Snippets from Ron Paul's Vast Collection of Writings on Race

The Anti-Racist Presidential Candidate

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.

More Black People Who Didn't Get the 'Ron Paul Is a Racist' Memo

More Black People Who Didn't Get the 'Ron Paul Is a Racist' Memo

Video: Walter E Williams - Minimum Wage as a Racist Tool

Dubious Racist Origins of The Davis-Bacon Act

In 1927, Rep. Robert Bacon (R.-N.Y.)--whose pet issue was protecting America’s racial "homogeneity"--introduced what became the Davis-Bacon Act after a contractor employed African-American workers from Alabama to build a Veteran's Bureau hospital in his district. The "neighboring community," Bacon reported, was "very upset," as were local unions.

David Bernstein, Bush 'The Emancipator?'

Richard Bernstein on the threat Free-Thinking Blacks pose to the Dems

Ironically, the political party which portrays itself as the "champion of tolerance and freedom" knows that free-thinking black Americans represent a mortal threat to its power base.

Richard Bernstein, The Democrat Plantation

Richard Bernstein on the Democrat Plantation

So what's changed? For an overwhelming majority of black Americans, nothing much. They still embrace a plantation mentality, but they've changed "masters:" from slave-owners to the Democratic Party.

Perhaps blind loyalty to a political party they perceive as their "protectors" is an inevitable consequence of black Americans' unique history. That such loyalty is to a Democrat party whose own history is a tattered tale of segregation and racism is mind-boggling.

Richard Bernstein, The Democrat Plantation