Upsetting the narrative

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Blacks in the big city North moving back to the South after 3 or 4 generations? Why, it just can't be!

The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, pastor of the 23,000-member Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said he was losing hundreds of congregants yearly to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

“For decades, Queens has been the place where the African-American middle class went to buy their first home and raise a family,” Mr. Flake said. “But now, we are seeing a reversal of this as African-Americans feel this is no longer as easy to achieve and that the South is more benevolent than New York.”

Some blacks say they are leaving not only to find jobs, but also because they have soured on race relations.

Candace Wilkins, 27, of St. Albans, who remains unemployed despite having a business degree, plans to move to Charlotte, N.C.

She said her decision was prompted by an altercation with the police.

In March 2010, witnesses say, Ms. Wilkins was thrown against a car by a white police officer after she tried to help a black neighbor who was being questioned. She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, according to the Queens district attorney’s office.

Ms. Wilkins disputes the charges, which are pending, and has filed a complaint against the police. A police spokeswoman said the department was investigating her complaint.

“Life has gone full circle,” said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.

“My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,” she said. “Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.”

And this:

The movement marks an inversion of the so-called Great Migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s and saw African-Americans moving to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work.

Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution, said the current exodus from New York stemmed largely from tough economic times. New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South.

The South now represents the potential for achievement for black New Yorkers in a way it had not before, Professor Crew said. At the same time, unionized civil service jobs that once drew thousands of blacks to the city are becoming more scarce.

“New York has lost some of its cachet for black people,” Professor Crew said. “During the Great Migration, blacks went north because you could find work if you were willing to hustle. But today, there is less of a struggle to survive in the South than in New York. Many blacks also have emotional and spiritual roots in the South. It is like returning home.”

But it's not just blacks, either, as people and businesses of all stripes are heading to the friendlier business climates of low tax and right-to-work states, many of which are in the South.

After all and aside from cultural implications, higher taxes and onerous regulations that raise the cost of living and constrict the labor market are in themselves a type of oppression as well.


* Pictured: The Atlanta skyline

Follower blog post of the day

It could never happen here, could it?


One of the criticisms we've heard through the years regarding Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is that its portrayal of the government as oppressor was too overbearing and exaggerated.

Ya think?

Just last week brought news that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was attempting to dictate where it was a private enterprise could and could not do business.

Straight out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged Obama-appointed Lafe Solomon has filed a complaint on behalf of the NLRB contending that Boeing must manufacture 787 Dreamliner airplanes in Washington, a non-right-to-work state, rather than completing a new plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. Thus by regulatory fiat the NLRB might soon declare that its illegal to move to a freer state to do business. Can you hear the shackles clicking closed on your legs? By what right? By what right does a government bureaucrat dictate where we can work?

Please check out Shane Atwell's outstanding post on this matter, here.

More choices, more freedom

To the barricades, people!


Maybe because it's a slow news cycle in the dog days of August but once again we see a confluence between liberty and our ability to purchase and consume booze on our terms here in California.

With little public notice, distributors of alcoholic beverages are pressing for a federal law that would allow states to block interstate sales of wine and beer to their residents — a result that could limit consumer choices, raise prices and hurt hundreds of small vintners and micro brewers.

A bill pending in the House would put the authority to regulate alcohol more squarely in the hands of the states and would require those challenging the regulations to prove the rules violate federal law or the Constitution.

And it would supersede a number of recent court rulings that have struck down limits on interstate sales of alcoholic beverages.

“It’s the cumulative effect of all these lawsuits, and the confusion,” said Paul Pisano, a vice president at the National Beer Wholesalers Association, which proposed the legislation in the spring and backs a lobbying campaign. “We’re asking to make sure that states aren’t having their hands tied when they’re trying to defend their alcohol laws.”

Critics countered that the distributors’ real motive was to restrict competition.

Internet and direct-mail sales have become essential to the growth of smaller winemakers and micro brewers in the last decade.

South Coast Winery in Temecula, Calif., for instance, sells almost 30 percent of its wine through a 10,000-member wine club and ships to customers in about 20 states, owner Jim Carter said.

“It’s very important for small wineries, especially, to be able to have these wine clubs because it’s our best vehicle for dealing direct with the public,” Carter said. “We sell more wine through our wine club than we sell in the wholesale market.”

Through consolidation in recent years, many markets are controlled by only a handful of high-volume distributors, and they have little incentive, critics contend, to carry wines and beers that are available only in small quantities.

That last paragraph is key, because whatever alleged mess of conflicting state and federal laws this bill would supposedly clarify, the end result of this bill would represent a constriction of small vintners and microbreweries' ability to compete in the open market.

San Diego is dominated by essentially 4 distributors: Crest, Budweiser, Stone and Wine Warehouse and the article is quite correct in its contention they have no interest in pushing small volumes. Stone does what they can for the little guys but they have their own beer to get to the thirsty masses, as well.

This bill will have a devastating effect on local microbreweries who ultimately depend on a literal out-of-the-back-of-the-van distributorship.

And in case you were wondering how the free market is effected by all this, check this out:

Jerry Ellig, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, studied wine prices in the years before and after Virginia enacted a law in 2003 to allow direct shipping to residents. The study, published in 2007, found that the law had prodded retail stores to become more competitive with online sellers.

Wait. Is Ellig suggesting that increased competition from increasing the avenues by which a product is brought to market... lowers the prices of those products?

Opponents of the bill also claim that the bill would be the proverbial camel's nose under the tent and would prove to be the conduit to even more regulatory meddling in the liquor industry.

Of course, proponents of the bill go the "it's for the children route" (which, by the way, is an automatic disqualifier in our book) by claiming the tightening up on the ways that booze can be sold will cut down on underage drinking.

Right. Because the last time some under aged scrub hit us up for beer, it was to buy a couple of 22 oz. bombers of Green Flash's 30th Street.

Just another assault on our collective ability to enjoy perfectly legal adult activities.

H/T: Got an assist on a couple of points in this article from Michael Craig of Hoffer's in La Mesa.

Quote of the Day

“We, the Chinese human-rights activists, are like the Jews were in Nazi Germany. We can be arrested, jailed, killed at any moment at the Communist Party’s whim. Why the Western media, political leaders, and intellectuals do not support us more is a mystery to us. When we all disappear, you will ask yourself why you did not do more. But it will be too late then.”

It has become conventional wisdom in some quarters that the Maoist brand of communism is derived from the Chinese culture itself, that the Chinese Communist Party is heir to ancient cultural traditions within China.

However, in East Asia that is home to disparate cultures and societies that have nevertheless witnessed human disasters as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the boat people of Vietnam and the concentration camps of North Korea, there has been only one constant: Communism.

As we noted with respect to the ironies of Keynesian economics, the irony of the Chinese urban bourgeoisie maintaining their standard of living on the oppression of the rural Chinese would not be lost on one Karl Marx.

But ideology only counts for so much when it is power and stability that is sought by government rather than freedom and liberty being protected by that government.