Kamala Harris’s economic plan is a misguided path to equality

Kamala Harris wants an “opportunity economy for black men.” Invoking her experience attending civil rights marches as a child, she recently promised to “remov[e] historic barriers” that have prevented “wealth creation, education, employment, earnings, [and] health.” Economic opportunity is an important and underappreciated aspect of the civil rights movement. But Harris’s proposal, which recommends race-based laws and more government regulation, gets both equality and opportunity wrong. And it flies in the face of the Constitution. 

While the tie between equality and civil rights is well known, the tie between civil rights and economic freedom is less appreciated. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were deeply concerned with securing economic rights like the freedom to make contracts, to own and dispose of property, and to keep and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. They knew these rights were particularly important to ensuring the well-being of the formerly enslaved. As one congressman remarked, “It is a mockery to say that a citizen may have a right to live, and yet deny him the right to make a contract to secure the privilege and rewards of labor.”  

This theme has been repeated by civil rights leaders throughout history. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, the civil rights agenda should not be “burn, baby, burn,” but “build, baby, build.” It should be “learn, baby, learn, so we can earn, baby, earn.” That’s why the Fourteenth Amendment contains not just the Equal Protection Clause, but also a guarantee of due process and a promise that government cannot take away the privileges and immunities of citizenship—another term for individual rights. 

Despite these constitutional protections, the government often stands in the way of economic opportunity. It has created a regulatory thicket that suffocates entrepreneurs, especially up and coming ones who cannot afford to navigate the expensive and confusing regulatory world. Between the long, onerous, and uncertain permitting schemes, zoning laws, licensing regimes, and hefty fees, many would-be entrepreneurs give up before they can get started.   

A 2015 report from the Obama White House detailed some of these problems. It noted that occupational licensing has become a significant barrier to employment and innovation—and disproportionately affects political minorities of all kinds. It estimated that licensing restrictions alone cost millions of jobs and raise expenses by over $100 billion annually with limited effects on quality or public safety. 

The victims are the very people Harris now purports to help: a Nevada man thwarted from starting a moving business; people who would benefit from an innovative healthcare company that seeks to make dentistry less expensive; and education entrepreneurs trying to bring promising new learning models to struggling neighborhoods.  

Harris’s plan to “remove historic barriers” to economic opportunity, health care, and education therefore sounds promising. But rather than scaling back, her proposal seems to tack on. For example, it includes providing one million forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs (and others) to start a business, creating a new regulatory framework for cryptocurrency, and launching an initiative focused on health challenges that disproportionately impact black men. In short, her agenda promotes unequal treatment and expanding regulation.  

While the Harris campaign has recently said that any measures it takes will be race-neutral, its original framing seemed to indicate it would be specifically targeted at, if not limited to, people based on race. The U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause mandates equal treatment on the basis of race for good reason. For one thing, the government is especially bad at classifying human beings. Consider the government’s broad and imprecise classification of “Asian,” which groups together people from dozens of countries, languages, and cultures, as if they all share the same experience. In all, the government’s definition of Asian includes 60% of the world’s population.   

Race is also a crude proxy for whatever the government is trying to get at. People of the same race do not necessarily have the same experience or history. Instead, racial categories encompass people of different ethnicities who live in different states with myriad different experiences and traits. Put simply: not all people of the same race have experienced the same injustice.  

One of Harris’s recent tweets illustrates the point. She lauded the Department of Defense’s announcement that it would seek to right the wrongs of past policies that targeted LGBTQ+ individuals. It offered 800 veterans who were kicked out under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” honorable discharges, which will unlock benefits they are currently denied. This is an example of a policy that does not use a proxy to correct an injustice. It doesn’t simply offer some benefit to all LGBTQ+ people who have served; it applies to people directly affected in a way that corrects a specific historic wrong. 

That’s all to say, a meaningful and constitutional opportunity agenda is one that targets the actual barriers that people face and that avoids resorting to racial classifications. In the words of one Supreme Court justice, “we are just one race here. It is American.” And all Americans deserve both the equality and opportunity promised by the Constitution.