… is from Thomas Sowell’s October 28, 2005, column, “Rosa Parks and history“:
Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn it was government that created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.
These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit — and you don’t make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.
It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.
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People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
Black people’s money was just as good as white people’s money, even though that was not the case when it came to votes.
For more depth and detail, see Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (1976).
