The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, June 12, 1979

Review & Outlook

The Lincoln Review

There's a new magazine around with something important to say about the future of the black community in the United States.  The publication is a quarterly called Lincoln Review, and its editor says it is meant as a platform for topics and points of view that may fall outside conventionally defined "black issues" and black perspectives but that are nevertheless of significant concern to black Americans.  The first issue of the magazine covers a range of subjects from biography to a historical sketch of black Americans in grand opera, but the review's central aim is to emphasize the black community's stake in this country's economic growth.

An article by Wendell Wilkie Gunn, "The Civil Rights Struggle:  Phase II," puts the case quite clearly.  Black Americans and their leaders, Mr. Gunn begins, are growing disenchanted with President Carter's Democratic administration.  Politicians on the Republican right have welcomed this disenchantment by announcing that black organizations are beginning to "see the light" and turn from the false god of income redistribution to the true solution of economic growth as a way of meeting their problems.

But this kind of analysis, Mr. Gunn says, doesn't do credit to the changing nature of the black struggle in America.  Through the mid-1960s, massive racial discrimination prevented blacks from participating fully in the American economy.  The Democrats offered them both the political activism necessary to remove the legal barriers and the redistributionist social welfare policies necessary to mitigate the economic plight of poor blacks in the short run.  Siding with the Democrats was a fully proper response to the black community's real need and interests.

Now the discriminatory barriers are coming down, and future economic progress for blacks will depend on overall economic growth.  The Democrats' policies are likely to slow that growth and thus damage the interests of black Americans.  But the Republicans look like they may pass up their opportunity to make themselves the party of black progress.  Many of them insist on fighting inflation with tax rate increases.  The resulting contraction causes unemployment among poor blacks -- and doesn't even really curb inflation, since the unemployed stop producing but receive enough in transfer payments to keep right on consuming.

So both parties offer platforms of economic contraction; the difference is that the Democrats' social welfare programs transfer some of the costs away from the poor.  Under the circumstances, it's reasonable for blacks to keep choosing the Democrats; if Republicans want to change the calculus, they should push harder for the kinds of tax reductions that would stimulate real economic growth.

Mr. Gunn's argument on tax policies is of the kind that always stirs up a fuss in Republican circles.  But perhaps the most refreshing thing about it is that it views black Americans as producers, actual and potential, whose interest lies in expanding opportunities rather than restricted ones.  We hope the Lincoln Review will provide more of this perspective.