| Economic pressure should have altered those instances where racial practices were a matter of custom, not law, and, in any case, should have eroded support for the relevant laws. But it is not so much a matter of whether it was given a fair test, as that we really do not know if, in some longer run, market pressures alone (even without legal support) would have changed things, and the resistance to even ordinary measures, like voter registration, was so brutal, that there is a danger that a racial regime would have been enforced by groups like the Klan even had the market eroded segregationist sentiment. Anyway, my ultimate point has to do with the hypothetical question I left at the end, not surmise over the power of markets to correct social injustice........ |
