Capitalism, Socialism, and Race
By Bill Dillard
Published 7/21/2006 12:06:39 AM

American Spectator
July 21, 2006

Europeans have long talked down to Americans on a variety of subjects;
our cowboy capitalism, our income inequality, our failure to embrace
their vision of a cradle to grave welfare state. This history of
condescension made all the more interesting the comments of Abdelkarim
Carrasco, a leader of Spain’s estimated one million-member Muslim
community, on the causes of last spring’s riots in France.

"Either Europe develops and supports the idea of a mixed culture,
or Europe has no future," he said. "Europe has to learn from what the
United States has done: It is a country that has taken in people from
all over the world."

The ironies are rich, aren’t they? Europeans, of all people, are
being lectured by a Muslim leader who, of all nations, points to the
United States as the world’s exemplar of assimilation and economic
opportunity.

We are the capitalists. They are the socialists. We are the
racists. They are the equal opportunity egalitarians. Here at home,
liberals have, for decades, cast themselves as the defenders of
oppressed minorities. Their enemies in this war, we are told,
are greedy conservatives, white businessmen (i.e., capitalists),
and their political henchmen, the Republicans. Conservatism is the
redoubt of racist oppressors, socialism the liberator of oppressed
minorities. Perhaps the greatest article of liberal faith is that
American racism is the most virulent strain to ever afflict the
world. Racism, we are constantly scolded, is "everywhere" in America.

But are these presumptions warranted by logic, reason, or human
experience? How is it that France has race riots in 2006, while the
U.S. is the volitional home to more ethnicities and cultures than can
be found in any other consensual political union on the planet? How is
it that Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croats,
Hindus and Sikhs, and all manner of other people who used to butcher
each back home, can all come to America and live in relative peace?

Perhaps it is a propitious moment to revisit some long cherished
notions about capitalism and socialism, conservatism and liberalism,
and their respective impacts on racial assimilation. Herewith a
dissenting opinion to the orthodox view.

SOCIALISM ACTUALLY EMPOWERS the racist, because the absence of
market forces affords him the luxury of making decisions in economic
transactions on criteria other than efficiency and merit; criteria
such as ethnicity, and cronyism. Market capitalism strips the racist
of that luxury, and imposes a cost that must be absorbed and passed
downstream whenever he chooses the least efficient economic option,
preferring instead to base his decision on race. Because French
industry is so heavily regulated, and outcomes are largely determined
by bureaucratic fiat and not merit, outsiders who look different, talk
different, and have fewer skills to start with tend to be more easily
be marginalized and kept that way without penalty to the marginalizers.

Market capitalism, properly regulated by antitrust and
anti-discrimination laws, permits every person to realize his
inherent economic worth, and through experience and education, add
to that worth.

Thus, an Indian family that has been in the U.S. for less than a
decade, with virtually no cultural assimilation to begin with, can
find a flophouse motel, buy it, fix it up, show a profit, borrow for
major improvements, turn the place into a really nice motor court,
and send their children to a nice private school, all within a
generation. That same family in France has no such opportunity, not
because the French are more inclined to prefer their ethnicity than
any other group of people, but rather because their economy altogether
removes the incentive to deal on the merits with other ethnicities,
and also removes the penalties when the French choose less efficient,
but more familiar, French options.

Seen this way socialism enables race discrimination, and market
capitalism inhibits it. This seems so counterintuitive to most
Americans because, to the left’s credit, it led the political fight to
end legally sanctioned and institutionalized racism in America; while
the American right, in what was undoubtedly its greatest moral and
strategic failing, obstructed those efforts or refused to take part.

Understandably, the question of whether the economics of the left
or the right most effectively assimilates different ethnicities is
easily confused with the question of which side deserves the credit
for waging the political fight to end racism in America. But they
are two entirely separate questions.

We saw the marginalizing effects of socialism with the favoritism shown
to Great Russians in the Soviet Union. We see it again today in France,
Europe’s grandest exponent of continental socialism, its cities in
flames because of the lack of economic opportunity exacerbated by race
discrimination that is in turn enabled by its stratified and heavily
regulated economy. Ireland, Europe’s most market oriented economy,
has no such issues. And indeed, there is a rough correlation in time to
the widespread institution of market reforms in Ireland and the rise of
an accretive peace between Catholics and Protestants. George Mitchell
helped, but so did market opportunity. Here at home, if only we had
looked, we would have seen the empowering effects of the market when
prior to the Civil Rights era, with virtually no social safety net, and
rampant discrimination, blacks in America compiled enough wealth that,
on a stand alone basis, they comprised the 10th wealthiest nation in
the World. In his "promised land" speech, on the last night of his
life, Martin Luther King, Jr. actually quoted that statistic when
urging boycotts against businesses that discriminated against blacks.

Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together,
collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the
exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the
United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and
I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most
nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty
billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the
United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you
know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.

To black Americans living in a time of institutionalized, even
legally sanctioned racism, the market wasn’t their oppressor. The
market was their only shelter from the storm — the only place where
white Americans who would never have blacks to dinner or allow them
to join their country clubs would, albeit incompletely, put their
prejudices aside and afford blacks a place at the table.

Of course, blacks were treated unfairly in the pre-civil rights era
market, because capitalism does not prohibit racism. But the capitalism
of that day was the one true ameliorator of the barriers of race; the
one place where in the hard unemotional currency of economic exchange,
the worth of ethnically disfavored people was given value. Thus, in
our society, and indeed in any society with a race problem (that is
to say, any political compact whose members consist of more than one
race), capitalism and markets are not the problem. They are part of
the solution. Markets create reasons for people to focus their hearts
and minds beyond their own cultures and ethnicities. They meld. They
do not divide.

As proof of this assertion consider a question with a self-evident
answer. Would African-Americans be more broadly assimilated
into mainstream American life if the political movement to end
discrimination against them hadn’t been dominated by people who held
such enmity for the market, and who instilled that same enmity in a
broad cross-section of the beneficiaries of their efforts? But then,
that isn’t the fault of the left, is it? That’s the fault of the right.

Bill Dillard is a businessman and freelance writer living in Savannah,
Georgia.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress