I’ve written many times on my blog that those societies which enact anti discrimination laws accomplish only one thing, and that is to reduce to zero, the costs associated with capricious behavior. It is one of the things which will send the political left into a tizzy, have them screaming racist from what ever roof top they can find, and more specifically, get them to spout off some of the most economically illiterate arguments concerning basic economics that I’ve ever heard. It may or may not interest everyone reading this that I did not just make that thought up from thin air. As it turns out, that very statement, and the research to prove it, won an economist named Gary Becker the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992. That by the way was still a time when a Nobel Prize meant something more than just the prize for the person who did something noteworthy in the arena of leftist political advancement. Yes, there was more to Becker’s theory than that one statement, but that is the nub of it. He showed conclusively that fairness laws produce only the opposite result upon which they are sold to the public, that the free market price system is the greatest tool available to modern man which actually does end racial or any other type of societal discrimination. Unfortunately, the politicians who often get themselves elected by convincing Americans that they have some basic understanding of economics will more often than not simply pretend that Gary Becker never existed, and that is a real shame.
Gary Becker passed away this week, and one of his former students wrote a nice essay paying homage to his former teacher. It would be nice, if some time during our century old national discussion on race, we would actually allow for substantive debate to trump emotional demagoguery, but that’s just a pipe dream of mine. Becker’s theory you see wouldn’t allow for the professional race huxters, grievance pimps, shakedown artists, or political bosses to keep using America’s most profitable divide to stoke their own self centered agendas.
Here’s Thomas Sowell, who I believe deserves a Nobel Prize for Economics based upon his work with empirical analysis alone. He’s done more to follow up on Becker’s work than any other economist alive. In this video he discusses some of that research with William F. Buckley during an interview in 1983.
