Fire John Stossel!
Want to sign the petition to get me fired? Here’s a group leading the campaign. They write:
Stossel’s position is an affront to Black America and everyone in this country who believes in racial progress…. add your voice to the call to fire Stossel…
My “position” was telling Megyn Kelly that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate. Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul is being attacked for expressing skepticism about the “public accommodation” section of the Civil Rights Act. I argued that Paul is right, that the Civil Rights Act was great because it abolished government discrimination (Jim Crow Laws), but problematic because it tells private actors what to do.
Media Matters sneered: "Market forces hadn't exactly made anti-black discrimination disappear during the several centuries before the Civil Rights Act."
But as economist Don Boudreaux points out, that was because government got in the way:
Jim Crow itself was government power. Jim Crow was legislation that forced the segregation of blacks from whites.
Many private businesses objected to government-forced segregation. In the Journal of Economic History, Economic Historian Jennifer Roebuck pointed out that street car companies wanted to serve Blacks. When the State of Florida forced transportation companies to segregate races in 1905, the Florida Times-Union reported:
[I]t was passed by the Legislature much against the will of the streetcar companies operating in the state… the streetcar company in this city has always accorded to the colored people who have patronized their lines the most careful and generous treatment… it is thought that there will be no concerted efforts on the part of the colored people of Jacksonville to boycott the streetcars.
Blacks boycotted the railroad anyway. So a competing company built new lines that served mostly blacks and seated them in front, whites in the back. The market partially got around the racist Jim Crow law in that case.
In another case from 1902, Mobile, Alabama, passed a segregation law that the Mobile Light and Railroad Company “flat out refused to enforce.” Enter the fist of government:
On November 1 [1902], the police chief wrote to the president of the Mobile Light and Railroad Company, advising him that the ordinance would be enforced by the police force if necessary… One of [the company’s] conductors was arrested and fined on December 12.
The Savannah Tribune, a black newspaper, reported in 1899 that: “We have always said that the railroad officials are not anxious to carry into effect the unjust laws passed by the several states requiring separate cars for the races.”
The free market is naturally color-blind. Businesses want to make money, and they do that best by serving customers of all races. Eventually, inclusive businesses grow, and racists go broke.
Racist Southern governments hated integration, so they used government force to make companies segregate.
Eight out of ten provisions in the Civil Rights Act struck down those horrible Jim Crow laws. But the other two provisions are a mistake. They violate individuals’ freedom to decide with whom to associate.
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