What Is Up with A’Jamal Byndon?

And “Movement In Omaha For Racial Equity”

A’Jamal Byndon and I met many-a-decades ago when he was speaking at a lunch on race relations at a university. Over the years, we have interacted and had many disagreements but were always cordial and found ourselves enjoying the exchange.

He has the heart of Fredrick Douglass in defending the freedom of speech knowing he receives information and understanding of how people think and view things in exchanges. He is a rare bird for such a love of discussion.

Unlike so many people, Byndon has made a point of taking in the cosmopolitan viewpoint. Yet at the same time, he will flat out agitate for racial reciprocity and representation to the annoyance of many. He is now chair of Movement In Omaha For Racial Equity (https://moreomaha.org). Byndon finds himself surrounded with leftists and knows he needs broader input in the discussions and I am happy to oblige.  At the same, Byndon can rub some people (perhaps many) the wrong way. Three white guys talking on a street corner and Byndon screams out “Hey, you racist KKK members! Where is the racial diversity in your discussion?”. Alright! I admit that is a bit of an exaggeration but there are many government organizations and others who feel that way. He is very consistent and persistent!

Our latest exchange was over slave reparations a few days ago. Such reparations are a stupid idea in part because there were black slaveowners and historical extractions are futile. The reality is these reparations are just divisive politics which miss the mark.  I challenge many who push the slavery issue to rethink your position. The slave revolt in Haiti had an international impact on how slavery was practiced and altered US slavery to some form of serfdom. Not much of an improvement but slaves thrived. However, slaves were bound to the land and the cash crops grown: cotton, tobacco, and indigo. All of these products were designated mostly for export which meant ships exporting products would bring back imports and immigrants, and the imports were taxed. Such taxes were the source of many problems.

Northern states wanted a protective tariff against the imports and the revenue from them, but South Carolina, during the Nullification Crisis, objected. When Lincoln ran for President, the 1860 Republican explicitly called for protective tariffs. When Republicans took over Congress, their first legislation was not to tackle slavery but to impose a protective tariff and Lincoln had not even taken office yet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff). For over 50 years, the Morrill Tariff Act punished the former Confederacy states. What damage General Sherman had done was capped by a decades-long tariff which ruined the Southern economy and ground it into poverty and racial conflict. This did not change until 1913 when the Federal Income Tax came to be and reformed the tariff.

Unfortunately, BIPOC-oriented organizations never caught on to how macroeconomics operated or what has been inherited in their economic thinking. Yet from the site, they support multiple minimum wage hikes by ballot (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff8a0306bbc7c345297bc51/t/61df050cb5bebb57e7f47a40/1642005772243/Raise+the+Wage_MORE_1.10.22.pdf) and have State Senator McKinney (https://moreomaha.org/about-more), the man in charge of such advocacy (https://raisethewagenebraska.org/about/).

The time has come to re-evaluate what happened after the Civil War and what the economic impact was.  McKinney and his kind need to stop buying into all the economic policies put forth by labor advocates such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and start looking at Mises and Milton Friedman. But, for many, that would be a steep climb.