Over at the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch, I have some thoughts on how libertarianism might be able to get around the left-right logjam in talking about race, especially in light of both Ferguson and Paul Ryan’s new budget proposal.

What Ferguson and the Ryan proposal suggest is that there is a way to engage a new conversation about race in this country. The libertarian analysis recognizes that a great deal of racial disparity is the result of structural factors, and not the behavior or culture of communities of color. However, libertarians see those structural factors as being the way in which government, often at the behest of whites with the resources to access the levers of political power, has thrown up barriers to racial advancement.

 Libertarians can agree with conservative concerns about the growth of government and the benefits of markets, but they can also provide a way of expressing those concerns without engaging in blaming the victim. And libertarians can open a conversation with progressives that avoids blaming the victim and recognizes the importance of structures in racial disparity, but offers a different set of structural barriers that need to be removed.