Libertarian take on institutional racism

I think people hear the term “institutional racism” and get the wrong idea as to what term means. (I know I used to).

Institutional Racism as I understand is NOT just laws or institutions that are intentionally and overtly racist, it’s more about the result.

Example, the Drug War. Yes, the drug war more directly punishes poor people from poor places thus is overtly classist.

*Making something a crime like taxes and regulation always punish the poor the most as they don’t have the resources or influence to often defend themselves so end up getting the brunt of the pain.

Although, in history there were large portions of time that minorities and women couldn’t vote, couldn’t participate in entrepreneurship, etc. through the use of Government holding them back economically. This in particular caused minorities to be disproportionately in the lower economic classes. (Meaning within x minority, the wealth distribution will skew poor because those families didn’t have the same generations of wealth accumulation other families had)

The tragic irony is as women and minorities get access to traditional markets, markets are barraged with regulations, taxes, and new crimes making it harder for the poor which included the new market entrants (women and minorities) to have less access to the opportunities they were looking forward to having access to. (This also allows a cultural narrative to develop that this is caused by lack of effort and culture, blaming the victim instead of the use of government power to outprice the poor in the opportunity market)

Creating these new costs to opportunities may or may have not been intentionally setup to hold these people back (I can’t read the heart of every legislator). Nevertheless, the result is that it has made it harder to move out of poverty allowing disparities in the population to last longer then they would of in a free market.

Bottom line: institutional racism refers to how insitutions evolve that result in reinforcing disparities not the intention of the institution or of those who created them.

How do you fix it? Lower taxes, deregulate, and stop calling everything a crime so opportunities can be restored to ALL people who’ve been priced out of the market for opportunities.