Apartheid appears in these excerpts not as a topic examined on its own terms but as a recurring reference point in arguments about property, migration, economic pressure and labor regulation. The episodes span 2020 to 2022 and touch the subject from four distinct directions: a think tank’s post-apartheid land-titling campaign, a libertarian first-principles argument about freedom of movement, a discussion of whether sanctions changed South Africa, and a treatment of the South African color bar as a labor-market institution.
Land titling after apartheid
Matt Warner, describing the work of a think tank in Johannesburg, says that in the 1990s it was on the forefront of pushing to end apartheid and to create justice in its aftermath. One effort took the form of pushing for legislation allowing apartheid victims living in government housing the opportunity to win title to where they were living; in many cases their land had been taken from their parents or grandparents, and the aim was restitution and a chance to move beyond a government-housing lifestyle, which Warner says has never been the key to achieving prosperity. The legislation passed in the 1990s, but the think tank found that land titling and home titling had not changed much. Research and a pilot project in a local town revealed a lack of trust in the system: people said they had heard about the program but thought it was too good to be true, did not trust big city lawyers, and would not get involved. The think tank then created a model placing local attorneys in each community and matching them with donors to obtain bulk rates on administrative fees. The project was called Kaya Lam, meaning my home, and Warner says it has helped achieve land title for thousands of post-apartheid victims, with estimates that millions of dollars are available to those sitting on what Hernando de Soto called dead capital — property that, without a land title, cannot be sold or used as collateral for a loan for education or to start a business How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020).
Bob Zadek draws a lesson about scale from the anecdote: with roughly 500 local think tanks around the world, a mistake is small, whereas when USAID makes a mistake it is huge and costs taxpayers large sums. Local think tank mistakes are invisible and too small, and through networking other think tanks learn from each other’s mistakes, developing best practices organically. Zadek says one can imagine that once a few homeowners get title they acquire a capital asset they can borrow against, create a business, improve their life and give some money away, producing a multiplier effect in which wealth is created like magic through the work of the Atlas Network How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020).
Apartheid as a paradigm of unchosen status
Ilya Somin argues for a presumption of freedom of movement across international boundaries, much like the existing presumption of freedom of movement between states within the United States, so that people can move to locations with better government policies and more freedom. He says that even if there should be limitations on that right — and he does not claim any right can be completely absolute — they should not be based simply on where you were born or who your parents are, which he identifies as the main limiting factor in most current immigration law. Domestically and in almost any other context, he says, people take it for granted that liberty should not be limited based on who your parents are or where you were born, and he gives as one reason for this that we reject Jim Crow racial segregation or South African apartheid or other similar policies. He compares a policy that constricts liberty because a person was born south of the Rio Grande rather than north of it to race or ethnicity: where you were born is not something you can control and says nothing about whether you are a good person or how much freedom you should be entitled to Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Bob Zadek supports the point by calling it a founding principle of the country that who your parents are should have no effect on the rights you enjoy. He cites peerage as a principle of English society the founding generation found abhorrent — the status that if your parents were dukes or earls, you were entitled to something by that fact alone — and says most Americans would agree that peerage and the principles for which the Revolution was fought remain principles today. He argues that the inability to enjoy the benefits of life in the country unless your parents lived there when you were born is clearly peerage, an advantage conferred by the accident of birth, and that those who promote strict immigration rules are promoting the principle of peerage, which he says has never been part of American DNA Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Sanctions and the South African precedent
Jonathan Bydlak, discussing the economic consequences of Russian sanctions, says he thinks they will prove effective but adds caveats: exactly how much is uncertain, and it is unclear how long it will take. He notes that the example people point to most often as effective sanctions is the case of getting rid of apartheid in South Africa, and that those sanctions took a very long time if one wants to attribute to them success at changing the reality in that country. He says it is not clear that the desired impact will be achieved within the period of time wanted The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022).
Bydlak also challenges an assumption he attributes to Zadek’s argument — that people will ultimately not stand for sanctions as they may not have stood for certain pandemic actions — by pointing to a difference between the Western world and Russia on the issue of freedom. In the United States people can vocalize frustration, whereas in Russia independent media and alternative viewpoints have basically been shut down, and people cannot protest or vote out Vladimir Putin. He adds that Russian propaganda has blamed the West for the sanctions, and that it is not clear the ultimate outcome of removing Putin from power will happen in the way or on the timeline desired. He says he is personally supportive by and large of the economic actions the US and the rest of the Western world have taken, but that those actions are not without costs The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022).
The color bar as labor-market restriction
Art Carden, discussing minimum wages, says they do not have their origins in good intentions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many US states were passing minimum wage laws, leaders of the economics profession cheered this on, and some said reducing employment was a great thing because it would prevent swarthy immigrants, people with darker skin, and people with differently shaped eyes from the other side of the Pacific from working as much and reproducing as much; Carden paraphrases one of the terms they used, that these groups would not debauch the gene pool. He calls this horribly, absurdly, awfully racist stuff — the claim that the unemployed are genetically inferior to people who look like the speakers Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
Carden says he has been doing a lot of work on institutions and cites the economist William Harold Hutt, who spent most of his career in South Africa. Carden states that the South African color bar, most of apartheid, was aimed specifically at shutting black labor out of skilled occupations to the benefit of highly unionized white labor. He addresses the claim that Elon Musk was a beneficiary of apartheid, saying that from what he understands it is not true, and that the beneficiaries of apartheid would have been the white workers shielded from competition, not the mine owners necessarily — and that this was ultimately to the long-run detriment of everybody. He then returns to minimum wages, saying that support for them comes with good intentions but that they increase the amount of labor people are willing to supply while reducing the amount firms demand, creating unemployment and distorting the ways people compete for artificially scarce jobs Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
Bob Zadek offers the example of a fast-food cashier, a low-skilled entry-level job worth what the worker’s contribution to profits is. If the task must be paid $15 an hour, the employer may hire an uneducated teenager or a retired college professor who is tired of sitting around the house and is erudite; since $15 must be paid anyway, the employer might as well get the professor and underpay that person rather than overpay an employee worth only $6 an hour. The employee worth $6 an hour does not get to sell the services even though willing to accept that market value, and Zadek calls this the mother of all examples of government establishing by fiat rather than by market the value of services Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of apartheid across episodes. Each episode invokes it for a different argument: Warner for post-apartheid land titling and the local think tank model, Somin and Zadek for immigration first principles, Bydlak for the timing of sanctions, and Carden for the labor-market origins of minimum wages. No speaker responds to another’s characterization, and no episode revisits a claim made in an earlier one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the apartheid system’s statutes, its internal chronology, or its ending beyond the references above. They do not name the Johannesburg think tank, the South African legislation on land titling, or the sanctions regime Bydlak alludes to. They do not state the outcome of any South African court case or the constitutional provisions at issue. The Kaya Lam project’s later scale and the full effects of the sanctions are left where the excerpts stop.