Bruce Bartlett, an economist whose work I’ve enjoyed reading over the years, and author of a book on the history of the Democratic Party and race, uses the occasion of Rand Paul’s controversial remarks about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to launch a weirdly ahistorical attack on libertarianism:
As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn’t have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn’t work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.
Many of the specific factual claims Bartlett makes above are false, but instead of nitpicking those (e.g., African-Americans’ standard of living kept rising after Reconstruction) let’s start with first principles. The basic libertarian position on civil rights is as follows: (1) Private discrimination should, in general, be legal (this includes affirmative action preferences, btw). Many libertarians would make exceptions for cases of monopoly power, and most would ban private discrimination when the government itself ensured the monopoly by law, as with common carriers like trains; (2) The government may not discriminate. If necessary, the federal government should step in to prevent state and local governments from discriminating; (3) The government may not force private parties to discriminate, and the federal government should, if necessary, step in to prevent state and local governments from forcing private parties to discriminate; (4) The government must protect members of minority groups and those who seek to associate with them from private violence. If the state and local government won’t do so, the federal government should step in; and (5) As part of the ban on government discrimination, and to prevent rent-seeking voters from taking advantage of the disenfranchised, members of all racial groups should be treated as individuals for voting purposes, and thus members of all groups should have equal voting rights. If state and local governments don’t guarantee such rights, the federal government should step in.
I don’t think any of these propositions–freedom of contract/association, equality under the law, protection from private violence, nondiscrimination in the allocation of voting rights–are controversial among professed libertarians. Some libertarians may have federalism concerns about the federal role in all this, but federalism, as such, is not a “libertarian” concern.
So let’s compare the libertarian position to what the Supreme Court held in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, and, more generally, to the situation in the Jim Crow South.
(1) The Supreme Court did hold that the federal government could not prohibit private, voluntary discrimination. Some, but not all libertarians, would argue that the Court went too far in allowing discrimination even in common carriers and other monopolies. On that score, the Supreme Court was, say, mostly libertarian. But the Court fails the libertarian test by every other measure, to wit: (2) The Court allowed state and local governments to discriminate with impunity, as with its endorsement of the constitutionality of separate and unequal public schools. The Supreme Court also upheld less well-known examples of discriminatory legislation, such as emigrant agent laws; (3) The Court upheld state and local segregation laws that applied to private parties, most famously the law in Plessy (opposed by the private train company, btw), including even laws that required segregation on interstate trains that traveled to the North; (4) The Court effectively banned the federal government from combating racist violence. (5) The Court failed to protect African-American voting rights.
In short, the idea that the Supreme Court had a “libertarian philosophy” with regard to race that “gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color,” is just completely absurd. If there is anything in post-Civil War, pre-New Deal American history that was NOT libertarian, it was how African Americans were treated in the South after Reconstruction.
Admittedly, even if the Court had held otherwise, the political climate was such in the late 19th and early 20th century that it’s unlikely that the outcome for African Americans would have been that much different, because the the political branches needed to take the lead to accomplish anything in practice. But I find it bizarre that Bartlett considers a Court that was essentially “localist” on civil rights issues–keep all three branches of the federal government out of state and local business–to be “libertarian.” As noted above, the Court adhered to the clear libertarian position on less than one out of five criteria, and the “less than one” is almost certainly the least important criteria historically.
Now consider some specific points Bartlett makes about the Jim Crow South: “Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn’t have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.” Nonsense. Store owners, employers, et al., had to worry not just about losing business from whites if they treat blacks fairly, but also about private violence and harassment from government officials. Cotton mills that tried to hire blacks, for example, were routinely “whitecapped” into submission. Certainly, there would have been a great deal of segregation and discrimination even without violence and official and unofficial government harassment. But the pervasiveness of segregation, discrimination, and exclusion in the South surely was related to violence and harassment.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court did, in fact, adhere to a “libertarian philosophy” in one race case, Buchanan v. Warley in 1917, one of the most important, and least appreciated, cases of the early 20th century. In the process of invalidated a residential segregation ordinance, the Court held that racist views and fears of racial unrest could not justify depriving African Americans of their constitutional rights, a principle that came to fruition in Brown. Anti-libertarian Progressives fulminated fruitlessly against Buchanan.
Speaking of Brown, the weirdest part of Bartlett’s essay is that he unfavorably compares the libertarian position to the constitutionalist opposition to federal civil rights laws from the likes of Barry Goldwater and William Rehnquist. Rehnquist, let’s recall, wrote an infamous memo to Justice Robert Jackson in 1953 arguing that the Court should uphold the school segregation laws at issue in Brown, which is quite clearly not the libertarian position. And the constitutionalist position of the 1960s was that the federal government could perhaps (not according to Rehnquist, though), invalidate state and local segregation laws (number 2 above), but could do nothing about number 1, number 3, number 4, or number 5, because they were all beyond federal power.
Bartlett may claim that the constitutionalists were right as a matter of constitutional law. But he purports to be judging libertarians by the results of their philosophy, not by their good or bad intentions. And the result of adopting the Goldwater and certainly the Rehnquist 1950s/60s constitutionalist view is that state-mandated Jim Crow would have continued indefinitely. The result of adopting the libertarian view, or at least the version Bartlett is attacking, is that Jim Crow would have been abolished, except that private discrimination would have still been legal.
This all doesn’t answer every or even many possible objections to the libertarian position on civil rights and antidiscrimination laws. For those interested in a grand defense of that position, at least with regard to employment discrimination laws, see Richard Epstein’s book, Forbidden Grounds.
But for Bartlett to attack libertarianism with the premise that American law was libertarian with regard to how blacks were treated in the Jim Crow South, when in fact they suffered from overt government discrimination, blatantly discriminatory Jim Crow laws, private violence acquiesced to by the government (and sometimes with the participation of the government), and a denial of voting rights based on race, is just risible.
UPDATE: Edited for length. And by the way, many of the leading advocates of civil rights for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century, including many of the radical Republicans, Frederick Douglass, Moorefield Storey, and even Justice John Marshall Harlan, would be considered, if not libertarians, at least libertarian fellow travelers on today’s ideological spectrum.
Reader says:
Bruce Bartlett is a very deceitful man who now defends politicians who engage in wasteful spending, which is something he once claimed to oppose.
He has also smeared think-tanks that oppose wasteful spending like AEI and the Heritage Foundation, whose analysts were outspoken in opposing the mammoth and costly health care bill, which federal Medicare experts said would increase the federal deficit.
He is little more than a shill for the wasteful spending of the Obama Administration.
May 20, 2010, 10:13 pmSteve Sailer says:
The South certainly didn’t benefit economically from Jim Crow, just as India doesn’t benefit economically from caste restrictions. Mississippi’s GDP was something like 36% of the national average in the first half of the 20th Century, and is now about twice that ratio. And India is doing better economically as caste is slowly overcome.
May 20, 2010, 10:15 pmSteve Sailer says:
The 1964 Civil Rights Act has taken on a sacramental role in the civic religion, so any doubts about it are considered heresy.
The real issue for the 21st Century is disparate impact: equality of result v. equality of opportunity. But, who has time to think about the future when we have to obsess over things that happened 46 years ago?
May 20, 2010, 10:20 pmsashal says:
Libertarianism according to Paul:
!.in a free society you have to tolerate some assholes, and that some of them will be racist.
2.the property rights are more important then human rights
libertarianism amounts to little else than pseudo-intellectual masturbation for solipsists.
In order for the ideology to function coherently, everything must be detached from circumstance so that the practical implications of what they recommend are swept away.
Everything is just academic exercise because that’s the entire point. The fact that discrimination had a real impact on people’s lives does not matter and is not recognized: Only the theoretical impact of a government having “too much” authority (whatever that means) matters.
It’s single-minded focus on a theoretical question, at the expense of practical circumstance, makes it heartless. libertarians fail to recognize how the lack of regulating bad sh* actually lets the same bad sh* hurt people, in real ways.
But they’re just being dicks. That’s basically your modern libertarian: someone who enjoys being a dick
May 20, 2010, 10:20 pm1040 says:
steve, india is not like race. you might be well advised to get a clue before opining about it. your correlation is ass backwards.
May 20, 2010, 10:21 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I am willing to agree that the Jim Crow South was not structured in a libertarian way. What is unclear, in the extreme, is that without the non-libertarian components, such as discrimination in government services and failure to stop private racist violence, private (non-violent) discrimination would have withered away as predicted by libertarian dogma. The connection, for example, between segregated and unequal schools and refusing to let blacks try on clothes in department stores is tenuous, at least to me.
Moreover, libertarian tradition would remove from government some of the very responsibilities that we agree were non administered in a libertarian way. For example, the libertarian attitude towards Brown is scarcely relevant in the libertarian world where the government gets out of the education business—as, indeed, the Commonwealth of Virginia did for a time, rather than integrate the schools. This evasion is, as far as I can tell, not a problem for Rand Paul in specific nor libertarianism in general.
May 20, 2010, 10:23 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I guess property rights are enjoyed only by, what, anteaters?
May 20, 2010, 10:23 pmsashal says:
so you think they are more important, prof Bernstein ?
May 20, 2010, 10:27 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
There’s something quasi-Marxist about assuming that Mississippi cared about its GDP (especially after correcting for GDP per white resident, which would have been the local metric). The antebellum GDP of the Confederate States was nowhere near the Union’s, but that rather misses the point of secession, doesn’t it? Their “way of life” (that is, racial oppression) counted more than GDP.
May 20, 2010, 10:27 pmSarcastro says:
Also true of the Constitution!
May 20, 2010, 10:27 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I don’t think “libertarian dogma” necessarily predicts any such thing, any more than “liberal dogma” can predict that the government will “abolish” private discrimination by government fiat.
May 20, 2010, 10:28 pmDavid Bernstein says:
To the extent only anteaters have property rights, and humans don’t, I don’t think that property rights are very important. To the extent that humans do actually have and exercise property rights, they are human rights.
May 20, 2010, 10:29 pmsashal says:
to everybody , regarding R.Paul.
May 20, 2010, 10:30 pmImagine if to clarify while he’s all in favor of women’s rights, and now agrees with settled law, a prominent republican would have opposed the 19th Amendment giving women the vote, but not because he’s in any way sexist, he just didn’t think it was right for the federal government to force its way into states’ voting policies.
Imagined that?
Enjoy……
sklein11 says:
Why is “(2) The government may not discriminate” a libertarian principle? Why is “separate but equal” incompatible with libertarianism?
May 20, 2010, 10:31 pmrpt says:
AEI and Heritage are excellent examples of wasteful spending; look at some of the people they subsidize because the market would not do so.
May 20, 2010, 10:31 pmSarcastro says:
I think it’s beavers that love their bundles of sticks.
May 20, 2010, 10:31 pmTacomaJoe says:
This is an excellent piece; it surgically eviscerates Bartlett’s baseless and somewhat juvenile claims.
Though Bartlett’s piece does present a target-rich environment.
An example:
“Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained.”
Is it a certainty?
If one were the only store, among several competitors, that served blacks, would one not enjoy a monopoly of the black population’s patronage? Even if that’s not a given, it certainly calls into question whether Bartlett has any foundation for his claim of certainty.
May 20, 2010, 10:32 pm1040 says:
well, if he is anything like that famous libertarian bryan caplan, he probably thinks that the pre woman’s suffrage days were a gilded era for libertarians and personal liberty. (only if you weren’t a woman, but who cares about them anyway?)
May 20, 2010, 10:33 pmAnonsters says:
Come on, Bernstein, that’s a silly argument, and you know it. If you want to argue the right to property is a human right, that’s fine. The international human rights regime would (with admittedly some hesitancy, but they would in the end) agree. But just to say that because humans have a right to hold property, therefore the right to property is a human right is to pretend that “human rights” doesn’t have a particular meaning beyond merely those rights that humans, as such, possess.
May 20, 2010, 10:34 pmjb says:
“think-tanks that oppose wasteful spending like AEI and the Heritage”
But I thought they supported the Iraq war…
May 20, 2010, 10:34 pmsashal says:
so property rights are human rights?
Every human has a right for a property?
Do the humans have a right for a health ? Wife?
Is property rights more important then right for a spouse?
I was always suspicious that libertarianism and Marxism are two sides of the one Utopian coin.
May 20, 2010, 10:36 pmNow I am fully convinced
rpt says:
After Paul’s performance today, it is impossible to tell what he really believes. Is this the libertarian “star”? Was he beaten up by the fearsome Rachel Maddow before being comforted by the much nicer Laura? Did the “loony left” move his lips last night? Has he put the libertarian/Tea Party fully behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968? Or will he change his mind again the next time he’s challenged? We’re now waiting fir the “Rand Tough” video to appear on youtube. What a character.
May 20, 2010, 10:36 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I can’t go into a historical disquisition here, but it’s a bedrock principle of modern libertarianism, with direct descent from classical liberalism (we hold these truths to be self-evident, etc.) that all individuals are equal before the law, and that the government should treat all people as equal individuals, not as members of castes or classes.
May 20, 2010, 10:37 pmDavid Schwartz says:
sashal: Libertarians fall on all sides of the Federalism question. There is nothing particularly Libertarian or unLibertarian about where you draw the line. I suppose most Libertarians would love a system where the Federal government can force States to be more Libertarian but not to be less Libertarian, but that doesn’t seem possible. It’s a mixed bag of good and bad either way in the real world.
May 20, 2010, 10:41 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I think the libertarian philosophers (which I am not) would put it something like “everyone has a right to self-ownership. from the right of owning onself comes the right to own the fruits of one’s labor.” But I don’t really like philosophy; I just think the idea of contrasting “property rights” and “human rights,” as if it’s the property that has the right, neglects the fact that property rights are rights enjoyed and exercised by humans, and thus are human rights. It’s no different than contrasting “human rights” and “religious freedom rights,” or “human rights” and “free speech rights.”
May 20, 2010, 10:41 pmEli Rabett says:
If, as according to DB, property rights are human rights, then humans are property, and we now know where David stands on slavery and civil rights. That is all
May 20, 2010, 10:53 pmRicardo says:
Sure, but this doesn’t prove that fear of violence and illegal harassment was necessarily the overriding consideration for private businesses. Many businesses outside the Deep South discriminated on the basis of race — I haven’t seen any evidence they did so out of fear of violence and intimidation. Country clubs excluded blacks and Jews up through the 1970s and 1980s: it certainly was not threats of violence that motivated them.
Private discrimination was pervasive because of pervasive racism and still pops up every once in a while despite the laws against it.
The best argument for banning private discrimination is based on perceived social norms. When people see that all businesses discriminate against certain groups, they are more likely to think that such discrimination is unremarkable and acceptable and will be more likely to practice it in their own lives and businesses.
May 20, 2010, 10:53 pmMark Field says:
Libertarians have traditionally been associated with so-called “federalism”; Prof. Somin defends it here regularly, as do others. All of the defects in SCOTUS rulings that you identify can be attributed to the philosophy that states, rather than the federal government, should be the source of decision for most aspects of life.
By identifying themselves with federalism, libertarians have to be responsible for its defects. One of those defects was (and is) that the South refused to intervene to protect its black citizens. For libertarians — who CONSTANTLY complain about government intervention — now to complain about government for failing to intervene is the very picture of chutzpah.
Those Southern states were libertarian paradises. And they were a fucking disaster for humanity.
May 20, 2010, 11:01 pmRowerinVA says:
If old-time everyday Southerners were as bad as they are assumed, by present-day elite Northerners, to have been, then answer me this: why did the South have Jim Crow laws? Why would the South have needed a law to tell a shopkeeper not to serve a black man, if that shopkeeper wouldn’t have served him anyway?
Look, the South was pretty racist (sort of like Boston in the 1970s, with all those white people rioting against busing … but I digress). But Jim Crow laws were there because if those laws weren’t enforced, a whole lot of whites would have been just fine with dealing honestly with blacks. Jim Crow laws were the opposite of libertarianism, and the only reason that Jim Crow laws were put on the books is that Southern elites (who made the laws, as elites always do) were trying to prevent the common folk of one color from mingling with the common folk of the other color, when in fact they often wanted to mingle.
Calling the Jim Crow South libertarian is just bizarre. It was much closer to a police state than it was to libertarian.
And it was the age-old story of elites trying to cram their vision of pure society (in this case, a racist, racially pure society) into a bunch of common folk who were much more decent and pragmatic than the elites.
May 20, 2010, 11:03 pmElliot says:
What is the particular meaning of human rights you mention?
May 20, 2010, 11:14 pmSteve Sailer says:
From a functional standpoint, the most important Civil Rights era law was the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which established a fair market for votes. Old fashioned white race-baiting politicians changed their tune quickly once blacks could vote: e.g., George Wallace made his wheelchair comeback in alliance with blacks. It’s extremely unlikely that, say, segregated lunch counters could have survived in any sizable numbers for long once the Voting Rights Act was in place to establish competition for votes. Business owners would prefer to sell to everybody. So, which governments would enforce petty segregation laws once blacks made up, say, a third of the voters? If would just take one-sixth of the white votes to form a majority, so getting rid of noxious laws about lunch counters would have been an easy compromise to make and they would have rapidly disappeared from most of the South within a few years of passing the VRA.
May 20, 2010, 11:14 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Since libertarians have only been around as a self-conscious ideological movement for around 40 years, and during that entire time the federal government has been almost entirely a force for anti-libertarian policies, I have no idea what “traditionally” means in this context. Taking a broader view of American history, people who were, shall we say, libertarian-ish, could be found on all sides of the federalism issue. More to the points, libertarian-ish people tended to support the federal government when it was doing libertarian things, like abolishing slavery, and to oppose it when it was doing anti-libertarian things, like passing the NLRA.
May 20, 2010, 11:15 pmSarcastro says:
RowerinVA, noted antebellum South historian, is right. Just like murder laws nowadays means that folks are just waiting to go out and murder, the Jim Crow laws are proof that if those demmed politicians got out of everyone’s way, slavery and racism would be gone!
Redlining is ’cause of government regulation as well, I assume.
And don’t get me started about those Norther Elites!
May 20, 2010, 11:15 pm1040 says:
golf clubs aren’t exclusive because tiger woods has brought golf to the “city youth”. viva la rand paul!
May 20, 2010, 11:15 pmDavid Bernstein says:
True, and a very much underappreciated point.
May 20, 2010, 11:17 pmSarcastro says:
Let me just say that southern restaurant owners during Jim Crow were totally rational actors. And to maximize profits, you totally serve blacks. Never mind how white patrons might not have spent their money in a mixed lunch counter. I have it on awesome authority that the South wasn’t thaat racist back in the day.
And all this talk of red-lining and blockbusting? White guilt!
Banks should be able to have a policy of not lending to black businesses, cause the market will make sure they lose that business! And real-estate agents should be able to discriminate if they want! Market! Go go restrictive covenants! Private homeowner groups can band together and keep out blacks if they want, it’s freedom!
May 20, 2010, 11:22 pmSteve Sailer says:
In contrast, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was more of a sacramental, we-have-all-decided gesture against Jim Crow. When people come to a moral decision, they like to pass a law about it to commemorate their goodness.
A few people at the time in 1964, such as Barry Goldwater, pointed out the long run problems built into Civil Rights Act’s mandating of equal opportunity in hiring. How, exactly, do you measure equal opportunity? What else besides equal outcomes will work to make sure you have eradicated discrimination in hiring? Doesn’t this make quotas inevitable? That insinuation drove the bill’s Senate floor manager, Hubert Humphrey, crazy. He swore to eat the Civil Rights Act, page by page, if it led to quotas. Of course, it did and of course he didn’t.
Forty-six years later we’re still dealing, as in Ricci or Vulcan Society, with the question of how can you tell when there’s equal opportunities when there isn’t equal outcomes. The easy assumption was just to assume that unequal outcomes would disappear over time. As recently as 2003, Justice O’Connor announced that she expected unequal outcomes to vanish by 2028. I’ve been following this issue since 1972, and there’s very little progress toward equal outcomes in 38 years.
May 20, 2010, 11:25 pmRicardo says:
“You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.” — George Wallace
Someone opposing such laws would have had a lot of explaining to do to white southerners. The point is that these laws were not imposed on southern whites by out-of-touch elites residing in the state capital. They came from the racist sentiments of the overwhelming majority of white residents of the southern states at the time.
Your view of history is extraordinarily revisionist and doesn’t seem to based on any actual evidence. George Wallace is a pretty good barometer of public sentiment as a very skilled populist politician. He actually started his career being a bit progressive on racial issues in the 1950s and his career subsequently flopped. Then he came out as the foaming-at-the-mouth bigot you see reflected above and his popularity took off in the South throughout the 1960s. His third-party run for President in 1968 won him the electoral votes of almost the entire Deep South. Then once black people started voting in large numbers, he renounced his racist past and got elected to the Alabama Governorship in 1979.
George Wallace did not create segregation: segregationist sentiment among white southerners created George Wallace.
May 20, 2010, 11:28 pmConstantin says:
Mark, you don’t see a distinction between “failing to intervene for” and “actively discriminating at every turn against”? Which did the Jim Crow laws look more like?
May 20, 2010, 11:29 pmMark says:
Oh, Steve Sailer is here. Goody.
I am off to take a shower.
May 20, 2010, 11:30 pmJoe Kowalski says:
The problem with allowing private discrimination is that enforcing it inevitably requires the cooperation of the state. For example if a green person sat at a table in the purples only side of a Starbucks, and the management didn’t want that person there solely because of their skin color, they would have to contact the police to arrest that person for trespassing, in a location open to the general public, for doing nothing that no one else in the establishment was doing, and as a result, the state would have to participate in the discrimination as well.
May 20, 2010, 11:33 pmSteve Sailer says:
The federal government has been pushing mortgage lending to minorities since the FHA act of 1968. It has succeeded in changing the culture of the home lending business from Ebenezer Scrooge to Angelo Mozilo, a true blue believer in minority lending.
George W. Bush campaigned in 2002-2004 for 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010 to close the race gap in homeownership. He warned federal regulators not to enforce rules about down payments because down payment restrictions were the #1 cause of the racial gap in homeownership.
How’d that all work out, anyway?
May 20, 2010, 11:33 pmRK says:
As far as I know, Alabama and Georgia were the only two states that had Jim Crow laws requiring segregated restaurants, but there were still plenty of segregated restaurants in the rest of the South. In many states, Jim Crow only applied to public facilities.
Yes, those poor decent common folk (or is that volk?) doubtless thought they were voting for integration when they elected George Wallace as governor in a landslide. Such mistakes happen with the best of us.
May 20, 2010, 11:38 pmSteve Sailer says:
The federal government keeps careful tabs on mortgage lending to minorities. You can look up every single dollar lent by race/ethnicity/sex in the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act online database.
In 2006 in California, 78% of the subprime home purchase mortgage dollars originated went to minorities, and 56% of the total dollars, prime and subprime.
So, the long campaign to change the culture of mortgage lending succeeded.
Unfortunately, California turned out to be, by far, the biggest money pit of the mortgage meltdown that set off the economic crash. A study by economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve of 239,101 mortgages issued in California during the Housing Bubble reported:
“We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.”
[Lending in Low- and Moderate-Income Neighborhoods in California:The Performance of CRA Lending During the Subprime Meltdown,by Elizabeth Laderman and Carolina Reid, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, November 26, 2008]
http://www.richmondfed.org/conferences_and_events/research/2008/pdf/lending_in_low_and_moderate_income_neighborhoods.pdf
May 20, 2010, 11:39 pmMark Field says:
A couple of additional points.
Bartlett said that “The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them.”
You dispute this, saying “African-Americans’ standard of living kept rising after Reconstruction”.
First, I understood Barlett to be refering to their political and civil rights. If I’m right, then your criticism is wrong (as I’m sure you’d agree).
Second, even if you’re right that he meant economic rights, that’s a pretty low bar you’re setting. At the end of Reconstruction the freed slaves were just 11 years removed from slavery. They literally (yes, literally) had nowhere to go but up economically.
How about things like enacting the CRA? Lots of self-described libertarians don’t seem to have supported that, and all you need to do is read RowerinVA’s comment in order to see a libertarian claim utterly divorced from facts about ending discrimination. By limiting your claim to slavery, you’re again setting a pretty low bar.
You’re reference to the NLRA is also misconceived. Labor control was one of the principal components of the apartheid regime of the post war South. Granting rights to labor was a significant blow to that regime (and it would have been even more significant if not for racism within the unions and Taft-Hartley).
May 20, 2010, 11:44 pmSteve Sailer says:
My impression from “Time on the Cross” was that the calories consumed by black Southerners tended to decline from 1875 to 1900. That’s an old book from the 1970s, so perhaps my understanding is out of date, but my impression is that the post-Reconstruction era was a very bad time for blacks economically (as well as politically and legally).
May 20, 2010, 11:47 pmMark Field says:
No. If someone has the power to intervene and fails to do so, they’ve approved it.
Don’t get me wrong — the Jim Crow laws themselves were not libertarian (at least not all of them; some were). What was libertarian was the absence of government intervention to protect those who needed it.
May 20, 2010, 11:48 pmSteve says:
Since libertarians have only been around as a self-conscious ideological movement for around 40 years…
This sort of crystallizes the entire problem with the post. The libertarian movement has only been identifiable for 40 years, but we need to prove Bruce Bartlett wrong, so we’re going to go back 150 years and identify all the people who were on the right side of history and assign them to the libertarian position too. Take that, Bartlett!
See, the thing is, everyone wants to claim the legacy of the folks who were on the right side of history, libertarians included. Everyone wants to argue that they’re the true heirs to the folks who freed the slaves. Everyone wants to argue that they’re the true bearers of MLK’s legacy. Just today, we saw the Republicans haul out the argument that never gets old: we’re the party that really passed the Civil Rights Act, and Robert Byrd filibustered it! Maybe the debate will never end, but creating a convenient definition for your movement that just happens to encompass only the people who were on the right side of history doesn’t make it true.
This is a movement that has “only been around as a self-conscious ideological movement for around 40 years,” so basically you get to feel free to make up whatever prehistory you want! I can’t tell you how it really was, of course, but I think it’s interesting that the quintessential libertarian Supreme Court decision – Lochner v. New York – was decided only 9 years after separate-but-equal was upheld by an 8-1 vote in Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Harlan, the one and only Justice to be on the right side of history in Plessy, dissented from the libertarian position in Lochner. Heck, the Supreme Court was famously libertarian right up through the New Deal, and yet they sure didn’t do a whole lot to stop state and local governments from discriminating. Maybe the economic libertarians don’t get to claim the civil rights mantle after all.
40 years, by the way, is an interesting length of time for a movement to be organized. All those years that state and local governments were discriminating, no libertarian movement. All those years that state and local governments were forcing private actors to discriminate, no libertarian movement. All those years that state and local governments failed to protect minorities from private violence, no libertarian movement. But then one day, the federal government decides to right those wrongs, yet “overreaches” and prevents private actors from discriminating as well – now we need a movement! We libertarians must organize and combat this outrage! Oh but by the way, in case you were wondering, we were against that other stuff all along.
May 20, 2010, 11:49 pmAnonsters says:
Then explain how we got to Jim Crow, despite the fact that African-Americans had voting majorities in some of the states during Reconstruction, and even controlled state governments (like South Carolina). On your reading of history, there’s no way Jim Crow should even have been possible in those circumstances.
See, e.g., here.
May 20, 2010, 11:49 pmRicardo says:
“A few years” is a sufficiently vague term. George Wallace captured the electoral votes of Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia in 1968 running on an explicitly racist and segregationist platform. In 1970, he was reelected as Alabama’s Governor on a campaign of fighting against black people trying to take over the state. His conversion to a moderate on racial issues took at least 7 years after 1965.
Moreover, there was nothing that radical about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Its prohibition of discrimination by private businesses largely copied the provisions of the 1875 Civil Rights Act which was later ruled unconstitutional.
May 20, 2010, 11:52 pmDavid Bernstein says:
So did Justice Holmes, much more vehemently, and he was both the least libertarian Justice of his age, and also the one least sympathetic to the rights of African Americans.
May 20, 2010, 11:54 pmrpt says:
Back in the real world, after today, you can expect ARP to repudiate most of the major tenets of libertarianism just as soon as he feels a little bit of pressure. Public accommodation laws are legal, desirable, and he would have voted for them. Soon will come his endorsement of mine and offshore oil drilling safety and so on. And his GOP cohorts will, as today, claim they never knew him. Thus all of this academic dialog will be meaningless.
May 20, 2010, 11:55 pmSteve Sailer says:
Let’s step away from the South for a moment and look at anti-black discrimination in New York City. In 1934, Adam Clayton Powell began a “Buy Where You Work” boycott of Blumstein’s department store on 125th street in Harlem for not employing blacks as shop clerks. After a few months of picketing, Blumstein capitulated and hired 35 black clerks.
So, that shows both the power of the libertarian logic about how markets fight discrimination and its shortcomings: we’re talking about a Jewish department store in Harlem.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/realestate/streetscapes-blumstein-s-department-store-black-boycott-opened-employment-door.html
May 20, 2010, 11:56 pmRicardo says:
“Time on the Cross” was the subject of an extensive and protracted scholarly debate on the methods and sources of evidence it used for its conclusions. I’m not sure what the outcome of that debate was but I would be careful with treating as an authoritative source without reviewing all the ink that’s been spilled over it both pro and con.
May 20, 2010, 11:56 pmDavid Bernstein says:
The abstract you link to says exactly the opposite of what you are citing it for, i.e., that Jim Crow came to be only after the black majority was disenfranchised.
May 20, 2010, 11:56 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I think it’s safe to say that the rise of libertarianism as a self-conscious ideological movement had exactly nothing to do with the civil rights laws. Ayn Rand was the “fountainhead” of modern libertarianism, and Atlas Shrugged didn’t come out until 1957. It would be hard to accuse Rand of appealing to racial resentment; a more plausible criticism was that she was largely blind to racial injustices, I don’t think that race ever comes up in Atlas, or in The Fountainhead. Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, I think, came out in 1963. The Libertarian Party was founded in 1972. Cato didn’t exist until 1977. Proto-libertarians were happy,or at least content, with Goldwater, the most libertarian candidate since at least Calvin Coolidge. But Vietnam, the sexual revolution, Richard Nixon, among other things, caused libertarians to want to separate themselves from conservatives. If you’re actually interested, as opposed to just feeling snarky, you should read Brian Doherty’s excellent history of the libertarian movement. But maybe I shouldn’t interfere with the liberal sport of assuming that everyone (but liberals) is motivated primarily by racism.
May 21, 2010, 12:04 ampload says:
So, Mr. Bernstein, do you share Mr. Paul’s view that folks should be allowed to keep negroes out of their privately-owned restaurants?
You were just so excited the other day when you posted about Paul’s victory. Were you surprised by his principled stand in favor of folks right to be as racist as they wanna be – or was that what attracted you to him in the first place.
May 21, 2010, 12:05 amD.R.M. says:
There’s a reason the issue in Plessy v. Ferguson was the Separate Car Act, and why the Mr. Ferguson named in the case was a Louisiana judge enforcing that Act. The power of the state was used to create and compel the norm of segregated privately-owned facilities. The state did not refuse to intervene against the discriminatory actions of private property owners; it used force to compel property owners to discriminate.
Oh, and the lunch counters at Woolworth’s? They were desegregated four years before passage of the Civil Rights Act, and that desegregation was not the result of the North Carolina legislature voting to outlaw segregation.
May 21, 2010, 12:07 amMark Field says:
It’s hard to speak definitively about such things, but I believe the majority view is that Gutman’s criticisms were devastating. Some aspects of the book may nevertheless be valid, but it should be cited only on very specific points.
Note also that it’s been 35 years or so since the book came out. A lot of work has been done since then.
May 21, 2010, 12:09 amMark Field says:
Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater all opposed the CRA. That doesn’t seem to help the libertarian case much.
May 21, 2010, 12:11 amSteve Sailer says:
Right.
Martin Luther King was the best thing to happen to white Southerners since air conditioning. The federal government got rid of the weird Jim Crow caste system for them and let them plunge ahead into the modern economy without being retarded by strange and noxious rules.
May 21, 2010, 12:13 amAnonsters says:
Right, and being able to vote (and even commanding majorities in some states) wasn’t enough to prevent them from being forcibly disenfranchised.
May 21, 2010, 12:14 amOrenWithAnE says:
But Eugene just explained to us that there is no Constitutional right to vote on par with the ‘real’ rights that e wants vindicated!.
May 21, 2010, 12:19 amSteven Appelget says:
So, how about those Ivy League quotas for Jews they used to have? Those were pretty awesome and free market-y, too.
I look forward to Prof. Bernstein’s next post showing how great those were.
May 21, 2010, 12:23 amDavid Bernstein says:
Here’s Rand’s essay on racism, in which she opposed the CRA. You may vehemently disagree with it, but your implicit accusation that she was appealing to racist sentiment, or was racist herself, is directly contradicted by the essay. And btw, in fairness to Rand, she ignored race in her fiction, but race wasn’t exactly a pressing issue in American discourse at the time. The Democrats, after all, ran a segregationist national ticket in both 1952 and 1956, and still received the hearty support of most liberals.
May 21, 2010, 12:24 amSteve Sailer says:
That’s a big change from the 1870s to the 1960s, and one reason why white Southerners didn’t resist fairness in voting as violently in the 1960s as in the 1870s: by the 1960s, they had majorities in each Southern state.
In the 19th Century, white Northerners were highly averse to black emigration from the South. Northerners preferred white immigrants from Europe. In 1895, Booker T. Washington made a famous anti-immigration speech to white industrialists called “Cast down your buckets where you are,” in which he called upon factory owners to hire American blacks rather than to import European whites. But white immigration continued to preclude most black hiring in northern industrial regions until 1914 interrupted the flow, followed by Congressional restrictions of 1921 and 1924. This opened the door for blacks in the North.
The North allowed a Great Migration of blacks in the mid-20th Century, which meant that by 1960s, whites were a majority of voters in each Southern state. So, by then, white Southerners could allow one man one vote without losing political control of their states, merely losing control of some cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta.
May 21, 2010, 12:25 amDavid Bernstein says:
Because violence and fraud prevented blacks from using their majority status to their advantage, not because having majority voting status was irrelevant.
May 21, 2010, 12:26 amrpt says:
Very telling how no libertarian leaning commenter will go near ARP—the currently best known self-professed Libertarian candidate–in this thread. Like it or not, he will now define the ideology for the nation.
May 21, 2010, 12:33 amDavid Bernstein says:
Hmm, judging from some of the comments here and on other blogs I’ve seen, when the government engages in/encourages/requires discrimination, that’s not a reflection on government, that’s just a result of racism, so it says nothing good about libertarianism that libertarianism would oppose such policies. But when the government prohibits discrimination, that’s an example of why libertarianism is bad. Odd logic, that.
So, look: if you are going to argue that libertarianism is BAD when a voting majority, or whoever happens to be in power in a dictatorship, is inclined to use the government to help minorities, you have to acknowledge that libertarianism is GOOD when a voting majority or the folks in power is inclined to use its power to hurt minorities.
Or, to put it snarkily, wow, the absence of non-discrimination laws allowed Ivy League colleges to have Jewish quotas! It’s a good think the Nazis didn’t hear about that, they might have allowed University of Freiburg to limit the number of Jews admitted! It’s a good thing the Nazis didn’t have any libertarian notions of rights running around in their heads, German country clubs might have been allowed to exclude Jews!
May 21, 2010, 12:35 amMark Field says:
This leaves out a great deal of background to such laws. There was a long period of mixed de jure and de facto segregation on public transportation, combined with some civil rights laws passed during Reconstruction and some allowance of black passengers in the absence of any law. You can read more here.
You’re also forgetting that most common carriers were subject to government regulation and had been for a very long time. Thus, the fact that this particular case involved government regulation isn’t surprising.
May 21, 2010, 12:36 amDavid Bernstein says:
No one with any sense puts their faith in any politician, much less in having a politician running for office be a spokesperson for a consistent, coherent, and non-pandering ideology.
May 21, 2010, 12:36 amAnonsters says:
With this, I whole-heartedly agree.
May 21, 2010, 12:38 amElliot says:
Let’s hope fiction writers can always ignore race or anything else they want.
May 21, 2010, 12:38 amMark Field says:
I wasn’t making any implicit comment about Rand or about Goldwater. I was simply noting that the very people you identified as founding libertarians opposed the single most important anti-discrimination measure this country ever passed. That hardly suggests that libertarianism is a cure-all for racial discrimination.
Oh c’mon. It’s the fact that libertarians opposed the government prohibitions which makes us question libertarians.
Godwining your own thread is rarely a good practice.
May 21, 2010, 12:43 amDavid Bernstein says:
It’s not Godwining, it’s comparing the awful libertarian policies of the U.S., which allowed discrimination in country clubs, among other places, against Jews, with what was the leading contemporary counter-example of what should be done with the Jews in a society that was the polar opposite of libertarian. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, yes. But less cheap, or certainly no more cheap, than the insinuation, seen here and on other threads, that libertarianism is somehow either responsible for, or an intentional accommodation to, racism, because a consistent libertarian would permit private parties to engage in discrimination (along with a huge variety of other acts) without government intervention.
May 21, 2010, 12:50 amSteve says:
Apropos of this discussion, Rich Lowry writes:
Keep fighting the good fight, though. That Steve Sailer anecdote about the department store was mighty convincing.
May 21, 2010, 12:57 amDavid Bernstein says:
No, that would be the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act passed under it. And Rand quite explicitly said that she thought all the Jim Crow laws should be invalidated, so she only opposed part of the ’64 act, and not the most important part.
Who said it was? Anyone who says that is an idiot. Some libertarians philosophically believe (as, btw, liberal Hannah Arendt believed) that discrimination must be allowed as a matter of political morality, just as many liberals believe that hate speech must be allowed as a matter of political morality. Other libertarians think that discrimination must be allowed because once the principle that permits discrimination is breached, the long-term consequences will be worse for society than the consequences of allowing discrimination, just, again, as many liberals believe that the consequences of breaching the free speech principle to suppress hate speech will be worse than allowing the hate speech. There’s nothing especially shocking in either the liberal or the libertarian position, except that the latter has been written out of polite discourse, and the former has not.
But I don’t think anyone sensible believes that allowing discrimination means that discrimination will inherently wither away, any more than allowing hate speech means that racial/ethnic/religious hatred will wither away, though it’s entirely plausible in either case to believe that in the long-term there will be less discrimination, or less hatred, if there is a natural social evolution toward that goal, rather than government intervention which creates various perverse political incentives.
May 21, 2010, 12:57 amOhio Scrivener says:
“If someone has the power to intervene and fails to do so, they’ve approved it.”
