Video: Tom Woods Interviews Walter Williams on Peter Schiff Radio

One of the guys who helped me get into economics got interviewed by the guy who is keeping me in it. (Really, my own desire to understand what is going on around me is keeping me interested. But hey, it sounded nice!)

Update 2/18/12:

In the first paragraph below, I accidentally wrote Thomas Sowell instead of Walter Williams. The error has been corrected. I think I wrote Sowell instead of Williams because I was listening to this interview before I updated the page on 2/8/12.

Update 2/8/12:

In the above interview, Walter Williams mentions a report or paper that one of his colleagues wrote about Jim Crow laws in New Orleans. If I remember correctly, he said that private industry was actually pushing back against those laws which were being forced upon them by the government.

After doing some digging, I found out today that Thomas Sowell wrote about Rosa Parks a few days after her death in 2005. The column "Rosa Parks and History" is worth the read and piggybacks on the report mentioned above. Secondly, it shows that free-market's solutions to racism aren't just academic theories, they reflect something that happened in the real world.

As Walter Williams wrote, "When white solidarity is confronted by the specter of higher profits by serving blacks, it's likely that profits will win."

Upon some further digging, it didn't hit me until now--because I read the column when it first appeared in 2010--that one of my other favorite economists, Walter Williams, wrote about this exact topic then, and it may indeed reference the paper that Thomas Sowell was talking about (although he doesn't mention New Orleans so there is a chance it isn't).

For more reading into this topic, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (which is one of the first books on capitalism I read a few years ago) by Mises scholar Robert P. Murphy has a section dedicated to the free market and racism.

George Reisman, who studied under Ludwig Von Mises himself, has a paper taking a slightly different angle called "Capitalism: The Cure for Racism" and it is pretty short.