out gradually that cosmic justice simply cannot be achieved by government programs or orders.

Thomas Sowell, by the way, has been making the same point over and over again in multiple books for decades. Besides The Quest for Cosmic Justice, there’s also A Conflict of Visions, The Vision of the Anointed, Intellectuals and Society, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Discrimination and Disparities, and multiple more. I keep waiting for people to realize that Sowell has been right all along, but it looks like I’ll need to wait a little longer.