Arnold Plant had constructed similar arguments during the 1920s, drawing on the economic principles he had learned from Edwin Cannan. Plant’s first publication concerned the wage differentials secured by a segregated labor market, whether in South Africa or the American South, translating a denunciation by Lord Bryce of racial discrimination into the language of rent-seeking behavior. Poor whites, he argued, unable to compete on equal terms with blacks, employed political means to place blacks at a permanent disadvantage and hence extract a rent. He maintained that such impediments to the working of the labor market impoverished black workers and reduced overall economic efficiency, and hence the welfare of all. Later, during the 1930s, he wrote two papers on patents and copyrights, which similarly identified these legal instruments as monopolistic in character, secured as a property right created by statute.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 401