… is from page 201 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1981 volume, Ethnic America: A History (footnotes deleted):
In the post-Civil War era, southern white employers and landowners sought to band together to restrict the money and discretion they had to give to blacks. Yet, despite the economic strength, political power, and organizational advantages of the whites, these restrictive agreements failed repeatedly in the face of competition for laborers and sharecroppers. Black income grew at a higher percentage rate than white income during the last third of the nineteenth century.
DBx: The three footnotes not shown in the above quotation are all to Robert Higgs’s remarkable 1977 book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914.
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Liberalism – it is well to recall today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural. Hence it is not to be wondered that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
The savage is preëminently his brother’s keeper. He knows precisely what his brother ought to do in every situation and is full of indignation when it is not done. But the civilized man has doubts….
The name of the man who first made a slave of fire … is unknown to historians: burrow and sweat as they will, their efforts to unearth it are always baffled. And no wonder. For isn’t it easy to imagine how infamous that name must have been while it was still remembered, and how diligent and impassioned the endeavor to erase it from the tablets of the race? One pictures the indignation of the clergy when so vast an improvement upon their immemorial magic confronted them, and their herculean and unanimous struggle, first to put it down as unlawful and against God, and then to collar it for themselves. Bonfires were surely not unknown in the morning of the Pleistocene, for there were lightnings then as now, but the first one kindled by mortal hands must have shocked humanity. One pictures news flashing from cave to cave and from tribe to tribe – out of Central Asia and then across the grasslands, and they around the feet of the glaciers into the gloomy, spook-haunted wilderness that is now Western Europe, and so across in Africa. Something new and dreadful was upon the human race, and by the time the Ur-Mississippians of the Neander Valley heard of it, you may be sure, the discoverer has sprouted horns and was in the pay of the Devil.
There are, in the last resort, no economic ends. The economic efforts of the individuals as well as the services which the market order renders to them, consist in an allocation of means for the competing ultimate purposes which are always non-economic. The task of all economic activity is to reconcile the competing ends by deciding for which of them the limited means are to be used. The market order reconciles the claims of the different non-economic ends by the only know process that benefits all – without, however, assuring that the more important comes before the less important, for the simple reason that there can exist in such a system no single ordering of needs.
