Walter E. Williams · Oct. 5, 2016

I was invited, along with several other American professors, to deliver lectures at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1979. Pieter Willem Botha was the prime minister, and apartheid, though becoming a bit relaxed, was the law of the land. Under apartheid, intermarriage between blacks, coloureds and Indians on the one hand and whites was prohibited. There was the Group Areas Act, which determined where different races could live. In addition to many other racially discriminatory laws, there were job reservation laws that determined who could hold what jobs by race. My lecture sought to produce the argument that in free market settings, one is apt to observe less racial discrimination because it is costly to both the discriminated and the discriminator.

So my lecture began with this question: Why doesn’t South Africa have a law against elephants flying? Elephants having no radar and understanding of flight procedures would pose a severe air traffic control problem. The answer to my question is quite simple. There is no need for a law banning elephants from flying because elephants cannot fly. Think about South Africa’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, which banned marriages between people of different races. What about its job reservation laws, which required that only whites be employed in certain occupations, such as blasting, running elevators, driving engines, supervising boilers and other machinery, supervising people’s shifts, and overseeing mines? A question naturally arises: If white people would not intermarry or if white mine owners would not hire blacks to run mine elevators and other machinery, why in the world would a law banning them from doing so be necessary? The answer is that whenever there is a law on the books, one’s immediate suspicion should be that the law is there because not everyone would behave according to the law’s specifications. In other words, some people would intermarry and some mine owners would hire blacks in those reserved jobs….

read more here