The Economics of Racist Movements

 Hoisted from Naked Capitalism's "Water Cooler":

“Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors? [Quillette]. Roland Fryer Jr. The article is interesting, but this factoid caught my eye: “Fryer’s first major published work, co-authored with Levitt, deconstructed the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan…. [T]hey were surprised how expensive it was to become a KKK foot soldier: a $10 initiation fee, $6.50 for branded robes, a $5 annual membership charge, plus a mysterious yearly $1.80 ‘imperial tax.’ That’s equivalent to about $350 today—a lot of money for many of the joiners. Fryer tracked the money flow, and found that it fuelled lucrative paydays for upper management. An imperial ‘Kleagle‘ could pocket $300,000 a year (in 2006 dollars). D.C. Stephenson, the “Grand Dragon” of Indiana, made double that. The KKK has the look of what Levitt and Fryer call a ‘classic pyramid scheme,’ but for gullible racists.” • Hitler’s Nazis had to buy their own uniforms, too. I wonder if the Nazis got that idea from the KKK, just as they copied Jim Crow from us (see here “shirt movements” in interwar Europe, perhaps prefiguring the tactics of color revolutions).

 

...Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that when Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare it was rejected by Dixiecrats because they might have to integrate their hospitals. So now the US has healthcare that's twice as expensive, and produces crap results. The WHO international study ranks the US 37th in healthcare outcomes like life expectancy, vaccination rates and infant mortality--between Costa Rica and Slovenia.