political markets, economic markets, and the poor

Walter Williams makes a series of familiar/famous points in his most recent JewishWorldReview.com effort...

He takes solid pokes at Davis-Bacon laws and mandatory licensing in cabs. But I'm going to excerpt what he says about capitalism, interest-group democracy, socialism-- and poverty.

Listening to America's liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth....In poor black neighborhoods, one might see some nice clothing, some nice food, some nice cars but no nice schools. Why not at least some nice schools? Clothing, food and cars are distributed by the market mechanism while schools are distributed by the political mechanism.