Comments

Review these ideas and then use the BACK key in your browser to go back to the page you were on.

There is a debate among scholars about the extent to which a free market would work against racial discrimination. Southern discrimination before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was aided in many ways, directly and indirectly, by local, state, and federal governments. We can therefore ask how much discrimination in hiring would have survived if the federal government had simply outlawed state support for discrimination rather than going further and making discrimination itself illegal.

Libertarian writers such as economists Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell or law professor Richard Epstein believe that a free market would result, in the long run, in roughly equal wages and salaries for blacks and whites with roughly equal skills. Some firms may discriminate, but others will profit by hiring the good workers that the others pass over. Other writers emphasize the influence of custom, prejudice, and non-economic motives. Still others claim that in some cases discrimination will survive because it is economically rational. For a critique of Sowell's views, see Christopher Jencks' book on social policy in the bibliography.