There’s a lot not to like about this David Frum piece concern trolling Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations essay. For instance, Frum asks as a hypothetical “If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about… Japanese Americans, interned during World War II?,” apparently unaware that we already did that. But here’s one that I find really baffling. Comparing reparations to affirmative action, Frum writes,

the strategy detoured talented people away from the higher risks and rewards of the private sector, and especially from entrepreneurship. Black Americans are less than half as likely as white to own their own businesses.

A reparations plan is likely to prove even more distorting.

If paid to individuals as an income stream, reparations would dis-incentivize work.

If paid to individuals as a lump sum, reparations would expose one of America’s least financially sophisticated populations to predatory practices that would make subprime lending seem socially responsible by contrast.

So let’s sort this out. Like most conservatives, Frum thinks that a key aspect of solving black-white economic inequality is entrepreneurship, and he further thinks that affirmative action has dissuaded black Americans from going down that path. OK, fine. He particularly advocates for the “higher risks and rewards of the private sector,” which is in keeping with the conservative fetish for exposure to economic risk as some sort of virtue. Well, let’s think about this structurally instead of psychologically. What’s one of the biggest impediments to starting your own business? A lack of initial capital. To start your own business, you either need a) your own money, b) a loan, c) outside investment. In access to all three of those, black people face systemic disadvantage in our country– and Coates’s essay spends a great deal of time establishing that disadvantage. The black-white wealth gap is enormous, and loans and investment are precisely the sort of area where implicit and structural racism hurts the most. On a theoretical level, I find a lack of access to initial capital a far more plausible reason for a lack of black American entrepreneurship than some sort of enculturated fear of risk and reward. And for exactly this reason, we could reasonably expect that reparations could result in a great flourishing of black-owned businesses, like we’ve never seen.

Of course, many or most of those businesses would fail; that’s the reality of small businesses, after all. There’s the risk part of that equation. And yet Frum seems to see this risk as a reason not to give out reparations, when he writes “If paid to individuals as a lump sum, reparations would expose one of America’s least financially sophisticated populations to predatory practices that would make subprime lending seem socially responsible by contrast.” All entrepreneurs need to be wary of predatory practices. That’s the risk that you yourself endorsed in this essay! You can’t have it both ways; either entrepreneurship is a potential financial salve for black Americans, including the risks, or the risks are too great and the problem lies in the entrepreneurship and not the reparations.

Me, lefty that I am, I’m not so gung-ho on entrepreneurs. But if you want to spread small business ownership within the black community, you have to figure out a way to provide startup funds to an impoverished group that lacks the social capital necessary to get credit and investment. Reparations sounds like a great way to start– and that’s from a purely consequentialist standpoint, before we even get to the moral justification Coates invested so much time and effort in building.