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12/29/2002 Archived Entry: "race, politics and economics"

INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS ON RACE, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS: Bruce Bartlett has an interesting column on the way various economic policies have impacted blacks, and how the perception of these policies has turned them from a constituency that voted upwards of 90 percent Republican before the Depression to one that votes upwards of 90 percent Democratic today.

Bartlett makes the important point that in a free market, discrimination doesn't pay. The reason racial discrimination was so pervasive prior to the civil rights movement's successes owes largely to the fact that government supported this discrimination, especially through the Jim Crow laws in the South. Readers who responded to my last two articles questioned whether the expansion of federal power occasioned by the 1960s civil rights laws were justified by the oppressive state laws they tore down. Leaving that aside, I think a key Republican - and to an even greater extent, conservative - failure during the 1950s and '60s was not explaining the extent to which bad government policies were the primary cause of problems faced by black Americans and other minorities. Certainly, these policies made it possible for them to suffer the amount of discrimination they did without businesses and individuals who chose to engage in discrimination having to face the full economic consequences. Perhaps if this had been made clear, we would not today evaluate officeholders' support for racial equality on the basis of their record of supporting big-government initiatives as we so often do.