State Against Blacks [Paperback]

Walter E. Williams (Author), W. E. Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1984

In a beautifully persuasive chapter called "Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly," Williams demonstrates that minimum wage laws hit inevitably at marginal workers who cannot in the circumstances do enough work in a given hour to make a profit for their employers. The consequence of the minimum wage is that nobody will hire people who haven't yet learned certain skills or absorbed certain disciplinary lessons. It is purely accidental that the worst negative effects of the compulsory minimum wage are borne by nonwhite teenagers, followed by non white males in their twenties.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies (July 1984)
• ISBN-10: 0070703795
• ISBN-13: 978-0070703797
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,693,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well-researched look at good intentions gone awry, November 28, 1998

By 

Tomm Carr ([e-mail]) (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: State Against Blacks (Paperback)

This book goes into meticulous detail how government programs, ostensibly meant to help the common American worker, actually exacts a tremendous toll on all of American society. However, as Williams so well documents, the costs of these programs fall disproportionately on blacks and other minorities.

One example from the book is the taxi licensing in New York City. Licensing was implemented in the 1930's, and, due to the political pull of existing license holders, not one additional license (medallion) has been issued in more than 60 years. To handle the increased demand for taxi service (there are, after all, a few more people in NYC today than in the '30s) a black market fleet of thousands of illegal taxi drivers has "plagued" the city from almost the very beginning. These "Gypsy" taxis handle the perpetual overflow caused by too many passengers trying to catch too few taxis. They are often the only service to and from the poorer New York neighborhoods that the licensed taxis will not enter.

No one knows exactly how many Gypsy taxis there are at any one time traveling the streets of New York. But the Gypsy taxi driver is almost invariably a poor black or Puerto Rican man who is just trying to eke out an honest living despite the best intentions of the city government.

If you are of the opinion that government programs have aided minorities, and helped them on the way to realizing the American dream, you need to read this book.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most eye-opening, well-reasoned books I've read, December 28, 1999

By 

Jeanmarie Todd "locavore omnivore bookovore" (Mendocino County, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The State Against Blacks (Hardcover)

I have a copy of this stored somewhere and am looking for another ``loaner'' copy. This book had a huge impact on my thinking when I first read it in my mid-20s. Walter Williams has a gift for making economics clear and nonthreatening to the average reader. The video based on the book is also excellent if you can find it. Exposes the terrible toll America's myriad laws constraining working people, including the minimum wage, have taken on blacks among others. Raises important issues related to the unintented consequences of laws and regulations. Or, in many cases, intended but hidden consequences. Taxi medallions (licenses) benefit not riders or would-be drivers but the few who can get their hands on one, to cite one example. Find it, read it. You owe it to yourself to read this if you care at all about public policy, freedom, or society.

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Classic waiting for a new edition, August 1, 2003

By 

Mark Horne (Saint Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The State Against Blacks (Hardcover)

The only reason I don't give this five stars is that it is decades old now. Why doesn't Walter Williams get his students to do some up-to-date research and come up with an expanded edition?

But the book is awesome--easily (apart from datedness) worth six stars out of five. And because it explains really well why the average person of color came from a poorer family in the eighties, one could even argue that it remains quite contemporary. More importantly, the principles articulated here are quite easily applied to a variety of other situations.

The basic thesis (I'm going by memory here) is that even though "jim crow" laws have been removed from the state governments, that the federal, state, and local governments have in fact passed laws and (especially!) regulations that disproportionately hurt blacks and promote their poverty rather than their prosperity. One reviewer has already mentioned the taxicab example. At one time, if one had a car, one could offer one's services as a taxi cab driver. But now the City government has made it illegal for a person to offer that service. Walter Williams discusses the proffered rationales for this use of state violence (Williams's tone is not nearly as severe as mine, but what can I say?: All laws are statements threatening people with violence who don't comply.). But they are easily shown as bogus. The existing cab drivers are lining their pockets with money from all other potential cab drivers. This is a colorblind system of robbery, but it is not economically blind. It hurts those who have a car and can drive but who don't have other more lucrative opportunities. Due to past injustices that were not color-blind, this injustice ends up not being color-blind either. Because minorities are disproportionately poor, laws exploiting the poor are laws that especially target certain races.

Basically, the relative poverty of those who are poor today cannot be addressed in the same way as it once was. Various laws have knocked many rungs out of "the ladder of success" that were once in place for the European immigrant waves of yesteryear.

Another example that especially sticks in my memory is Walter Williams' historical analysis showing that poor black outbid richer whites at the same houses in the cities. The reason for this was that multiple families were willing to subdivide and share dwellings. Williams shows how much money a racist landlord would lose if he tried to be racist in his practices by refusing to rent to blacks. But those opportunities were no longer present when African Americans had an incentive to leave the inner city. The suburbs had passed laws denying landowners the freedom to control their property. It became illegal for more than one family to share a house. (Incidentally, this is a cause of homelessness in general; see http://www.reformed.org/webfiles/antithesis/v1n3/ant_v1n3_homeless.html).

Also cutting off blacks from economic opportunities were the industry regulations for occupations such as beauty salons. It is horrible that there are discrepancies in the education that minorities receive, but it doesn't help to arbitrarily demand unnecessary education accomplishments of people who want to cut other people's hair for a living. Again, this was a case of a law that simply artificially raised beauty salon prices by putting up barriers that kept others out of the market. Why should better-educated whites make a living at the expense of blacks? Why should a black be threatened with fines and jail time for cutting peoples hair and receiving money in exchange for that service?

Readers will be surprised to discover what South African labor unions resorted to when they were unable to continue using blatantly racist laws to keep blacks from competing with them: minimum wage laws. In a racist culture, if you force everyone to be paid an artificially high level, racist employers can afford to be racist. But if blacks can outbid whites at their labor, a racist employer will soon be driven out of business if he tries to hire his preference. Of course, blacks should get paid the same as whites, and that is what we should all want. But which brings that vision closer to reality, blacks learning job skills and integrating in the work force, or blacks forced into permanent unemployment by laws that basically allow some workers to gain at the expense of other workers? Don't whites have enough privileges already? The market is a force for integration if politicians will leave it alone.

Besides all this, minimum wage laws, unless they are set too low to matter, would discriminate against minorities regardless of present-day racism. Again, such laws hurt the poor for the sake of the better off. Those whose labor, due to lack of education and training, is not worth the level set by the law, are forced into unemployment. It is illegal to hire them. And because minorities are disproportionately poor, such economic exploitation is also race exploitation.

Reading this book was a life-changing experience in college, one that I tried rather ineffectively to share with my socially conscious peers. I can't recommend it enough. --Mark