After a couple of responses to my first post on the solution to the problems of inner cities, I decided I ought to delve a little deeper.  I am responding here to two similar but different types of responses. One asks what can Christians do?  The other is a bit irritated at my alleged “Gospel-without-solutions” post.  I will treat both as raising fair concerns.  Before I go the specifically Christian route, however, let me also say something about “solutions in general,” that is “secular” policies that might also be acceptable to Christians.  My thoughts were stimulated here on reading an article by Kevin Williamson in the National Review Online of April 29, 2015.  I also said a little about this side of things in my earlier post, but in the negative—what went wrong.  Now I feel it important to suggest possible positive solutions, or rather partial solutions.  I in no way therefore retract my basic point in the first post.

Let us assume we can go into a city and propose solutions to problems directly related to the black communities (but of course which affect all residents to some degree). Let us assume I am now able to influence their implementation.  What would I propose?  In general I would address corruption in government, education, community economic development via economic policies, police services and cooperation with churches that can actually help.

The corruption problem ultimately is a problem of human nature coinciding with opportunity.  Opportunity in turn comes with power.  We must then reduce the incentives to use that opportunity by limiting power of offices and bureaucrats.  To accomplish that, I would decentralize much power to neighborhoods or even out of the public sector altogether, leaving it to market forces.  At the same time, city decision-making ought to be “constitutionalized” to a much greater extent so that there are fundamental “rules of the game” that govern and limit the governors themselves and which have enforceable provision built in to them.  Private citizens would then have real voice in governance, but not an unlimited ability to exercise majority rule to the detriment of a minority.  This layer of constitutionalism of course supplements those already in place at the state and Federal levels, but addresses different issues.

Second, education needs a radical overhaul.  I am surprised that urban dweller have put up with such shoddy results for so long.  I would propose two possible solutions: (1) radical decentralization of schools to neighborhood levels, with funding that is sufficient, and including the elimination of teacher certification except for the elementary level, curriculum overhaul to stress basic skills and memorization at lower grades and a more rigorous academic commitment at the higher levels (and no Common Core), the implementation of vouchers for all parents to any school, as well as elimination of much of the bureaucratic “bloat” and the elimination of public teacher’s unions (2)  privatization of the entire educational institution, but with the continuation of vouchers funded by the government.  In neither case would I accept any funds that attached unacceptable conditions or reduced local autonomy (this would be built into school or system charters).  Finally, I would, if I retained a public system at all, reduce bureaucracy radically—I believe this would occur naturally if the two proposals were adopted.

Economic development needs to be re-thought from a broader perspective.  It is not primarily specific programs that would improve economic well-being—jobs, incomes, etc.  Rather it is broad-based policies.  These include tax reductions for all, income, corporate, sales taxes alike, etc.  In addition, regulations that stifle housing development, businesses, diverse land uses, must be reduced or eliminated.  Most of these are just cronyism anyway.  Both of these policies would encourage development in urban areas and even in poorer ones, if other conditions followed also (more on that later).  Regulations affect everyone, but especially the poor who need opportunities to be maximized for them.  Why for example, did (I think still does) DC require a hair braider to have special and expensive training as part of the regulations on barbering?  The only reason was to protect existing barbers and stylists.  But it hurts those who would be entrepreneurial.  Why, for example, can’t anyone open a taxi business?  Why is it so difficult to open a business in almost any large city?  And it costs money to meet the useless requirements of so many of these regulations.  The poor can’t afford it.  It simply is not fair.

In general, government itself must be decentralized for most goods and services, especially those involving a great deal of face-to-face contact, such as police services.  But along with this, the standards of justice and order must be enforced uniformly for all.  Without that, the incentives to remain in a community or to invest declines or disappears.  I was heartbroken to read of the several merchants in Baltimore who lost everything in their businesses they had worked so hard to develop—and in those neighborhoods.  Thousands of dollars up in smoke or destroyed or looted.  They weren’t wealthy.  But the police failed to do their job in those instances—one merchant calling 911 50 times with no response.  We must not only have fair law enforcement, to minimize the threat to innocent citizens, but actual and uniform enforcement.  I should add that without that, new investment will not come to the inner cities.  All our high talk about the big, bad corporations refusing to “take a cut in profit” makes no sense when you consider that profit margins are pretty low (2-5%) and if the business is continually threatened (by robbery, fire, etc) then it will go out of business altogether—and then no jobs at all, no incomes.  But the other side of this is that I propose to give the communities themselves a voice, a real voice with “teeth.”

Finally I come to what I mentioned above as “cooperation with churches.”  The current case law in Supreme Court jurisprudence does not forbid cooperative ventures with various churches to engage in all sorts of functions that until recently they did universally—what we might have called “pastoral care,” broadly speaking.  Now however things can get a little difficult.  Would those churches be required to omit explicitly Christian references when teaching for example?  Would they be able to include the Gospel along with their aid if they received government funding?  If not, the most important aspect of this cooperation is lost.  The churches ought to go it alone anyway, without the state, but I don’t know to what extent they could.  Nevertheless, it might be possible to inculcate traditional moral values even with state funding, if the teaching excluded the Bible.  And that is a start.  Now of course, churches can try any number of innovative ideas in urban areas.  And individual Christians could do the same.  But somewhere along the line, the schools will be necessary to at least not contradict traditional values.  Preferably they ought to be part of the process.  They themselves ought to teach or reinforce traditional values.  That would be much easier if schools were private (we know that Court has held that vouchers can be used even for private school children, so the funding problem can be solved).

As I said my proposals are secular, except for the last one.  They don’t require religion to be acceptable, but I believe they are also consistent with and not contradictory to Christian theology.  Now I have a challenge.  Are those who read this blog and who are regular critics of what they label “conservative” solutions, willing to actually seriously consider my proposals.  Just in the interest of full disclosure, some of the policies have been suggested over the last 40 years by individuals who are not exactly flaming conservatives.  Obviously they wanted to discover what might actually work, no matter whether it “looked” like a conservative proposal.  We are dealing with the well-being of real people.  That being the case, we must also be willing to drop the partisan and ideological labels sometimes and do the hard work of policy analysis.  Not all policies are created equal.  And not all involve just more spending on the same programs.  We ought to be looking for the best policies, not the perfect we can never find.

There is more to say on this subject and specifically how Christians might respond.  But that will have to wait.