Friday, December 6, 2013

Labor Unions Provided The Political Support For Apartheid In S Africa

From The Circle Bastiat, "Mandela and the Economics of Apartheid" by Peter G. Klein:
Apartheid is widely misunderstood as a system based purely on racial prejudice, while it was actually a more complex mix of economic controls (primarily, restrictions on capital ownership and movements of labor) and racial separatism — what Tom Hazlett calls "socialism with a racist face." Apartheid’s political support came primarily from working-class (white) Afrikaners and their labor unions eager to suppress competition from unskilled black labor. As Hazlett notes: "The conventional view is that apartheid was devised by affluent whites to suppress poor blacks. In fact, the system sprang from class warfare and was largely the creation of white workers struggling against both the black majority and white capitalists."
Similarly, in the US, labor unions and minimum wage laws kept Blacks from competitng with Whites for jobs.

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