Racial segregation operates as rent-seeking that impoverishes black workers

Evidence

Arnold Plant had constructed similar arguments during the 1920s, drawing on the economic principles he had learned from Edwin Cannan. Plant’s first publication concerned the wage differentials secured by a segregated labor market, whether in South Africa or the American South, translating a denunciation by Lord Bryce of racial discrimination into the language of rent-seeking behavior. Poor whites, he argued, unable to compete on equal terms with blacks, employed political means to place blacks at a permanent disadvantage and hence extract a rent. He maintained that such impediments to the working of the labor market impoverished black workers and reduced overall economic efficiency, and hence the welfare of all. Later, during the 1930s, he wrote two papers on patents and copyrights, which similarly identified these legal instruments as monopolistic in character, secured as a property right created by statute. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 401

Categorization

• XREF: Plant’s framing of Jim Crow as rent extraction through political means connects to later public choice theory (Olson, Tullock) and to the reader’s interest in how libertarian economics absorbed a critique of segregation on efficiency rather than moral grounds. — connects to: Occupational segregation creates white jobs and black jobs that tax policy treats unequally — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 353; Jim Crow era labor discrimination forced black workers into unbenefited sectors — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 9; White workers cemented segregation to protect their labor advantages — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1459
• QUESTION: Does this rent-seeking reading of segregation appear in the standard history of American libertarian responses to civil rights? Plant’s analysis predates and anticipates what others argued decades later.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 401

Broader Connections

• Occupational segregation creates white jobs and black jobs that tax policy treats unequally #expands (0.80) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 353
• Jim Crow era labor discrimination forced black workers into unbenefited sectors #expands (0.80) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 9