In an interview with Reason magazine, February 1986, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther who converted later to Christianity, showed a keen appreciation of many free-market principles:

Cleaver: I’ve come to basically the same conclusions. My life, I think, spans the whole era of the welfare state. I was born in 1935. I remember when people were ashamed to be on welfare and receive state aid and all that, but we developed a situation where black people to a large degree and a lot of other groups such as elderly people, children and a lot of poor white people ended being harnessed by political forces, particularly the Democratic Party. In return for the federal appropriations that we now dependent upon, our leaders were obligated to get out the black vote for the Democratic Party. So this put us in a negative relationship with the economic system. We were dependent upon the federal budget—a very precarious situation, because when the political winds change, we get our living cut off.

REASON: How do you break that dependence? Something like 90 percent of blacks voted for Mondale.

Cleaver: Ninety percent of voting blacks. A majority of the black people didn’t participate in the election and never have. But I think that the only way to break the cycle is to give—not give, but make it possible for black people to have a stake in the economic system, where they earn wages, salaries, interest, and dividends. This is the only way you can break that. You’re not going to pull your living out of the air. If you can’t get your living through participation in the production process, then you are going into dependency on the consumption process. I would like to see black people flood into the productive process.

REASON: Are problems of poverty things that the government can solve, or do they have answers elsewhere, through different institutions or the private sector?

Cleaver: It would have to be the private sector. But at the point where we are right now, the government can’t just bow out. This is one of the problems Reagan had. He scared the hell out of people because he started cutting programs, but he didn’t spend enough time talking to people about how to replace them. So people had this idea that he was just throwing them aside.

What we have to do is organize people in free institutions that can put them to work, and then they can draw their living out of our economy, not out of the federal treasury. Because the federal treasury doesn’t produce anything. It gets what it has out of the private sector.

We need entities where people could belong to organizations that are not controlled by government. The organizations could come up with projects that would benefit society and then they could earn money that would come out of that national product and not filter through the state. If we do it through the state like, say, President Roosevelt did it with the New Deal, you augment the power of the state. But if you do it through decentralized structures that are controlled by the people, then we maintain our freedom, within a free institution. I don’t want to see the government get control of the economic system as a whole and the livelihood of all the people, because I have seen that, and it’s a no-no.

REASON: Aren’t private ventures of this sort what people like Muslim dissident leader Louis Farrakhan are after? What do you think of Farrakhan?

Cleaver: I know Farrakhan. You know, he taps a deep chord among the people because people want to be involved in some enterprise, they want to have money that they can control and get some benefit out of, something that the government doesn’t control. The same activity that Farrakhan is talking about doing could be funded in other ways. But because we don’t have any provision for that, he goes to Qaddafi. The problem with that is that Qaddafi is not giving away anything. He has some strings attached.

REASON: Is Farrakhan a dangerous man because of his Qaddafi connection?

Cleaver: Certainly he’s a dangerous man, because he will do things for them—intelligence things, but also military things.

REASON: When you were living in exile in Cuba and Algeria, what was it that started to make you rethink your view of them and their government?

Cleaver I had a great burning desire to help enlarge human freedom and no desire at all to increase human misery or totalitarianism, so I stood up in America to fight against what I saw as the evils of I our system. Then to go to a country like Cuba or Algeria or the Soviet Union and see the nature of control that those state apparatuses had over the people—it was shocking to me. I didn’t want to believe it, because it meant that the politics that I was espousing was wrong and was leading toward a very bad situation. So, I tried to figure out what was wrong.

You know, the communists teach you that the dictatorship is a transient phase—that once capitalism is eliminated, then the state will wither away and you will have freedom. Well, when you look at those governments up close and see how they treat their own people, you can’t believe in that. You see that people are using that preachment of the withering away of the state as their excuse to justify their own dictatorial power. The way that the goods and services of the economy are distributed, the way that the power mechanism is organized and the monopoly on power by the Communist Party, the control of the Communist Party apparatus by an elite—these things struck me as dangerous. And then when I had a chance to get to know people and see what the experiences had been in these countries since their revolutions, it made me realize that a new form, a worse form, of totalitarianism was creeping into the world and that it was necessary to sound an alarm against it, stand up and protest it—without sugar-coating anything that’s wrong over here.

That’s been the mistake made by a lot of people in assessing what I have said. I have never intended to say that we can rest on our laurels or we can stay right where we are. But I wanted to point out that we had better be careful where we jump when we jump out of the frying pan.”

Read the whole interview by Lynn Scarlett and Bill Kauffman at Reason, February 1986