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. Continue reading →