Hardly. The word “approve” is not synonymous with ignore. Nor is it synonymous with declining to act or even making tough choices on a limited budget. Try this for a thought experiment. How many poor people did you feed and shelter tonight despite having sufficient material wealth to have a computer and sufficient time to be posting comments? If the answer is none, does that mean that you have “approved” of their depravity? Or put another way, how much money did you give this week to the American Heart Association? Again, if the answer is none, does that mean you have “approved” of heart attacks? This faulty logic does not work. Nor does it support your strained attempt to blame libertarianism for the post-Civil War South.
May 21, 2010, 12:57 amMike P says:
The first big wave of student lunch counter sit-ins started in 1960, and the students repeatedly won the campaigns years before federal intervention was even legally possible. Greensboro’s Woolworth’s was desegregated in July 1960. In Nashville students got all the downtown merchants in the city to desegregate in just a few months.
Clearly, those stores did not lose so much white business.
May 21, 2010, 12:58 amrpt says:
In other words, libertarianism is a great doctrine in theory, just don’t expect anyone to live by it in the real world. I couldn’t have said it better.
May 21, 2010, 1:03 amRicardo says:
Adlai Stevenson was not an explicit segregationist. Pro-civil rights Democrat Harry Truman (who Strom Thurmond revolted against with his Dixiecrat Party) supported Stevenson as the Democratic candidate while the rest of the Northern segment of the party passed over the charismatic and popular Richard Russell in part because he was an explicit segregationist and white supremacist. I can’t find any information that Stevenson committed to anything more than neglect and looking the other way on racial issues. This was part of the corrupt bargain that kept the Democrats together, to be sure, but he tried to portray himself as a moderate who did not want to use the power of the federal government (and hence lose the support of the Southern Democrats) to oppose segregation.
This Time article provides some historical color.
May 21, 2010, 1:03 amDavid Bernstein says:
And, I’m going to sleep now, but I should point out that for reasons I express here, I would have voted for the ’64 Act, provisions on private discrimination and all.
May 21, 2010, 1:04 amRK says:
The difference is simple enough: Liberals support efforts to end governmental discrimination, but libertarians oppose the government prohibiting discrimination. That’s why libertarians are tarred with the latter, but liberals aren’t blamed for the former.
I mean, the point that you’re making — that non-libertarians should face up to the fact that the government can do pernicious things — might well be valid. But there’s no inconsistency here.
May 21, 2010, 1:07 amDesiderius says:
Steve,
“Everyone wants to argue that they’re the true bearers of MLK’s legacy.”
Well, we are. So are you. So is Mark Field. So is David Bernstein. Just as we’re all the true bearers of Lincoln’s legacy, and Washington’s, and Copernicus’. We’re not going back to Jim Crow, or slavery, or Monarchy, or geo-centrism.
Bruce Bartlett disagrees:
“In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color.”
This is the worst sort of defamatory bullshit. To the extent that Libertarians argue that we’re the only true bearers of MLK’s legacy, of course we’re mistaken. To claim that we’re the bearers of some bizarre illiberal legacy that MLK has already soundly defeated and would in any case be the polar opposite of everything libertarians stand for is worse than mistaken – its flat out libelous.
May 21, 2010, 1:10 am1040 says:
especially YA writers like Rand.
May 21, 2010, 1:11 amDesiderius says:
RK,
“I mean, the point that you’re making — that non-libertarians should face up to the fact that the government can do pernicious things — might well be valid. But there’s no inconsistency here.”
“Can do” is too theoretical for me to sleep at night. The “has done” is too real.
The happy exception of the federal efforts to enforce Civil Rights (driven by a significant external factor – the effective Comintern propaganda offensive) is not enough to entirely outweigh the rest of the record.
May 21, 2010, 1:15 amShelbyC says:
Negros?!? Who the hell says Negros anymore?
May 21, 2010, 1:15 amKen Arromdee says:
By that reasoning, if a racist customer refuses to buy from a black-owned store, the store owner would be within his rights to pickpocket the customer and then hand the customer some product. After all, it would be the state that decides that this behavior is theft and violates the racist customer’s property right; to arrest the store owner for theft would be participating in discrimination, just like arresting the customer for trespassing is in your scenario.
May 21, 2010, 1:20 amlibertyreader says:
Libertarians don’t think of their opposites as liberals, they think of their opposites as “statists.” I know it’s hard for liberals to get into the libertarian mindset, but trust me on this one: to a libertarian, the same statist principles that give the government the power to pass anti-discrimination laws give the government the power to pass laws requiring discrimination. A libertarian system deprives the government of either power. So to a libertarian, if you want to take credit for your “side” supporting anti-discrimination laws, you also have to take credit when your “side” has/does/will support discriminatory policies. A liberal will say that this is ridiculous, because one side is motivated by good, the other by evil intentions. The libertarian will respond, we judge your principles by the power it gives government to do good or evil, not by your intentions. A very different mindset, indeed. But if you will allow me, I think it’s a defining attribute of modern liberalism that policies are judged by their intentions, and a defining attribute of libertarianism that they are judged by whether they are in accord with a proper limited role for government, regardless of intentions.
May 21, 2010, 1:32 amSteve Sailer says:
The battle against the weirder forms of Jim Crow caste segregation, like separate drinking fountains, had largely been won by the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The bill served more as a victory ceremony. There was a little mopping up action into the spring of 1965, but the end of publicly demeaning blacks with separate drinking fountains and the like was inevitable before the bill went into force.
Southern business elites wanted Jim Crow gone. It was bad for business and it made them look bad. (For one thing, it would prevent their cities from getting new major league sports franchises — Atlanta was rewarded with the Milwaukee Braves in 1966.)
May 21, 2010, 1:39 amSteve Sailer says:
On the other hand, some kinds of discrimination remain widespread even in 2010.
For the last 56 years, white parents of even the most respectable liberal views have largely made sure that their own personal children have evaded Brown v. Board of Education. Few whites who have a choice will allow their kids to be in classrooms in middle school or high school that are more than about a quarter or so black, instead paying vast sums for houses in school districts with “good” schools (i.e., mostly white or Asian) or for private schools.
May 21, 2010, 1:49 amDavid Welker says:
There is no right and should not be a right to discriminate on the basis of race when it comes to businesses. The whole idea that it should be allowed is repugnant.
This is the basic problem with libertarianism. It is an immoral philosophy that places too few limits on the individual, no matter how harmful the effects of one’s actions on others.
And Bartlett has a point. The free market never did end discrimination. Nor would it.
This is not to bash the free market, only to say that it is not the be all and end all.
May 21, 2010, 2:02 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
In many (not all) respects, this just isn’t accurate historically. For example, I’m not aware of laws that allowed whites (but not blacks) to try on clothing in department stores, but that was Southern practice. (Likewise, only whites could return clothes for credit.) As I was implying earlier, many libertarians like to make counterfactual arguments about the need for government intervention to maintain Jim Crow that don’t appear to address the entire historical record.
As another example, the Open Housing Law, which Paul specifically condemned in writing in 2002, did not, in most places, overturn government regulations, rather the customary practice of the real estate trade. And Libertarian big-name Professor Robert Epstein is on record as opposing the (activist) judicial decision that made restrictive real estate covenants unenforceable. One can’t tell, but it’s unlikely his parents agree.
May 21, 2010, 2:06 amSteve Sailer says:
I think the general trend is toward everything being judged on a “Who? Whom?” basis. Neutral principles are so old fashioned. Today, it’s all about who you are for. If you claim to be for the right kind of people (various identity groupings that have successfully asserted a claim to victimization), then you are good. Otherwise, you are bad. It really save a lot of stress on the brain having merely to react rather than to think.
For example, look at the Obama Administration yesterday firing physicist Jonathan Katz from their “dream team” of five supposed super scientists recruited to come up with a way to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The Administration fired him when it turned out he had written rude things in the past about gays’ responsibility for the AIDS epidemic. He’s against gays, so he couldn’t be allowed to volunteer his time to try to figure out how to plug the oil leak. Plugging the oil spill is unimportant compared to declaring forthrightly that the Obama Administration is on the side of the Right People.
That’s how more and more people make up their minds.
May 21, 2010, 2:14 amlibertyreader says:
Should you be allowed to discriminate based on race in whom you date or marry? That’s a lot more consequential than what businesses do. Racial inequality would largely disappear if everyone was just race-blind in intimate relationships. Isn’t it morally repugnant to allow people to choose the race of their partners?
And btw, we allow lots of stuff that’s morally repugnant in our society. It’s called “freedom.”
May 21, 2010, 2:20 amBruce Hayden says:
I don’t see that as avoiding B v B of E, but rather, merely opting, by paying that stiff price, of inferior school systems. I say this, having just finished paying for 13 years of such private education. It was expensive, but if I had it to do over again, I would do it again.
But, then, I am probably not who this is aimed at. I have far more sympathy with Prof. Berstein’s position than that of those liberals you call out here. My decision to pay a small fortune for private schooling had nothing to do with racism, and a lot to do with control over the curriculum and also in getting the individual attention that I think was needed to get my kid to flourish.
May 21, 2010, 2:22 amGrover Gardner says:
It’s worth reading the report to get past Sailer’s cherry-picking of the racial statistics. The report states that other factors must be considered, such as loan terms, lending practices of the broker, loan origination, etc.
May 21, 2010, 2:24 amSteve Sailer says:
Restrictive covenants in real estate contracts preventing buyers from selling to blacks were extremely widespread, including outside the South. For example, they were common all over Los Angeles. They aren’t talked about much these days, but they should be.
Restrictive covenants have been more or less replaced in function by various supposedly environmental regulations that keep housing density down and housing prices up.
It’s funny how the theory of disparate impact is almost never applied to environmental rules. But, I forgot, to do that would be to apply neutral principles, when we all know that anybody who says they are for the environment is Good, so they shouldn’t be pestered with unworthy suspicions that they are really pushing through land use regulations for the much the same reasons people in 1950 put restrictive covenants in their deeds.
May 21, 2010, 2:28 amDilan Esper says:
Steve at 11:40 p.m. on May 20 gets it mostly right.
What I would add is that this is a lot like the communists who say the USSR doesn’t prove anything and that REAL communism hasn’t ever been tried.
Professor Bernstein is saying that if libertarians could just enforce all the laws protecting black folks, while prohibiting all governmental discrimination, that could have adequately addressed the problem of white supremacism without having to prohibit private discrimination, and that the white supremacists who weren’t on board with that program weren’t libertarians but were something else.
However, what Professor Bernstein is describing is impossible to achieve. If you permit private discrimination, blacks in the South will have less economic power. It will be harder for them to get good jobs. Less economic power means less political power (especially under libertarian campaign finance rules that libertarians favor). Less political power means less ability to get prosecutors, police officers, and judges to take their side and protect them against white violence. Less protection against white violence reifies segregation. It also makes any legal guarantees against governmental discrimination hollow.
That’s the reality of the situation. Libertarians are saying “see, we can’t be racists, because we have a deeply principled way of protecting blacks from white supremacists”. But the problem is that the deeply principled solution CAN’T WORK. Meanwhile, the thing that the dreaded liberals did DID work. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960′s produced a lasting change.
Here’s a hint– if your principles lead you to oppose something that worked in favor of something that was not likely to work to solve a major societal problem, IT’S YOUR BLEEPING PRINCIPLES THAT ARE SCREWED UP. Change them. That’s right, libertarians need to acknowledge that the free market doesn’t always work and that sometimes government restrictions on private enterprise are justified and necessary. And further– liberals have every right to infer that those libertarians who refuse to acknowledge that passing the laws that changed the South was more important that upholding abstract principles about free private enterprise just don’t care about black people very much, certainly not as much as they care about abstract principles of free private enterprise.
Finally, it’s worth noting that even if the libertarians and federalists were acting on principle and not racial animus, they were still carrying water and providing intellectual firepower for positions that furthered the goals of racists. Barry Goldwater is a good example of this. I don’t think Goldwater was a prejudiced man. But he certainly gave aid and comfort to the white supremacists of the South when he opposed the Civil Rights laws– and the white supremacists recognized this and repaid him with support.
In the end, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a political no brainer. And the condemnation that libertarians who oppose it receive is entirely justified. You gotta learn to bend your principles sometimes and acknowledge reality. And if you aren’t willing to do that, you should expect to be accused of animus against the people who would be harmed by the rigorous application of your principles.
May 21, 2010, 2:47 amBruce Hayden says:
I don’t buy this justification.
For one thing, that would imply that the opposite was also true, that if the social norm were racial discrimination, then Jim Crow laws would be acceptable because they would just be enforcing that social norm.
I think that you can make a libertarian argument that laws enforcing racial discrimination are wrong, while I don’t think that you can make a very good libertarian argument to the contrary. And that is because one of the implied themes of a libertarian view of laws is that they be neutral. And laws enforcing racial segregation or discrimination are far from neutral.
