Want Less Segregation? Shrink the State.
"Birds of a feather flock together."
This rule governs our social relationships. It does not govern our economic relationships. This pair of facts is unfortunately not understood very well. Sociologists do not understand this paradox. Economists do, but they rarely emphasize it.
THE CHURCH
Let me give an obvious example. Most Americans attend churches with similar racial makeup. It is said that the church is the most racially segregated institution in the United States. This is one of the stupidest statements I can imagine. The church, meaning the church as a whole, is the most integrated institution in the United States, and everywhere else on earth. There is no other institution that comes close to the integration of the church.
The tax-funded schools come close, but they are imitations of the church. They are the West's only established church.
It was not an accident that Massachusetts in 1833 became the last state to stop using taxes to subsidize local churches, and became the first state with a state Board of Education in 1837. It was an obvious transition. It was Unitarianism's coup against the Trinitarians. It worked.
When people say that the church is the most racially segregated institution in America, they have in mind local congregations. But a single local congregation is not the church. The church is the all-encompassing, international, multilingual, multicultural institution that has survived for almost 2000 years.
A local congregation is segregated on a voluntary basis. It was far less segregated under the old slave system. Slaves attended church in the American South with their owners. They sat in a different section of the church, but they were in church. Slave owners were generally resistant to Methodist preachers, because Methodist preachers went into the slave quarters and preached when owners were absent. Some of them were black. Slave owners were not interested in that kind of segregation.
The reason there is an African Methodist Episcopal Church is because ex-slaves were not welcomed into the white Episcopal Church after 1865. So, they combined the two traditions. They had been Methodists in the slave quarters; they had been Episcopalians in the slave section of church.
People worship in the way their granddaddies worshiped. Anyway, the old-timers do. They worship with people who look like they do, who think like they do, who sing the same hymns they do, who like the same liturgy they do, and who live in the same kinds of subdivisions that they do. This is all voluntary. This is how people want to worship. People don't want to be sore thumbs.
Today, anybody can join an Episcopal Church. My daughter did. The acorn did not land close to the oak. But at least it's in the same yard. There is a lot of money in the Episcopal Church. This comes as no shock to anyone. There has always been a lot of money in the Episcopal Church. If somebody who is poor wants to rub shoulders with somebody who is rich, he can do this once a week. All he has to do is join an Episcopal Church. He doesn't even have to join. He can just show up. These days, given the decline in membership in the Episcopal Church, he will be welcomed. But poor people don't often go inside Episcopal churches. They don't want to rub shoulders with the rich. They feel uncomfortable rubbing shoulders with the rich.
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
Yet these same poor people are perfectly content to wait on the rich in a local business. Somebody with money walks into a Staples store or some other business-oriented store, and there are people with low incomes who are willing to serve him. There is peace. There is also prosperity. The poor person who is behind the checkout counter is glad to see a rich person come in the door and buy something. That means the store is going keep its doors open, which means he is going to have a job.
People who work at a fast food restaurant don't have a lot of money. They also tend to be young. I do not associate much in my social connections with people who don't have a lot of money and who are young. There is no reason for this.
People who don't have a lot of money and who are young do not associate socially with old men with money, except with respect to that oldest of all economic transactions.
Professors interact with students. The students don't have much money. The students are young; the professors are older. The students will someday be in the social class as the professors, but there is a distinct difference today. The professors are raking it in, and the students, or least their parents, are shoveling it out. The students want into the same social class as the professors. They may even want to get into a higher social class than the professors. But, while they are in college, they are in a very different social class.
They are in the same economic class in one sense. Upper-class people are future-oriented. Lower-class people are present-oriented. Students who go to college are upper-class people. They are looking to the future. They are sacrificing in the present in order to benefit in the future. They are giving up time, which is irreplaceable. Economic class position is based on time perspective far more than it is based on economic wherewithal in the present.
A professor walks into a classroom, and the students probably look like him. An exception would be if he is at the University of California, Berkeley, and he is in the social sciences. He is white; a lot of the students are Asians. But, in terms of money, and especially in terms of income, the students don't have much, and the professors do.
The great benefit that trade offers to people in the lower-income segment of the economy is they can make a living selling to people with a lot more money. Maybe they are thrifty. They are future-oriented. If they train their children in this class outlook, their children will rise both socially and economically. This is what immigrants have done in the United States for over 350 years. They start out poor; their grandchildren move in the middle class. In terms of time perspective, an immigrant is upper-class.
The free market allows people of widely varying incomes to come together and voluntarily work together in order to improve each other's conditions. This is a tremendous benefit of the free market.
Nobody with money thinks twice about the fact that his gardener does not have a lot of money. The gardener may think twice about it, because the gardener is constantly looking for referrals. He knows that he may get a referral from somebody with a lot of money to somebody else with a lot of money.
If the gardener gets enough referrals, he can hire another team of gardeners. If he is really successful in getting referrals, he can stop gardening altogether, and just be a manager. He moves closer to the social class in which his customers operate. He moves up both economically and socially, precisely because the free market allows him to cooperate with people who are way above him in terms of social position and economic position, but who may actually be lower than he is in terms of time perspective. They may be third-generation or fourth-generation consumers of capital, and he may be a future-oriented upper-class person who is extremely thrifty and is building capital. He will move up; they will move down.
SEGREGATION AND STATE VIOLENCE
People naturally segregate themselves socially. People naturally do not segregate themselves economically. Rich people may deal with rich people in doing big deals, but some of the deals that they do are with lower-income people, who provide the services they need. Rich people do not deal exclusively with people in their own social and economic circles. They never have. Rich people have always needed the services of poor people. Poor people do the services that richer people will not do.
The central economic fact of the free market is this: people on both sides of a potential transaction assess whether or not the transaction is likely to be beneficial, and they also assess whether to perform another similar transaction later on. Repeat business involves multiple transactions over time. That is where the long-term benefits are. The free market brings people of varying income levels and varying social classes together in mutually beneficial transactions.
All attempts to use the state to redistribute income create barriers between economic classes. The threat of violence against the rich alienates the rich from the poor. Politics intervenes in such a way that what would have been profitable transactions in the past now become filled with suspicion and even resentment. The poor, hearkening to cries of the redistributionists, begin to resent the rich. The rich, threatened by the cries of the redistributionists, begin to resent the poor. The threat of violence disrupts what would have been a profitable arrangement for both rich and poor, and everybody in between.
There are more poor people than rich people. But rich people are better organized politically. The threat to the rich is that the poor will organize politically against them. The threat to the poor is that the rich will organize against them politically. The threat to both groups is politics.
When somebody comes to a rich man and announces: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you and your class," the rich man is in trouble. That is because another government agent will approach the poor, and will make the same offer. This moves toward the destruction of those areas of life in which rich and poor happily cooperate. Rich and poor happily benefit.
When the ethics of wealth redistribution by the threat of violence enters into society, segregation increases every time.
CONCLUSION
Voluntarism benefits members of all classes. We have seen social conflict whenever one group uses the state to gain an advantage, an advantage based on violence. Violence creates a new mentality, one which reduces cooperation. When people cease to cooperate, segregation increases. Conflict increases.
When the bus driver told Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus in 1955, that was because the bus line was owned by the local government, and because state law mandated segregation in government agencies. In the 1890's, public transportation was integrated, because it was privately owned. That is why states in the South passed laws segregating public transport. The politicians resented the lack of social segregation that was visible on the seats of privately owned transport systems.
If you want less racial segregation, shrink the state. Let freedom ring.