Many of the formal rules restricting equality of opportunity have been abolished in the last few generations.
This was in large part because of political struggles by the discriminated against – such as the Chartist demand for universal (male) suffrage in Britain in the mid nineteenth century, the Civil Rights movement by blacks in the US in the 1960s, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and the fight by low caste people in India today.
Without these and countless other campaigns by women, oppressed races and lower caste people, we would still be living in a world where restricting people’s rights according to ‘birth lottery’ would be considered natural.
In this struggle against inequality of opportunity, the market has been a great help.
When only efficiency ensures survival, free-market economists point out, there is no room for racial or political prejudices to creep into market transactions.
Milton Friedman put it succinctly in his Capitalism and Freedom: No one who buys bread knows whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a Communist or a Republican . . . by a Negro or a white.
’ Therefore, Friedman argued, the market will eventually drive racism out, or at least reduce it significantly, because those racist employers insisting on employing only white people would be driven out by more open-minded ones who hire the best available talents, regardless of race.