I have a lot of sympathy for Dr. Paul here. I have absolutely no problems with striking down laws that discriminate on the basis of race, or, indeed, with banning state actions that directly further racial segregation and discrimination. So, from that point of view, much of the CRA of 1964 is just fine, as is the VRA of 1965. The problem is that the CRA of 1964 went well beyond striking down racist laws and banning racist actions by the state, and intruded itself well into the private affairs of citizens.
Finally, getting back to your social norms. By the mid 1960s, the mood of the country had indeed changed as to racial issues. What that meant in the long run was that racism was on its way out. Who here today would do business with a company that openly discriminated on the basis of race? I sure wouldn’t. By his statements, I am pretty sure that Rand Paul wouldn’t.
To some extent, this is like the abortion issue. The country was well on its way to finding a national accommodation to that issue when the Supreme Court took that issue away from the people and decided it arbitrarily. Nearing 40 years later, the country has not come to terms with such a top down approach.
What you are suggesting is that such a top down solution is preferable once a majority are on-board. I would suggest that we might be further along the road to MLK’s Dream of a color blind society if Congress had not stepped in and imposed what you consider to have been the “social norm”. It may be now. But while it was rapidly becoming such back then, it wasn’t there yet. Better, in my mind, to have banned racist state actions and law, while allowing that rapidly forming social norm of yours to have taken care of the private side of the issue.
May 21, 2010, 2:51 amSteve Sailer says:
It’s a common error to assume that the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was the be-all and end-all of government efforts to change the culture of mortgage lending. Republicans like to assume that so they don’t have to mention George W. Bush’s war against traditional lending standards (such as requiring down payments) in the name of increasing minority homeownership. Democrats like to assume that so they can claim that banks under the CRA made fewer bad loans than independent mortgage companies like Angelo Mozilo’s Countrywide.
But that’s a distinction without a difference, because the Clinton Administration told Countrywide and the other independents in 1994 that the Community Reinvestment Act, and all its paperwork, would be extended to them too unless they agreed to act just like they were covered. In response, Mozilo signed a treaty with Clinton’s HUD secretary Henry Cisneros making a pledge to lend to minorities and low income neighborhoods exactly like a CRA pledge.
Cisneros later joined Countrywide’s board and Mozilo kept upping Countrywide’s de facto CRA pledge, to $600,000,000,000 in 2003 and to one trillion (with a T) dollars in 2005.
May 21, 2010, 3:12 amMalvolio says:
I have to admit it. Libertarianism would not have rid the country of racism. Instead, the government wisely outlawed many forms of discrimination and now, not even half a century later, things are perfect. Blacks earn as much as whites, go to college as often, live as longer, are no more likely to be arrested, imprisoned, or murdered …
Oh, no, wait, that never happened. Hey, maybe libertarianism would have failed, but anti-libertarianism has in fact failed, by any reasonable measure.
Yup, I particularly remember when we evil libertarians, supposedly acting on “principle”, went to the Supreme Court to let the Skokie Nazis march. No, my mistake again, that was the civil libertarians. Huh, who would have guessed that it was Blackmun, Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall who were giving “aid and comfort” to the racists.
May 21, 2010, 3:13 amSteve Sailer says:
It’s worth quoting Countrywide’s January 2005 press release announcing:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5246/is_5_65/ai_n29163948/
May 21, 2010, 3:16 amSteve Sailer says:
To understand the mortgage meltdown, it’s crucial to grasp the subtle way in which government pressure for more minority lending affected the mortgage industry—selecting for success those executives like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide who were both wildly ambitious and true believers in the diversity mantra.
The government can’t force financial institutions to lend to likely deadbeats. You can always stay small and under the radar.
What the government can do, using a host of threats, is block from growing big those firms whose executives don’t share its dogma that lending more to minorities is a great idea.
Further, the government can excommunicate with anti-discrimination lawsuits anybody who expresses his skepticism about more minority lending on paper (or pixels). Imagine if a financial executive’s private emails turned up in discovery for a lawsuit had read: “Why are we lending so much money to Mexicans in the Inland Empire? How can Mexicans ever pay off these huge mortgages?” He would have been flayed alive in the press and in the courts.
So nobody in Corporate America puts their Doubts about Diversity into text where plaintiffs’ attorneys can later read them.
And that means they mostly don’t get communicated anymore—which explains much about why the Mortgage Meltdown, which has been highly concentrated among minority borrowers, was a surprise to so many.
Over the decades, the federal government changed the entire culture of the mortgage industry from penny-pinching skeptics to politically correct pollyannas.
Nobody took less persuading, however, than Mozilo. He always felt discriminated against by the old WASP financial elite. Connie Bruck’s article, Angelo’s Ashes: The man who became the face of the financial crisis, in the June 29, 2009 New Yorker documents just how driven Mozilo always has been by his Commitment to Diversity. Mozilo’s sister told Bruck: “He was always this Italian guy people didn’t want to accept. When he tans he gets really dark. My mother told me that when he worked in Florida he was asked to sit in the back of the bus.”
Bruck notes: “Mozilo always saw himself as providing mortgages to many who were like him — disenfranchised. (‘So they’re not upper-middle-class white people—so what?’ he would say. ‘They’re Hispanics, and maybe their money is not in a bank—but they are responsible.’)’
Bruck’s article suggests that Mozilo actually believes what he told Congress in 2008: “By the early 1990s, the government had recognized the obvious truth that our housing finance system was leaving major segments of society behind. In 1992, a landmark study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston made it clear that there were systemic underwriting issues relating to the treatment of African American and Hispanic borrowers. Policymakers called upon the mortgage industry to change their practices and redouble their efforts to better serve minorities and underserved communities. While many in the industry discounted the Boston Fed study as flawed, at Countrywide, we stepped up to the challenge by creating our affordable lending initiative known as ‘House America.’ ”
Bruck’s New Yorker article supports Mozilo’s sincerity—or self-delusion:
May 21, 2010, 3:22 am“… In 1992, shortly after Mozilo became chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston issued a report stating that it had found systemic discrimination by mortgage lenders against African-American and Hispanic borrowers. … Mozilo was appalled. He ordered that all Countrywide’s records on rejected minority applicants be sent to him, and he retroactively approved about half of them. …”
Ricardo says:
The fault may be mine for not making my argument clearer. I certainly did not mean to imply that laws should always follow social norms — my argument was exactly the opposite, actually. The argument is that the situation with respect to racial discrimination was bad on almost purely objective grounds and there was a need for government to step in. The point is that I suspect the law helped rapidly shift social norms in the south against racial discrimination — an objectively good outcome as I think almost everyone will now agree. As late as 1968, it is clear from George Wallace’s vote tallies that southerners still favored Jim Crow and discrimination. But within about 10 or 15 years it became a taboo. I think the law played a role in creating that taboo along with developments in the wider culture.
Another example I’ve seen quoted — but haven’t studied it myself — is that of corruption. People offer to pay bribes to government officials and government officials solicit bribes from citizens because it is perceived as normal and acceptable behavior in certain countries (as well as the city of Chicago). Singapore is an example of a society that rapidly changed this social norm — going from yet another corrupt Asian city to one of the least corrupt societies in the world.
Jim Crow was the most divisive political issue in the country since slavery. It split the Democratic Party almost perfectly along geographic lines: every Democrat from the South was in favor of segregation and almost every Democrat not from the South opposed it. The armed forces had to be called out on several occasions between the 1950 and 1970 to enforce anti-segregation laws or put down race riots. The idea that the debate over desegregation was ever going to be a genteel one where prejudices that had been in place for hundreds of years would gradually wither away is not supported by the evidence.
May 21, 2010, 3:27 amVisitor Again says:
Race wasn’t an issue in the 1950s? What a preposterously false statement. The Little Rock school crisis is one thing that dominated the national headlines for weeks at a time. I was here in the 1950s, Bernstein, and you weren’t. You’re rewriting history, as usual.
May 21, 2010, 3:31 amSteve Sailer says:
What is questionable today about the 1964 Civil Rights Act is how, by giving the government a veto over most hiring, firing, and promotion decisions in the country, it led quickly to the doctrine of “disparate impact” in the 1972 Griggs decision, which was written into law by Congress in 1991 and becomes ever more significant as the fraction of protected classes to unprotected classes in the American population swells.
The logic behind “disparate impact” is simple: sure, we’ve already outlawed discrimination, but what if discrimination is still going on secretly? How can we tell? Well, let’s just demand that any inequality in employment outcomes has to be expensively justified by the employer. Or they can make the inequality go away. We won’t ask how they do it. And if anybody says that the inequality in outcomes is because of racial differences in, say, intelligence, well that just proves they are evil and must have quotas imposed upon them.
Personally, I suspect that paying for quotas for African-Americans is, basically, the Slavery Tax and white Americans will be paying it forever. Okay. Personally speaking, my ancestors didn’t have any slaves, but I can see the logic of paying perpetual reparations: African-Americans helped build this country.
So, paying the Slavery Tax in the form of endless quotas is, hopefully, affordable.
What’s not affordable is extending disparate impact, quotas, and all the rest to immigrants and then not controlling immigration. The Census Bureau is predicting 132,000,000 Hispanics in the U.S. in 2050. How exactly are 200,000,000 whites supposed to pay for quotas for 132,000,000 Hispanics? You’ll notice that this is exactly similar to the usual questions about how workers in 2050 will be able to pay for old people’s Social Security and Medicare — except that nobody ever talks about it.
May 21, 2010, 3:49 amSteve Sailer says:
What’s definitely not affordable is the public stupidity fostered by political correctness.
May 21, 2010, 3:51 amlukas says:
From Cato’s Jason Kuznicki, a libertarian defense of the Civil Rights Act.
May 21, 2010, 4:55 amPragmaticist says:
What’s perverse about this issue is that it’s the leftist statists who currently advocate government enforced racial discrimination, albeit against white people.
May 21, 2010, 6:12 amRicardo says:
To give credit where it’s due, former Communist Party USA member and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin later came out against affirmative action and identity politics after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
May 21, 2010, 6:37 amCC says:
This is a truly ridiculous comment. In 1948, desegregation of the armed forces split the democratic national convention, right in the convention hall, so that you actually got a southern party for the first time, running for president.
May 21, 2010, 7:00 amBrett Bellmore says:
Actually, there’s a major component of Jim Crow still in place: Gun control. Granted, Democrats branched out from disarming blacks, to disarming everybody, but gun control is still just the remaining piece of Jim Crow Democrats couldn’t bear to abandon.
And if you look at where they’re hot to maintain it, maybe it IS still a matter of disarming blacks…
May 21, 2010, 7:00 amAnderson says:
Finding that Steve Sailer comments favorably on your post about race, is the blogging equivalent of finding that you’ve stepped in dogshit.
May 21, 2010, 7:38 amStephen Lathrop says:
There’s a lot of logic on this thread. That’s how you know that most of these contributers have no first-hand understanding what U.S. racism was like in the 50s and before. Logic wasn’t part of it.
If you were in it, and especially if you grew up in it, the pervasive fear and barely-suppressed violence that was the everyday stuff of Southern racism utterly overwhelmed logic. It made it hard even to learn stuff that had nothing to do with race, because you could never be sure your mind was working right. Racism got all balled up with weird religious superstition until logic became small potatoes—your mind had a lot tougher stuff than logic to struggle with.
It’s silly to think libertarianism had much or anything to do with that strange alternative universe. Except that it seems to be sort of catnip to libertarians, who can’t quite tear themselves away from it. They really ought to stop that.
May 21, 2010, 7:39 amthirdeblue says:
A Business is not a person. A Business does not vote, does not have freedom of speech. People do. A store owner can be the most bigoted human being on the face of the planet, his business can not.
May 21, 2010, 7:46 amArkady says:
I’d say that economics wasn’t uppermost in the minds of those supporting Jim Crow. After all, when you have culture wherein poor whites (dirt-poor whites, at that) could be convinced that slavery was good for them, we’ve left rationality far behind.
May 21, 2010, 8:23 amDavid says:
Let’s put a face on the person who offered, at the time this was historically salient, “libertarian” arguments against being forced to serve blacks at one’s place of business.
Meet Lester Maddox:
http://www.atlantatimemachine.com/misc/maddox01.htm
Granted, at the time he offered all the statist arguments for segregation too.
But the libertarian would let him, at the time, keep prohibiting blacks from doing business with him. And argue, theoretically, that the market would make this very unprofitable in the long run for Mr. Maddox to do. Note that the market argument, to work, presupposes both time and a “free” market, things that black Americans at that time did not have.
That’s the part that rankles. Even for someone willing to give libertarian arguments a hearing.
May 21, 2010, 8:29 amFloridan says:
Since libertarians have only been around as a self-conscious ideological movement for around 40 years…
Read William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe Each to Other(1883). These ideas didn’t begin with Ayn Rand.
May 21, 2010, 8:30 amPragmaticist says:
This is fundamentally about the fact that statists really do have a disdain for freedom.
People who are in favor of freedom when it comes to speech understand that some people will be free to engage in speech which is vile. Free speech is favored not because one is in favor of vile speech, but because one believes that people have a right to the liberty to express their ideas, or because one believes that freedom of speech, ultimately, in the fullness of time, has optimal consequences.
