Jim Crow as government coercion
On The Bob Zadek Show, Jim Crow is discussed chiefly as a body of law imposed by state governments rather than as a private business practice. Bob Zadek told Veronique de Rugy that segregated lunch counters and hotels that would not rent rooms to blacks in the Jim Crow South were not examples of discrimination in the marketplace, because refusing to serve blacks at lunch counters and to let them stay at hotels was the law in the South. He said that was not done as a business model, and that there is no indication that a business voluntarily posting a “No blacks” sign could possibly survive. De Rugy replied that discrimination persists only when it is enforced by the government. Veronique de Rugy on the Gender Pay Gap (2019)
Zadek returned to the point in a later episode, telling William Evers that in the Jim Crow South, when government was itself racist, the Jim Crow laws were there to fight capitalism, because capitalism would allow blacks to purchase goods and to open up stores. Evers cited Walter Williams, described as a retired economist at George Mason University, and Jennifer Roback Morse, saying she explained that the Jim Crow laws and the segregation laws in the South were meant to prevent up-and-coming, striving blacks from competing against entrenched white interests, whether workers or companies. Evers said this racism in its legal embodiment in the South was blocking capitalism and blocking competition. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)
Evers offered the example of labor contractors after the Civil War, who sought out black workers in the countryside for jobs elsewhere, such as building a railroad or a new light industry factory, providing a railroad ticket or carting money and taking a fee from the company. He compared them to electronic platforms that help Uber drivers meet Uber customers, and said the Jim Crow laws outlawed these labor contractors — the same mentality of stopping the productive middleman in order to keep racial privilege in place. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)
Jim Crow, labor supply and the minimum wage
In a 2021 episode, Zadek told Edward Conard that Jim Crow laws did what restrictions on the supply of unskilled labor do: they prevented somebody from selling an hour of their labor for what they were willing to accept and what somebody else was willing to pay. He grouped Jim Crow with the minimum wage as governmental policies that restricted the supply of unskilled labor, calling them now an embarrassment and an abhorrence to anybody with any kind of moral compass. Questioning Biden’s Inequality Narrative (2021)
Conard agreed in general, saying that to control the supply of something you have got to do it with guns, and that minimum wage laws and Jim Crow laws point the guns at ourselves, which he called a very dangerous and often immoral thing to do. He distinguished this from immigration policy, where the guns are pointed at the rest of the world. Questioning Biden’s Inequality Narrative (2021)
Jim Crow and the drug war
Jeffrey Miron, in a 2017 episode on the drug war, said the history of drug and alcohol prohibition correlates very strongly with attempts to suppress minorities or specific ethnicities, citing the banning of smoking in an opium den aimed at Chinese immigrants on the West Coast in the 19th century and the attempt to outlaw marijuana in the ’20s and ’30s, which coincided with immigration from Mexico. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Miron called Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow the best recent analysis of this history, and said the book is even more depressing than one might think because it suggests that legalization, which he and Zadek advocate, would only be a partial solution to the problems of the criminal justice system. As he described her story, there is an inherent racism — not in every human being or everyone in the United States, but enough — such that as Jim Crow laws were repealed and the explicit aspects of legal segregation were peeled back, part of the white majority wanted some new way to keep African Americans away, to keep them down, to keep them suppressed, and locking them up under the cover of the drug laws ended up being a politically acceptable, convenient way to do that. On that interpretation, Miron said, eliminating the drug laws by itself is not necessarily going to get rid of those unwanted racist attitudes, which may manifest themselves in some other way. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Jim Crow and generational wealth
Michael Tanner, in a 2019 episode on anti-poverty policy, said the wealth many African Americans would otherwise have today was stripped away over the years, going back to slavery, and cited studies by Julian Simon and others suggesting that about $7 trillion in African American wealth was lost because of slavery. He added that this does not count the years of Jim Crow that went on, and the discrimination that continues today and damps down African Americans in many ways. Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019)
Tanner said that in the Jim Crow South, African Americans who got educated were killed, lynched for the crime of being educated, which means there would not be the same legacy of educational attainment as in some other communities. He said white communities in many cases gained wealth from businesses that exploited African Americans, through slavery or by paying them lower wages, and that this built up inheritance many white people have. He invoked Nozick’s rectification principle: if wealth was not gained justly in the first place, then you cannot necessarily say it is always theft to redistribute it. Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019)
Jim Crow and the growth of judicial power
Josh Blackman, in a 2020 episode on the Supreme Court, said the Court had stood by idly for decades as segregation and Jim Crow spread, and that at some point the Warren Court — the court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren — said enough is enough and needed to assert itself. He described a very short glide path from desegregating schools to prohibiting bans on abortion, and said that once the Court took itself out of the mentality of deference, there was no reason it should not substitute its wisdom for that of the other branches. In his account these decisions made little pretense about the text and original meaning of the Constitution, resting instead on the idea that we are living here in the 1950s or 1960s, we are in a contemporary society, and we cannot have these things anymore. Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020)
Across episodes: the same argument, extended
The same question — whether Jim Crow was a market phenomenon or a legal one — is argued in more than one episode, and the later treatments extend rather than revise the earlier ones. In the 2019 episode on the gender pay gap, Zadek and de Rugy establish the baseline claim that segregation in the South was imposed by law and that the free market punishes irrational discrimination. Veronique de Rugy on the Gender Pay Gap (2019) In the 2020 episode with Evers, the claim is extended to labor contractors and occupational licensing, with Evers naming Walter Williams and Jennifer Roback Morse and comparing post-Civil War labor contractors to modern ride-hailing platforms. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020) In the 2021 episode, Zadek and Conard fold Jim Crow into a broader account of coercion and the supply of unskilled labor, alongside the minimum wage and immigration restriction. Questioning Biden’s Inequality Narrative (2021) Miron’s 2017 discussion adds a different extension, arguing through Alexander’s book that the repeal of Jim Crow laws did not eliminate the underlying attitudes and that ending the drug laws would be only a partial solution. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017) Tanner’s 2019 discussion supplies the wealth dimension, and Blackman’s 2020 discussion supplies the judicial-power dimension. Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019) Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not identify the statutes, cases or amendments that defined Jim Crow, and they do not give the dates of its rise or legal end. They do not describe the content of Michelle Alexander’s argument beyond Miron’s summary, nor the holdings of any Warren Court decision. They do not state the founding date or full statement of Nozick’s rectification principle, and they do not say what became of the labor-contractor laws Evers describes. Where an excerpt breaks off mid-sentence, the thought is left unfinished.