Mark Steyn makes the big bucks because of multi-level one-liners like that particularly exquisite example.
Because cough:
More coughing, this time from Steve “No F*cks Given” Sailer:
The giant retailing company has often been frustrated obtaining permits to build stores in the inner city—for example, Chicago city councilmen blocked a proposed Wal-Mart on the South Side. So Wal-Mart hired 74-year-old Andrew Young, who once worked for Martin Luther King Jr., to lobby local governments for them. Young is the former Atlanta mayor who helped capture the 1996 Olympics and made sure that blacks got a sizable hunk of the lucrative contracts—thereby much exacerbating the notorious incompetence of the Atlanta Games.
Asked by an interviewer from a black newspaper, the LA Sentinel, if Wal-Mart displaced mom-and-pop retailers, Young replied:
“Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom-and-pop` stores out of my neighborhood… But you see those are the people who have been overcharging us— selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they”ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs, very few black people own these stores.”
Needless to say, the fact that mom-and-pop stores in black neighborhoods are seldom owned by blacks has more to do with black entrepreneurial failings than with the moral failings of middle-man minority shopkeepers. And the stores’ high prices and poor selection more reflect the risk of operating in crime-ridden neighborhoods and the inherent inefficiencies of small shops than any nefarious plot against blacks.
If blacks owned those stores, the bread would presumably be even staler and the prices even higher.
Conservatives are always advising African-Americans to be entrepreneurial. But ambitious blacks seldom have the extended family structures that would allow them to compete with immigrants. If you are the patriarch of a Greek immigrant family, for example, you are culturally expected to browbeat your children and grandchildren into working in the family business. In contrast, poorer African-American males seldom have strong familial relationships with anyone other than their mothers.
After WWII, most of the liquor stores in Los Angeles`s black ghetto were owned by aging Jews. Then, following the 1965 Watts Riots, the Jews mostly sold out to black businessmen. When liquor prices were deregulated in the late 1970s, reducing profit margins, the blacks sold out to the harder-working Koreans. The efficient but brusque and disdainful Koreans came to be hated by their black customers, especially after a Korean lady shot a teenage black girl in the back of the head in 1991. Thus, the 1992 South Central riots were in sizable part a drunken black pogrom against Korean merchants.