Analogously, people are in favor of freedom, which includes freedom of association—which also includes the freedom to not associate—not because they favor vile racist behavior, but because freedom to act is a right to liberty, or, it’s believed that freedom to act will, in the long run, have the best consequences.
What have been the consequences of government prohibiting the freedom to not associate? We have the government mandating racist criteria (against whites and Asians) in employment, education, etc.
May 21, 2010, 8:34 amSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
I am surprised that Rand Paul and his defenders here have not availed themselves of the argument that Katzenbach vs. McClung was wrongly decided and that the attempt to base a law against private discrimination by all private businesses on the commerce clause was unconstitutional.
May 21, 2010, 8:37 amlibertyreader says:
I think it’s fair to say that someone in 1964 who is libertarian ONLY on race, as Maddox purported to be, was a racist. Not to mention that before 1964, I’m sure Maddox wasn’t a libertarian on race, but instead supported Jim Crow laws. That said, didn’t the Communists and fellow travelers in the late ’40s and early ’50s use “liberal” free speech arguments? Should the liberals who defended their rights be tarred as Communists,or at least people who gave aid and comfort to Communists (as they, in fact, were tarred by some)? If, as Esper wrote, libertarians get tarred with racism, I guess the McCarythites were right about the liberals being tarred with Communism.
May 21, 2010, 8:46 amDavid says:
libertyreader,
what boggles the mind is that, if we could take him back to that time, Rand Paul would have stood there with Lester Maddox and said, “Yep, Lester’s right–he shouldn’t be forced to serve blacks at his business.”
I don’t think Rand Paul’s a racist. I think he’s politically dense.
May 21, 2010, 8:58 amJoseph Slater says:
I understand why libertarians would try to claim that segregation was a product of government, not private, action. But the historical record is overwhelmingly clear that it was both, and removing the former would not have cured the latter. Private discrimination — in housing, employment, financial transactions, etc. — was rampant. It wasn’t just Jim Crow laws, as the experience in a number of northern cities which lacked such laws, helps to show.
But if you don’t want to take the word of pretty much all professional historians on this issue, consider this. Martin Luther King — you know, that guy who Rand Paul says he would have marched with — other civil rights leaders, the civil rights movement, and the vast majority of black folks who supported it called not just for a bar on government discrimination but also a bar on discrimination by private employers and businesses. Because, I’ll suggest, they knew the score better than modern libertarian theorists trying to wish away one of the biggest problems with their theory in U.S. history.
Actually, it’s not a problem for a libertarian who says something like, “sure, in the absence of laws like the CRA of 1964 there still would be a significant amount of discrimination on the basis of race and sex in employment, housing, public accomodations, etc., but I think private property rights trump those concerns, so that’s OK.” I would disagree with that position, and most Americans would too, but that’s realistic and in a sense, principled.
On the other hand, saying, “oh, we didn’t need the CRA because True Libertarian Principles would have ended pervasive discrimination,” is living in a fantasy world on a number of levels, almost too many to count.
May 21, 2010, 8:59 amPragmaticist says:
@Joseph Slater,
I agree with Joseph Slater. If the government allowed people freedom of association, there are people who would pay up, i.e., bear costs, to be able to disassociate from others. I spoke to a relative recently who’s house hunting, and in a very frank discussion he admitted that he’s looking to move to a much more expensive nearby neighborhood just so that his kids can go to a public school that’s overwhelmingly white. And he voted for Obama!
May 21, 2010, 9:06 amJoseph Slater says:
Pragmaticist:
I wouldn’t assume a choice of a schools in a more expensive neighborhood is primarily based on the race of the other children in the schools. But hey, if you’re trying to score a rhetorical point that some white Obama supporters might act in a racist way in the private lives, I wouldn’t deny it.
More importantly and more broadly, you shouldn’t kid yourself that the folks bearing the costs of permitting private race discrimination would be *white* folks. I know that’s what libertarian theory might predict, and of course that’s exactly the opposite of what happened in the U.S. historically.
May 21, 2010, 9:13 amlibertyreader says:
Many northern states did, in fact, have employment discrimination laws for decades, but no political will to enforce them. One has to keep in mind that just passing a law doesn’t do anything without enforcement. The 64 Act was effective because social attitudes had changed sufficiently that there was no massive resistance to it, and whatever resistance there was met with effective federal executive and judicial action. In other words, the Act could only buttress change that was taking place without it. If public opinion in 1964 had been the same as in 1924, but the 64 Act nevertheless somehow made it into law, it would have been ineffectual. Indeed, Title VII was almost designed to be ineffectual, given that the EEOC was modeled after ineffectual state FEPCs, but public opinion and political incentives overcame that.
Meanwhile, if the ’64 Act’s provisions re the private sector had never passed, much of the good that was done would have happened anyway due to shifts in public opinion, albeit more slowly and deliberately. The Act surely helped, but it’s weird that liberals often talk about the Act as if law exists totally in a social vacuum–exactly what they usually accuse libertarians of doing.
May 21, 2010, 9:18 amlibertyreader says:
Whites as a group only benefitted from Jim Crow relative to blacks. In absolute terms, everyone lost, at least economically.
May 21, 2010, 9:19 amGerbilsbite says:
First, Maddox’s view of the Civil Rights Act is the only reason anyone today knows who he was, since it wasn’t until his CRA opposition that he had any electoral success, so I don’t really know why his pre-1964 views are relevant: Paul is echoing Governor Maddox, which is the relevant point.
Second, is there a difference between “liberal” free speech arguments in this context and libertarian ones? What sort of libertarians would deny their opponents the right to make their case in the marketplace of ideas? Does this mean libertarians(?!!) should be tarred with communism, too?
Third, do you not get the difference between defending someone’s ability to make an argument (liberals with communists) and actually echoing those arguments and adopting them as one’s own (Paul with Maddox)?
May 21, 2010, 9:22 amDesiderius says:
Slater,
“I understand why libertarians would try to claim that segregation was a product of government, not private, action. But the historical record is overwhelmingly clear that it was both”
Maybe you can help me understand why illibertarians tend to so fundamentally misstate our arguments. We’re the ones saying it was both, against the argument that assumes government action is solely corrective.
Have you gotten away with it so often among Progressives that you’re unaware that you’re even doing it? You don’t seem the type who would intentionally deceive, or to do such a blatantly poor job of it if that was your intention.
Honest mistake?
May 21, 2010, 9:28 amMark says:
Tell that to Barack Obama.
May 21, 2010, 9:29 amPragmaticist says:
Affirmative action babies, e.g., Sotomayor, Obama, etc., are touted as proof of the success of affirmative action. What we’re not supposed to think about are the people who were displaced by the affirmative action babies being given special privileges to obtain coveted spots in top schools.
May 21, 2010, 9:33 amAnderson says:
In absolute terms, everyone lost, at least economically.
Right. Which shows that economics is not the master science of human nature.
Whites paid a cost to keep blacks down … and the whites thought it was “money well spent.”
… Bottom line, folks: if your political philosophy calls for an America where one restaurant excludes Jews, another excludes blacks, another is Hispanics only, and that’s called “freedom” … well, sorry, but your philosophy sucks.
May 21, 2010, 9:39 amDesiderius says:
“You know, I tried to talk about
good roadsfree markets andgood schoolsgood government and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking aboutniggerslibertarians, and they stomped the floor.” — George WallaceThere is power in hate. Always has been. Physiocultural holdover from a more primitive past. Doesn’t make appealing to it right, or even very effective in accomplishing anything worth doing.
May 21, 2010, 9:39 amMark says:
Precisely. Rand Paul is (supposed to be a) a frigging POLITICIAN, not a political philosopher. In theory, a government should not have to resort to things like the CRA. But, SURPRISE, in the real world it had to. This is why we should be grateful NOT to be ruled by philosopher kings, because reality has a nasty way of deviating from theory–any and all theories, sometimes. Paul–and libertarians generally–would be better served acknowledging these practical cases and being genuinely content with them. Ronald Reagan had no problem doing so. He bitterly opposed the Fair Housing Act when running for governor in 1966:
While Reagan probably adhered to the philosophy underlying that statement for the rest of his days, he certainly was capable enough of recognizing that as a matter of public policy it had to go. So what the hell is wrong with the rest of you? (Sailer, you needn’t answer–I know the answer in your case.)
May 21, 2010, 9:43 amDesiderius says:
Anderson,
“… Bottom line, folks: if your political philosophy calls for”
It doesn’t call for those things any more than your’s calls for massive deficits as far aas the eye can see.
Can you truly not see the difference, or do you assume you have such overweening power that you need not look?
May 21, 2010, 9:43 amlibertyreader says:
I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Communists made free speech arguments against accusations that they were subversives. The liberals echoed those arguments and made them their own.
Because no one before or after Maddox, in the history of the world, ever made a freedom of association argument against anti-discrimination laws? That’s like saying that William Brennan or Earl Warren was “echoing” Gus Hall.
May 21, 2010, 9:49 amBlue Neponset says:
I have a hard time understanding libertarian arguments because they don’t address real world issue very well. Prof. Bernstein wrote a short essay about this topic and I still don’t understand how he would have prevented segregated lunch counters.
One of the commenter, however, summed up my position in two sentences:
We are discussing very broad issues here and the libertarian solutions to these problems have many steps and don’t seem to take into account actual history. If you and other libertarians want to be more easily understood I would suggest making more direct arguments.
May 21, 2010, 9:53 ampload says:
It was a pretty simple question, Mr. Bernstein:
Do you think that people should be allowed to exclude black folks from their privately owned restaurants?
This isn’t a question looking for some reluctant endorsement of the Civil Rights Act. I’m asking about now.
May 21, 2010, 10:02 amOrenWithAnE says:
No, sbe was not appealing to racists sentiments. We can even grant that her motives were entirely pure while still believing that the result of her preferred policy was the continued empowerment of racists (again, granting that she supported it for other reasons).
May 21, 2010, 10:11 amToday's Tom Sawyer says:
Lolwut? I believe unions are mainly a Northern phenomenon. If you were up on your reading, The Jungle, which is a favorite of Statists for justifying safety and other regulations, pretty clearly pointed to the systemic employment discrimination in the North, especially in terms of union violence. This dream, that only the South discriminated and Jim Crow laws and etc., is what helps white affluent liberals sleep well after a long day of dropping their kids off to a white affluent schools, while they go to their white affluent jobs, go to lunch with their white affluent friends, pick up their kids and take them to their white affluent afterschool activites, and later that night return to their home in their white suburb with their affluent cul de sac. They feel guilty about it, and decide to pass a law such that it should make everyone else conform to behavior they feel guilty about. Most people would call that projection, i.e. the liberals don’t trust themselves, so they trust no one. Whereas libertarians say go ahead and do what you want, but if you’re an ass, we’ll think you’re an ass.
May 21, 2010, 10:12 amShelbyC says:
I see we’re re-purposing the anti-gay marriage folks’ arguments, eh?
Neither has outlawing it.
Most people think racially discriminating in one’s personal life is repugnant, too, but nobody thinks it should be outlawed. The distinction is how much control you believe people should have over their business. If you believe people should have the same degree of control over their business as over their personal life, it’s pretty hard to justify banning discrimination.
May 21, 2010, 10:12 amJoseph Slater says:
Libertyreader:
I agree with some of your response. Law does not exist in a vaccum. Legal academics can overstate the importance of it. A social movement and changing attitudes were inextricably intertwined with legal changes making progress against segregation and discrimination. My point was that the legal changes needed to be more than just removing formal Jim Crow laws. They needed to include bans on discrimination in, e.g., employment and public accomodations. But sure, those changes couldn’t have happened without an effective social movement.
That’s what Martin Luther King understood. He created a social movement, called for boycotts, and helped change the law with the CRA. He thought all these things were necessary. Again, I wonder about folks on this thread (apparently not including DB) who think the last of these was not necessary.
So ultimately I’m not so sure about your conclusion: Meanwhile, if the ’64 Act’s provisions re the private sector had never passed, much of the good that was done would have happened anyway due to shifts in public opinion, albeit more slowly and deliberately.
May 21, 2010, 10:15 amMark Field says:
Nobody would doubt that the VRA was very important, but I think few would elevate it above the CRA.
That’s a false equivalence: Sticks and stones…
Yes, and I’m criticizing the historical obtuseness of that judgment.
Libertarians regularly argue that discrimination can’t survive in a “free” market because those who choose to sell to blacks will outcompete those who don’t. David Nieporent, for example, has made that very argument here (as have others).
I’m glad that you agree their argument is silly.
While I agree with you that choices made in the face of scarcity don’t imply approval of wrongs not righted, this was not one of those cases. Ending segregation by federal law didn’t impose a “cost” on libertarians or anyone else. To the contrary, it removed a cost.
May 21, 2010, 10:16 amlibertyreader says:
Because political movements based on hate speech are inherently less dangerous than Lester Maddox banning blacks from his restaurant?
