Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Basically, the argument that the invaluable functions of government (especially invaluable for the rich) remove any claim to sole right to acquired wealth.

Starts with "Laws concerning property or contracts, and the public agencies that enforce such laws."

Yup, that covers a lot.

If we use these criteria to determine who can legitimately claim to be “entirely self-made,” the Forbes number drops dramatically. It’s not 270 out of 400. In fact, it’s precisely zero.

A 2005 article on hot young economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. by Stephen J. Dubner got me thinking about my thesis again.

About all I need to know to want to keep track of his work is that his model is W.E.B. DuBois.

But this statement is disturbing, and the author is an economist himself. Following up on examples of Fryer's willingness and capacity to look at all things that might affect black achievement, including genetics, Dubner wrote:

So here is Fryer's final anomaly: he is a man who revels in his blackness and yet also says he believes, as DuBois believed, that black underachievement cannot entirely be laid at the feet of discrimination.

What sort of fool, let alone a self-described rogue economist, would frame the question as a matter of discrimination? Kidnapping and slavery and no compensation hardly fit neatly under discrimination. Follow history a tad longer and you get to sharecropping, which puts the problem squarely in an economic context.

Make wealth and resources equal, and I bet black people will overcome racism – with great difficulty, but ultimately overcome it – and achieve just about anything professors and bureaucrats care to measure.