How Capitalism Defeats Racism

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PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Wanjiru Njoya, is a Scholar-in-Residence for the Mises Institute, a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

In her essay “Racism,” Ayn Rand argues that racism — which she describes as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism” — is incompatible with capitalism and can only be defeated through capitalism. She defines capitalism as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” She explains that a defense of private property and laissez-faire capitalism is the only way to defeat racism:

“There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism. ... It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world.”

Walter Williams adopts a similar view of the role of capitalism in defeating racism. He argues that only in a capitalist system, where economic gains are made through free market exchange and not by seeking political preferences and protections, can minorities make economic progress: “Free-market resource allocation, as opposed to allocation on political grounds, is in the interests of minorities and/or less preferred individuals. ... The market encompasses a sort of parity nonexistent in the political arena, where one person’s dollar has the same power as anyone else’s.”

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BIO: Wanjiru Njoya, is a Scholar-in-Residence for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon) and “A Critique of Equality Legislation in Liberal Market Economies” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2021).

She was born in New Jersey but grew up in Kenya. After graduating with a law degree from the University of Nairobi, she won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at St. Edmunds College, Cambridge University. Her doctoral research on the conceptual framework of the employment relationship was published under the title “Property in Work: The Employment Relationship in the Anglo-American Firm.”

She has taught law at St. Johns College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, Queens University in Canada, and, for the past six and one-half years, at the University of Exeter Law School, where she was a Senior Lecturer in Law. She is also a Fellow of the UK Higher Educational Academy. She has published widely in employment law and labor regulations, most recently in the King’s Law Journal, the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy, and the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

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Wanjiru Njoya, is a Scholar-in-Residence for the Mises Institute, a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.