… is from page 165 of William Easterly’s hot-off-the-press Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest [footnotes deleted]:
He [Frederick Douglass] saw markets offered a crucial alternative to paternalism. A free labor market, Douglass said, would “let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows.” Douglass told white philanthropists that market participation by the former slaves was “the best way to help them,” which “is just to let them help themselves.
DBx: Douglass was correct. Yet today, many well-meaning people – either ignorant of economics or too clever with economics-textbook models and careless with data – support the likes of minimum-wage legislation, occupational licensing, and special privileges for labor unions as means of helping ordinary workers. These people’s tunnel vision allows them to see only the workers who are benefitted by these labor-market restrictions; these people’s tunnel vision blinds them to the workers who are harmed.