May 21, 2010, 10:20 amJoseph Slater says:
Libertyreader:
I agree with some of your response. Law does not exist in a vaccum. Legal academics can overstate the importance of it. A social movement and changing attitudes were inextricably intertwined with legal changes making progress against segregation and discrimination. My point was that the legal changes needed to be more than just removing formal Jim Crow laws. They needed to include bans on discrimination in, e.g., employment and public accomodations. But sure, those changes couldn’t have happened without an effective social movement.
That’s what Martin Luther King understood. He created a social movement, called for boycotts, and helped change the law with the CRA. He thought all these things were necessary. Again, I wonder about folks on this thread (apparently not including DB) who think the last of these was not necessary.
So ultimately I’m not so sure about your conclusion: Meanwhile, if the ’64 Act’s provisions re the private sector had never passed, much of the good that was done would have happened anyway due to shifts in public opinion, albeit more slowly and deliberately.
Social attitudes were in some cases changed by the fact that it was now illegal to discriminate in certain ways. Also, even if you are 100% right, I’m not sure why black folks (and others covered by anti-discrimination laws) should be required to wait until the slow, deliberate change happens, whenever that will be.
Desiderius:
See above for my position on the rleationship between social movements and law. I’m not going to engage your insults, but I will point out that it’s ironic that you accuse me of caricaturing libertarian thought when you characterize “illibertarians” as people who “assume government action is solely corrective.”
May 21, 2010, 10:21 amJoseph Slater says:
Whoa, apoligies for the double-post with the first one not being complete.
May 21, 2010, 10:23 amDerHahn says:
You mean the guy with the white mother from Kansas, who grew up in Hawaii, and got Ivy League degrees? That Barry .. I mean Barak .. Obama?
May 21, 2010, 10:41 amDesiderius says:
Slater,
“See above for my position on the rleationship between social movements and law. I’m not going to engage your insults, but I will point out that it’s ironic that you accuse me of caricaturing libertarian thought when you characterize “illibertarians” as people who “assume government action is solely corrective.””
No insult intended. Just letting you know that in this forum, blatantly mistating arguments ain’t gonna fly, mine included.
The irony was intended to point that out – glad it caught your attention. Care to correct the original?
May 21, 2010, 10:41 amMark Field says:
I can’t remember where now, but I once read a description of Goldwater as a Typhoid Mary of racism: while never getting the disease itself, he spread it to others.
Comparing the success of your do-nothing approach in effect from 1877 to 1965 with the results since 1965 isn’t going to help your argument much.
May 21, 2010, 10:42 amSarcastro says:
[For those still thinking David Bernstein is being all uber-libertarian and impractical, The article he links in the comments quotes him as saying he is in favor of the private part of the Civil Rights Act due to the cartel controlling the South at the time.
Desiderius your point about the ahistorical arguments folks are making cuts through a lot of the Gordian knot this thread has become.
Malvolio, life does still suck for a lot of blacks, but it sure is better than it used to be, so don't pretend that blacks reaped no gains from the civil rights act.
Steve Sailer, your thesis seems to be that forced lending to black folks caused the mortgage meltdown singlehandedly. Such a one sided conclusion, on a thread that has nothing to do with said conclusion, means you have an agenda. And a pretty ugly seeming one at that.
As usual, folks are arguing that their policies are all benefit, not cost and that the opposing side's policies are all cost. Arguing that governmental racial policies help whites while in the same breath arguing they have no effect on blacks is pretty silly, as is the converse proposition.]
May 21, 2010, 10:42 amMark Field says:
Yes.
May 21, 2010, 10:44 amMark says:
Yes, that one–the one who has lived almost his entire life after the enactment of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and in 2008 managed to win three large states in the Old Confederacy. That Barack Obama.
If you have some fantasyland theories on how that could have happened had we adhered to strict “libertarian” principles back in the 1960s, I would surely be amused to read them.
May 21, 2010, 10:48 amGerbilsbite says:
Because no one before or after Maddox, in the history of the world, ever made a freedom of association argument against anti-discrimination laws? That’s like saying that William Brennan or Earl Warren was “echoing” Gus Hall.
First, you’re conflating support for free speech with support for the idea expressed. The issue here isn’t whether or not people have the right to express their ideas, but rather that Paul is agreeing with the idea expressed. That’s a horse of a different color, and you’re conflating the two. It’s not exactly an obscure distinction, either (“I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”). I would think anyone with even a passing familiarity with John Stuart Mill’s arguments for academic liberty would recognize the distinction and its importance immediately.
Second, while Warren (and all eight other justices) and Hall may have reached the same conclusion, they reached it through different reasoning. Paul and Maddox made identical arguments, reaching identical conclusions. I’ll say that Gus Hall reached the right conclusion about segregation and racism, but I disagree with his reasoning. Paul apparently thinks Maddox reached the right conclusion and employed the right reasoning to get there. Again, big difference.
May 21, 2010, 10:50 amMark says:
Steve Sailer, an ugly agenda?!? Why, he hasn’t even managed to drag interracial couplings into this discussion yet (at least to the extent I’ve read his comments).
Give him time, man, give him time. He has just begun to fright.
May 21, 2010, 10:51 amlibertyreader says:
So if you were looking out for the interests of the minority groups in questions, and you had a choice in 1935 between taking Father Coughlin off the air, or requiring all country clubs to admit Jews, you would have taken the latter? Or between forcing Sen. Bilbo into early retirement, or ensuring that all Jackson restaurants were open to all comers, you would take the latter? Either the answer is no, or you have a very strange idea of how the world works.
May 21, 2010, 10:51 amMAM says:
I recall the stories of my father, a veteran, traveling in Louisiana and denied a place the use of a gas stations restroom. The owner stated he could use the tree in the back.
I recall my father-in-law, an officer, heading west to California for college, deciding to buy a car b/c he did would not tolerate sitting in the back of a bus.
I also recall stories of my father going on trips where he would carry a through the South as protection against the Klan and storing food as a way to not to be humiliated by being denied service b/c of the color of his skin.
The theory of libertarianism, at least to me, assumes a rationality that was not present and belies history. Government action on private parties, while not a panacea, was a critical component in moving society in the right direction. More importantly, I believe it provided further support to blacks who believed that society, government included, was the enemy.
May 21, 2010, 10:55 amJonathan H. Adler says:
This is one of the stupidest and uninformed comments I’ve ever seen from Professor Rabett. To say “property rights are human rights” is to say that rights to property are rights held by people — not rights to hold other people.
Silly Rabett, law’s not for kids.
JHA
May 21, 2010, 10:57 amSeaDrive says:
I’m a New Englander, but the first-hand accounts that I’ve heard indicate that white business did sell to black customers, but on a second-class basis. In a clothing store, a black customer would have to wait until all white customers were served. I read in the past few days a black man saying that in his youth, he couldn’t eat a restaurant, but he could buy from kitchen door on a take-out basis. Business men don’t pass up customers.
Threads like this one make me want to quote Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
May 21, 2010, 11:07 amChristopher Cooke says:
The Paul candidacy highlights that libertarian candidates, because of their anti-government views which logically would lead to the abolition of laws designed to protect against discrimination, are now being embraced by some nasty people as their champions. This is not unique to libertarian candidates, but because there are so few of them who achieve a realistic chance of electoral success, they are not used to this spotlight.
May 21, 2010, 11:07 amzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
Seeing as Bartlett never made the “specific factual claim[]” you cite (“African-Americans’ standard of living [didn't keep] rising after Reconstruction”), that would not only be nit-picking but also literally false.
Even if we assume that Bartlett had claimed such, and if we assume arguendo that your refutation of this claim is true, what of it? Should they all be saying, “Why thankyoo, massah, I shore doo appre-shate dem chitlins ya dun give me”?
I think you were wise to leave the gratuitous nit-picking to others. Matter of fact, you might have shown your wisdom even more if you’d left the gratuitous non-factual nit-picking to others as well.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 11:08 amShelbyC says:
How do you determine which gains where reaped from the civil rights act, and which gains were reaped from the changes in attitudes that permitted the civil rights act? IOW, do you really think many people nowadays would like to discriminate but don’t due to the civil rights act, or do people simply not discriminate because they don’t wish to discriminate?
May 21, 2010, 11:09 amzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
Heretic!!! Burn him at the stake.
;-)
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 11:14 amShelbyC says:
Since DB never made the specific factual claim that blacks should be saying…
May 21, 2010, 11:20 amzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
You misstate the case. The claim is not that the Southern whites luvved them some libertarianism, but rather that libertarians luvved them some Southern discriminatory practises. To wit, that federal courts [forget the state courts; they were filled with racists] with libertarian tendencies deferred to both personal and institutional racism in the south.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 11:21 amMark Field says:
I guess I have a very strange idea how the world works.
I will say this, though: if blacks had been allowed to vote, Sen. Bilbo would have had a nice long retirement. Win-win.
May 21, 2010, 11:23 amMark Field says:
Nobody can ever prove such things definitively, one way or the other (that is, you can’t prove the CRA was NOT responsible for the change). But in this case we have 100 years of trying it one way and the change didn’t happen. It did once the CRA passed (and lots of other stuff happened also). Maybe that’s just chance, but I doubt it.
May 21, 2010, 11:27 amShelbyC says:
And the counter-claim is that courts who allow discrimination by state and local governments do not have libertarian tendencies.
May 21, 2010, 11:28 amlibertyreader says:
What about:
And if someone is writing about history, pointing out that they don’t know what they are talking about is relevant.
May 21, 2010, 11:28 amShelbyC says:
Who says it’s just chance? It’s not like the CRA just randomly passed one day. That’s how democracy works. If people think discrimination is a good thing, they won’t outlaw it, and they’ll do it. If people change their minds and think discrimination is wrong, they’ll outlaw it and not do it. To say that the change in the law caused the change in behavior is putting the cart before the horse.
May 21, 2010, 11:34 amRK says:
You’re comparing a political movement to a relatively minor manifestation of a movement. If you’re asking whether a political movement based on hate speech is inherently less dangerous than a political movement based on actual exclusion from businesses, the answer is yes.
The analogy to free speech laws is getting a lot of emphasis, and to an extent the logic actually is analogous. But at a time when a big slice of the country is fighting to maintain segregation, running a campaign that emphasizes an ostensibly neutral ideology that just so happens to come out on the side of the segregationists on the main issue of the day, and which actually gains the support of those segregationists, naturally leads people to associate Goldwaterism with segregation in a way that they don’t associate liberalism and libertarianism with Communism.
May 21, 2010, 11:39 amRK says:
This would be true were it not for the elementary fact that the “people” in question actually refers to two different groups: the federal electorate (and Congress) that passed the CRA on the one hand, and the Southern (white) electorate that supported segregation on the other.
May 21, 2010, 11:43 amRK says:
In context, it seems obvious to me that Bartlett was referring to legal gains, not standard of living. (The rest of the piece, after all, is about legal rights and not calorie intake.)
May 21, 2010, 11:45 amSarcastro says:
[I think (hope) you got trolled.]
May 21, 2010, 12:00 pmlukas says:
Mark Field, there certainly was nothing remotely like a do-nothing approach before the Civil Rights Act. Even federal programs were often racist (not overtly, to be sure, but disparate impact goes a long way). Social Security didn’t cover domestics and farm laborers (most of whom were black), the Federal Housing Agency endorsed redlining and restrictive covenants, labor legislation protected (often all-white) union monopolies on labor, GI Bill funds and other benefits were denied to black veterans by federally-funded local institutions, and the list goes on.
May 21, 2010, 12:03 pmSarcastro says:
[Ya caught me equating correlation with causation, 'tis true. Though I would venture that at the very least the upheaval desegregation caused had something to do with later changed attitudes, and thus more opportunities for blacks.
Though I do see anecdotal evidence that there are still those who would discriminate nowadays were it not for the law.
But even assuming no correlation, one cannot say that the "anti-libertarianism has in fact failed, by any reasonable measure" because it failed to assure that "things are perfect. Blacks earn as much as whites, go to college as often, live as longer, are no more likely to be arrested, imprisoned, or murdered." Which is the odd argument Malvolio (who still has my favorite name on the Conspiracy) was putting forward.]
May 21, 2010, 12:06 pmShelbyC says:
Don’t forget the fact that blacks couldn’t vote. The voting rights act probably caused way more gains than the CRA’s ban on private discrimination.
May 21, 2010, 12:15 pmShelbyC says:
People who don’t discriminate, but would? Not just people who discriminate discretely? It’s tough to imagine that there are many of those.
May 21, 2010, 12:17 pmzuch says:
So you agree that it would be wrong to attribute a statement to someone that they didn’t say. Good. Progress of a sort.
But you’ll note that I never said that Prof. Bernstein stated such a thing (while he said that Bartlett “specific[ally]” made the claim I highlighted). I just asked as to what Bernstein thought should be asked. I hope the difference is clear. Let me know if it isn’t.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 12:20 pmMark Field says:
What RK said.
