More hokey-pokey nonsense coming out of the Chicago School. Economist Gary Becker writes in Business Week on the plight of the black family. Essentially, he ends up calling for the legalization of drugs as something that will keep black men at home raising their families. First of all, drugs should be legalized for myriad reasons that I need not repeat here. Is one of them to keep black men out of jail, and therefore at home, raising their children? The latter doesn't necessarily fall out from the former. There are various social forces at work here, with the focus mainly on class problems.

Edward Banfield, in his sociological study The Unheavenly City, dares to define class by time preference, and the time preference problems in the lower classes extend to white as well as black families. Banfield also tackles the problems of rioting, crime, and lack of education as being a result of class, and hence time preferences. (One chapter in his book is called "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit.") To steal from a Chris Rock joke, a high time preference person is one who buys a $300 pair of sunglasses today, knowing that the rent is due next week.

Becker appears to say that high numbers of black men deal drugs and desire no other options. He's blindly immersing himself in pure economics (surprise! he's an economist), while forgetting the sociological aspects of being black, poor, and living the urban lifestyle. Urban areas are essentially great concentrations of people that have little or no attachment to the rest of society, as Tocqueville even recognized well before the onset of the black ghetto. Keeping young, black men at home to raise their children responsibly is not purely an economic problem, and in fact, the cultural/sociological aspects of poverty breeding poverty (collective heritage) greatly outweigh that which is economic. Of course, the problem with these mathematical economists is always the lack of interdisciplinary training enabling them to analyze societal problems from something other than a rigid, mechanical viewpoint.

Becker also makes a call for more welfare: "Unfortunately, some states still make it difficult for two-parent families to collect welfare. Especially for poor families, the tax laws should provide an extra benefit to intact families, instead of punishing them as these welfare laws do." He also calls for an expanded Head Start welfare program. What he doesn't focus on is that black families were largely intact, as a fairly stable unit, before Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

And this is free-market economics.