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.
