Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Bill Black — The Libertarian Plea to Bring Back Jim Crow: An Oxymoron by a Regular Moron
That this is seriously being broached in premier media of the United States and espoused by politicians who are candidates for high office is concerning, to say the least. How did America get to this point?
New Economic Perspectives
The Libertarian Plea to Bring Back Jim Crow: An Oxymoron by a Regular Moron
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC
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10 comments:
"how zany the policy views are that emerge like mold spores as soon as one endorses discrimination by merchants against groups they despise as a means of increasing “liberty.”
There is nothing "zany" about these policies within the context of liberty/libertarianism....
Its "liberty to discriminate"...
We should not find any of this surprising coming out of libertarianism...
Deciding to not enter into a contractual or other relationship with another person does not involve the initiation of violence. Therefore, it is not actionable nor does it justify the initiation of force or violence as a result.
Further, Jim Crow was democratically imposed state segregation which required the threat of government sanctions for enforcement because people were not and are not inclined to segregate in the free market.
The rare person who discriminates and shocks the conscience of the public can be shamed and ostracized without the necessity of any violence.
Take the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the South’s Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its 7–1 ruling, the Court upheld [government-imposed] segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example, segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in 1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in 1915–16, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in 1934.
[I]n a market free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, granted “free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected.”
You guys still cannot and will not distinguish between peaceful and non-violent action and the initiation of force by the state or private criminals. One could write a 2,000 page book just listing the stuff you guys don't know. And don't want to know.
And a 4,000 page book listing the stuff William Black doesn't know and just makes up.
Jim Crow was not a social custom, but a political system. Here we come to the reality that the Left cannot face. Ever since the Sixties, the Left has spun the line that racism is the outgrowth of "capitalism." Without government controls, bigotry will germinate from every square inch of the open society. However, it is a theory of racism that is falsified by the practice of racism. Almost without exception, the history of racism is a history of statism, i.e., of government imposition of racism on society. From the Old South to Nazi Germany to apartheid-era South Africa, it is government that (directly or through indifference) murders people because of their race, establishes segregated economic and cultural institutions, criminalizes interracial sexuality and marriage, and in general is responsible for almost every image that comes to mind when we speak of racism. If bigotry is the natural reflex of the social masses, why have racists always had to turn to the State to keep people of different races from teaching each other, hiring each other, marrying each other, and basically living together as members of the same society? Indeed, if there is an organic relationship between racism and capitalism, then history's greatest racist should also have been its greatest capitalist. Our textbooks would record how Adolf Hitler and his National Capitalist Party created the ultimate racist regime by implementing completely the libertarian free-market agenda: an unregulated economy, freedom of expression, freedom of sexuality, private education, open borders, equality before the law, anti-militarism, etc. Of course, actual National Socialist policy was the polar opposite on every point. Hitler chose totalitarian socialism (that is, total socialism) as the means to his racist end because he understood what every other racist has always understood: that mass bigotry is "socialist," not capitalist -- statist, not societal -- in nature. Our anti-discrimination laws were not a response to a history of market bias, but a deduction from the tenets of Leftist dogma, which now seeks to redeem the ideology of statism by placing the blame for bigotry on the American people. Thus, when a Michael Eric Dyson preaches that racism is "America's original sin," we must remember that the vision of a virtuous elite taking control of a villainous society that the Left brings to this issue, is the vision that the Left brings (and has always brought) to every issue.
http://www.abcdunlimited.com/ideas/affirmative-action.html
Funny Money (BR) + Uchronia = Libertarian cookooland
Bob you are talking about left libertarianism vs right libertarianism...
If libertarians (left or right) obtain positions of rule it never works out well... they just legislate for their own left/right libertarian povs and it becomes a tyranny for all others...
I agree with Bob Roddis. Racists inevitably turn to the state to impose their hatred.
Libertarians right and left are largely correct in their analysis of the consequences of hierarchical government in corporate as a "state"endowed with state power, which includes the claim to a monopoly on violence. History bears this out.
However, the question is how to overcome this, which involves getting from where things stand presently to a future desired objective. This is the weak point, both with respect to plan and goal.
This brings the issue back to the enduring question, What is a good life in a good society? This involves normative terns like "good," and "right," so it is at root ideological.
Some attempt to get around this by appeal to "natural." but the only natural process from the vantage of modern science is evolution, and the social, political and economic theory based on the is social Darwinism, in which might is right. However, social Darwinism is not scientific itself, but rather an interpretation of evolutionary theory.
Some ancient and medieval theories appealed to either divine command or "natural law," but those was never able to be justified universally in a compelling way. The Enlightenment altered that somewhat by appealing to "natural rights," which again failed the attempt to justify universally. Similarly, liberalism was extended to economics modeled on physics, with economic laws being "laws of nature." That has failed, too.
That brings it back to constructivism and thence to ideology. Since there is no universal criterion for deciding among ideologies non-normatively, a conflict among ideologies ensues.
Some might argue based on pragmatism as a criterion, but that just brings the debate back to the criterion of useful, which is context-dependent.
The enduring questions endure because there is no criterion or set of criteria that are universally compelling. But that doesn't mean that the questions are either meaningless or a waste of time. They clarify thought, introduce humility, establish a platform for debate. This is required to proceed rationally rather than jaw the law of the jungle. This is what separates humans from other big animals. Humans also adopt a lot of conventions to remind themselves
s of this difference, and of the difference this difference makes. The difference a difference makes is the basis of rational pragmatism.
Food and shelter is essential for a good life, I would imagine. Extend that to everyone and you have a good society.
It is up to the individual to consider the following, and how this applies to their life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Vital necessities are just the bottom line. Nothing much happens at the subsistence level, but below that conflict ensues.
A prerequisite for living a good life in a good society is substance, but that is just the starting point. Subsistence societies developed cultures but not civilization.
This is not to knock so-called primitive peoples though. It's possible to live a good life in a good society in that context, but there's no going back now unless humanity really screws up big time.
The context is different in every age, and so is the response to the question. Not that there is only one answer or even one best answer either. Life is experimental.
If we don't overcome the scarcity myth we will screw up big time.
Judging by the level of conflict, we aren't meeting the bottom line as you describe it.
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