If you were a white South African businessman, one with entrepreneurial proclivities and without racist blinders, you might very well despise apartheid. You’d realize how surely the system picks your pocket. Because that nation’s black majority is unable to function actively as either a profit-aiding consumer market or as a cost-reducing labor market, whites receive diminished return on investment and spend more to acquire goods and services; that’s the cost of protecting white “privilege.” The mechanisms of this protectionism are at the heart of apartheid and they define, as Walter E. Williams summarizes in the title of his new book. South Africa’s War against Capitalism (Praeger, 160 pp., $37.95).
This “war” is a part of South African history. Both J. C. Smuts and J. B. M. Herzog, two of South Africa’s leading statesmen in the first half of this century, saw apartheid as the bulwark in a struggle against the “tyranny” of capitalism. More recent South African leaders have learned to soften anti-capitalist rhetoric, and to emphasize the “struggle” against the Communist leanings of the African National Congress. Professor Williams traces the economic history of apartheid, concluding that it “has been an attack on free markets and the rights of individuals, and a glorification of centralized government power.”
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