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What is the liberal argument for why the free market doesn’t solve the problem of “looked over” minority applicants?
If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business? For instance, they can simply form their own trading company. Ostensibly, if the problem is so severe as to warrant large scale national discussion and policy change, there must be hundreds of thousands of minorities capable of making way more money than they currently make if only they are hired properly and placed in the appropriate position. Importantly, they would be making money for anyone who invested in the business. As there are already exorbitantly wealthy minority investors, shouldn’t this be occurring? And if the liberal theory were correct, wouldn’t this just be free money for everyone involved? All you would have to do is establish a trading firm made up of whichever minority applicants are being discriminated against.
As a gratuitous example, if Goldman Sachs weren’t hiring Korean PhDs to work on algorithmic trading, someone could swoop in and make free money just by hiring them. Or better yet, a Korean investor could help someone start their very own Korean version of Goldman. We saw something like this with physics PhDs; someone realized they would be exceptionally good at applying their intelligence to understanding the market mathematically, and those who hired them made bank. Now everyone hires them.
So if I were a female trader, or even better, an Afro-Caribbean female trader, and I were not placed in a position which maximized company gains, I would just need to collect together a few dozen others in a similar position and start my own boutique shop with investment from African and/or female investors, of which there are thousands. This should be an obvious decision for everyone involved. It would be a day 1 decision. It’s how non-minorities often decide to start their own business, feeling like they could be better off starting a new organization. A relative of mine started his own company with some colleagues when he felt he wasn’t being optimally placed for his own economic gain (and the company’s, given that he simply left and took clients). It’s also how, for instance, Jewish Americans involved in banking were able to start their own companies — in some cases being hired by the majority who saw their value, in other cases starting their own companies having realized their own value.
Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires? It’s free money! And half of all retail investors could invest in the enterprise (the Progressive half). The Portland school district could put their teacher’s retirement funds into their hands, knowing it’s the greatest bang for their buck. It would be like finding an undiscovered Ivy League school, churning out Yale-level talent without anyone realizing it. Why are we not hearing the success stories of all female or all-Latino or etc trading firms?
Simply put, running a business isn't the same as working at a business. I used to work at a law firm and it was pretty easy, conceptually—show up, do the work they assigned me, go home. I practiced law and did nothing but practice law. If you're a lawyer and you're looking to make partner then you can add in schmoozing and making client contacts and all that bullshit but even then the scope of your responsibilities is still pretty limited. And no one's forcing you to go for partner; if you're content being a worker bee you can still make a lot of money as an associate and schmooze for clients at your own schedule. Hang you own shingle and it's a whole different ballgame. Now, if you don't schmooze for clients, you don't work. Now instead of someone telling you where to show up every day you have to spend an inordinate amount of time considering cost, location, and space requirements to figure out where you're going to show up every day. And who's going to clean it. Instead of filling out a time sheet and collecting a paycheck I have to figure out what to charge, deal with the physical invoices, and make sure I actually get paid. Instead of grabbing whatever's in the supply closet every time you need a pen, now you have to order the pens yourself. And plenty of other things. And of course, I'm only getting paid while I'm actually practicing law, so I'm essentially doing all this extra work for free. And yeah, you can hire people do do all this stuff, assuming you can get the money, but that just shifts the problem back a level. Now your responsibilities are merely limited to hiring people to perform tasks you know nothing about and supervising them/keeping them busy at these tasks. It's not horrible if you're willing to put in the work, but if you start your own company be prepared to be more of a businessman than whatever it is that you ostensibly do.
Characterizing the work of maintaining and/or increasing the value of a thing you have an ownership stake in as "free" labor is a bad sleight of hand. Prole thinking for bourgeois benefit. For many small business owners/partners it can be well below prevailing wages or even minimum wage but that's the downside of the gamble of owning a business.
Right, but that's merely an abstraction; we all accept the necessity of having to do this stuff, but when you're actually in the position of having to do it it still sucks that you're not getting paid.
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