I agree that all these things were true. I don’t believe anyone’s saying that “do nothing” was the sole cause of segregation; certainly I’m not. But it was a cause. Let’s consider the following:
1. Federalism (then known as “states rights”) left blacks at the mercy of local whites. AFAICT, most libertarians support “federalism”. The effect of this principle was that the federal government was powerless to intervene in the South (“do nothing”).
2. Private parties discriminated against blacks even when no government regulation required that. That is, private market behavior was an important contributor to segregation, not a force against it as libertarians argue.
2A. This private market behavior was banned by the CRA, a law many libertarians seem to oppose. The legal support for the CRA comes from the Commerce Clause. Libertarians pretty consistently rail against an expansive reading of that clause, not seeming to care that narrowing it would remove the existing support for civil rights laws.
3. The government failed in its obligation to protect the basic civil and even human rights of blacks from private abuse. That is, the failure here was not that the government did too much (what libertarians usually complain about), it was that the government did too little (what libertarians want more of).
May 21, 2010, 12:25 pm1040 says:
All hail Reagan and Atwater for bringing state rights back!
May 21, 2010, 12:33 pmShelbyC says:
The southern white electorate is part of the federal electorate. But the southern electorate changed at that time as well, due to the voting rights act. So sure, you can say, “But in this case we have 100 years of trying it one way and the change didn’t happen. It did once the CRA passed (and lots of other stuff happened also).”, and sure, you’ve proved that it was either the CRA or the lots of other stuff. And when the “lots of other stuff” includes ensuring that the minority in question is able to vote, I’m not sure you’ve made much of a case about what the effect of banning private discrimination was.
May 21, 2010, 12:36 pmzuch says:
You’ll note the lack of specificity there, of course. Prof. Bernstein should avoid the use of the word “specific” when there’s no such specificity. Isn’t that obvious?
I would point out in addition that Prof. Bernstein claimed that the “standard of living kept rising after Reconstruction” for blacks. Why he thinks that this is a relevant measure of the legal emancipation and equality of blacks is not clear … particularly when the wealth gap persists even to this present day. One might better ask, for instance, whether the “standard of living” for blacks rose relative to that of whites, whether it rose as much as it would have had there been more comprehensive federal anti-discrimination law, or even exactly how it rose (and how much, and in what particulars, and when), seeing as Bernstein just cites to an “iconoclastic [...] account” in a paperback book, rather that providing any “specific[s]“.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 12:38 pmwtf says:
Did Bernstein actually say that racial matters weren’t much in the public discourse in the 1950s?
That has to be one of the most ignorant and ill-informed statements I have seen posted at the VC.
King was organizing bus boycotts in 1956 and they were a national story.
Eisenhower sent effing troops to integrate schools in 1957. I seem to recall that that may have made national news.
What patent idiocy.
May 21, 2010, 12:39 pmShelbyC says:
You’ve misstated the position. Most libertarians what government to stick to protecting basic human rights, and stop interfering in things like the way people run their businesses. The fact that the government both failed to protect human rights, and forced people to discriminate, underscores the claim that the whole thing was a failure of government.
May 21, 2010, 12:40 pmSarcastro says:
[Heh. Well, I suppose racist folks constrained by the law have lots of little ways they can discriminate, but are prevented from more overt acts by the law. Though the fact of folks walking up the the edge of the law or breaking it discretely is hardly unique to civil rights.]
May 21, 2010, 12:45 pmzuch says:
Prof. Bernstein:
I don’t think that Barnett denies this. I think (and it should be relatively uncontroversial) that there was quite a bit of synergy between government and private racism and discrimination. When the local governments were run by racists (which they pretty much were, at least in part thanks to black disenfranchisement), the (local) governments weren’t going to go out rounding up Klansmen and other violent groups … and they didn’t. Break the synergy, and not only do you stop the official discrimination, but also you may reduce the non-official discrimination.
As for cotton mill owners that were “white-capped’ into submission, doesn’t that just show that there was pervasive private racism as well, which would be a strong impediment to any positive change under a laissez faire attitude on the part of the federal government? Doesn’t this support Barnett’s claim?
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 12:53 pmjames says:
He’s a professor? That is quite unfortunate for his paying students…
May 21, 2010, 12:55 pmsashal says:
I like Rand Paul, I really do.
May 21, 2010, 12:59 pmWith his not typical for a politician honesty he unknowingly exposes the ideological rigidness
a pro corporation slavish statism of libertarianism to general public….
zuch says:
That’s not the point. The point is that some people at least thought that they would be better off under such a system (and they may well have been, such as land-owners in the south that kept sharecroppers). Sic transit gloria mundi.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:01 pmGrey says:
It sounds like Bartlett is (poorly) defining “libertarian” with a bunch of vaguely conservative and/or libertarian policy preferences that can be really only be synthesized with the the classic “things I disagree with.”
A liberal will immediately recognize this idiot tendency, as it’s often employed from the right — the labeling of anything objectionable as socialism, communism, “Obamanism” or “Pelosi-ism” (or whatever).
May 21, 2010, 1:02 pmzuch says:
I doubt many will pick up on this allusion. Sometimes, you need to hit them about the head with the fasces for them to catch on.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:07 pmMidcolumbian says:
As with every utopian political doctrine, Libertarianism runs into trouble when it confronts the practical realities of politics and actual governance.
May 21, 2010, 1:07 pmJeff Black says:
“Immoral” by whose definition? You will win every argument about politics or philosophy , at least in your own mind, if you get to define “immoral” to suit your preferences. Logical people will think your argument ridiculous of course but at least you can feel good.
@David Welker – Too few limitations on individual liberty=immoral. Therefore, libertarians are immoral. I win.
May 21, 2010, 1:09 pmzuch says:
Yes, yes, yes. Those that have property have a right to have property. For the rest, it’s a “right” best exercised in the hypothetical (and thus far more easy [and cheaper!] to enforce).
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:10 pmjosh says:
I think what troubles me about Paul, in addition to his position about the CRA, is what he chooses to be ideologically “pure” about. It’s one thing to say the government shouldn’t be able to dictate whether private business discriminates (an opinion I find ludicrous, but something I liken to a lot of late-night dorm room discussion). It’s another thing when: “Paul has lately said he would not leave abortion to the states, he doesn’t believe in legalizing drugs like marijuana and cocaine, he’d support federal drug laws, he’d vote to support Kentucky’s coal interests and he’d be tough on national security.” (http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1972721,00.html#ixzz0oUZzsxa9).
This is what I really don’t get about libertarians today. I’m sure there is a rationalization for considering yourself a libertarian, but still being against legalization of drugs (and it is just that — a rationalization). But to take that position and then be against state prohibition of private discrimination is not only contradictory, it begs the question of what is really motivating the position in the first place.
Seriously, police power is good, drugs are bad, but private discrimination is hands off? Give me a break.
May 21, 2010, 1:12 pmElliot says:
Sure. Let them keep out whomever they choose. My prediction is that in today’s social climate the restaurant would fail, and the competition would thrive.
If MacDonalds denied service to Blacks, would you buy MacDonalds stock or Burger King stock? If I owned Burger King stock I would pray for MacDonalds to exclude blacks.
May 21, 2010, 1:12 pmJeff Black says:
You have no clue what libertariansim is if you think that it is a “utopian political doctrine.”
May 21, 2010, 1:13 pmzuch says:
He’s a libertarian, no doubt, but a politician (and the two aren’t incompatible in my mind). He’ll say what he needs to in order to get elected, and then go “big lib” once in office.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:14 pmDavidBernstein says:
What I actually wrote was:
The Fountainhead was published in 1943. Atlas was conceived around the same time, and Rand worked on it from then until 1956, but the whole plot was outlined well before 1956. So (talk about ignorance) your examples are completely irrelevant, but I suppose it’s too much to ask that you actually figure out what time period we’re talking about. My examples, noting that EVEN AFTER Rand wrote and plotted her novels, the Democrats were able to nominated two segregationist tickets, to the general support of liberals, does show that race was not, even AFTER the relevant period for Rand, the pressing national issue it became LATER, and later includes 1957.
Even after 1957, JFK didn’t exactly run on a vigorous civil rights platform, which didn’t prevent him from being a liberal darling, and it’s rather well-known to historians that the real push for national civil rights legislation didn’t come until 1963.
Feel free to send an apology to my email, dbernste at gmu dot edu.
May 21, 2010, 1:15 pmChris Green says:
I don’t think we can know with any certainty if racism would have disappeared faster (or slower) or had less effect if America had been government by Libertarian principle during the century after the civil war.
Yes, local government played a role in perpetuating racism, but it is unclear weather it was the dominant role in the long term perpetuation of racism in the South. Furthermore, I think racism has declined greatly since the Civil Rights Act was passed, although that, in my opinion, is due more to a campaign to (rightly) demonize racism in public education then to any law passed by government. However, perhaps the motivation to come down on racism in public schools was increased when schools were forced to integrate or a cultural awareness brought about, in part, by the Civil Rights Act. You see how I could go on and on, listing one way and then another on the issue.
May 21, 2010, 1:16 pmJeff Black says:
Your understanding of “property” in the context of property rights is more limited than any I’ve heard since Junior High School. Let me give you hint, it means more than just land and a house.
May 21, 2010, 1:17 pmzuch says:
I’m not quite sure how that follows. If the libertarian is convinced that the private individual is free to treat others differently, what in libertarianism compels that the government may not do so? If the government may not do so, then why is the individual free to do so?
As for “equal before the law”, does that mean that criminals are to be treated equally with non-criminals? Maybe the power of the government, is, at best, to enforce compensation for criminal acts, eh? Maybe we’ll see a big upswell of libertarians (Tea Partiers?) making a big push for voting rights for prisoners….
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:23 pmStephen Lathrop says:
I would tune that a little differently. I prefer a definition of racism that labels someone a racist who supports any system that would use race to systematize the distribution of social rewards, whether wealth, education, honors, status, whatever. I except from that definition affirmative action for American Indians, and for blacks descended from U.S. slaves, on the grounds that remediating past racism can’t be present racism, at least until the fix is reasonably complete.
Note that there is nothing there about the content of a person’s character, or what they hold in their heart. Even if you are a hater, you aren’t a racist in my book unless you favor social action based on your hate. If you don’t, you may be a sinner, but bless you, you are not a racist. Racism is about action, not sentiment.
Conversely, no amount of purity of intent or inward charity saves you from the racism charge if you advocate for or act in favor of social outcomes with racially invidious implications. The fact that you might have been sincerely pursuing some unrelated objective makes no difference at all. If you are doing racist things, by choice, you are a racist. Purity of motive makes no difference. Acting as a racist is wrong no matter why you do it.
Ayan Rand puts the racism focus on sentiment, and objective reason—which she uses to suggest that anyone who respects individualism can’t be a racist. She’s wrong on that, and she falls into the trap of racism while excusing herself.
May 21, 2010, 1:23 pmzuch says:
How do they feel about inheritances, then? Are the heirs free-loading social maggots; “welfare queens” to be despised?
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:25 pmJoseph Slater says:
You have no clue what libertariansim is if you think that it is a “utopian political doctrine.”
If even adherents to a political doctrine admit that their doctrine has never really been tried in human history and that it has no immediate prospects of being tried, and if they respond to some real-world situations / historical events which at least arguably cast doubt on their theory with the claim, “but that’s because our theory wasn’t really in practice,” well, you might have yourself a utopian political doctrine. See also communism.
May 21, 2010, 1:25 pmShelbyC says:
What rest?
May 21, 2010, 1:25 pmChris Green says:
Soft libertarianism (conservative on economic issues, liberal on many social issues) is a not an idiotic philosophy even if I don’t agree with it. Hard core or pure libertarianism suffers from the same problems hard core socialism did, in short, overly optimist assumptions about human nature.
Hard core socialism assumes that the immense amount of power without any kinds of checks and balances that is required to collectivize a society (or much of industry) won’t lead to the most power hungry and power corrupted individuals taking control of government and, in the most extreme cases, abolishing democracy (I suspect we will see this in Venezuela in the next 10 years if there isn’t some kind of coup).
Libertarianism, on the other hand, assumes that in a democratic society, when an event occurs that injures or impoverishes people (like a drug advertised as safe turning out to have a deadly side effect), that the first and strongest public outcry will not be a demand for new, often draconian regulation to protect against any possibility of a future occurrence of the event, regardless of the long term consequences of such regulation.
May 21, 2010, 1:28 pmMark Field says:
No, I think the libertarian position is incoherent. It arbitrarily demands that the state do X while insisting that the state is incompetent, so should never do anything other than X. Worse yet, it insists that the state should forbear from doing Y in the face of tons of evidence that Y works and is good policy. That preference of ideology over experience strikes me as especially pernicious in this particular case.
Edit: What Joseph Slater said.
You seem to be trying really hard to argue in the face of the evidence. It’s like arguing that the Depression would have ended in the absence of government spending, while ignoring the fact that it did end because of the massive spending demanded by WWII.
May 21, 2010, 1:29 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Depends what you mean by “Depression.” Unemployment fell during WWII (if you don’t include the millions of men in uniform), but per capita consumption didn’t rise, I believe, until after the War. WWII was a period of great economic hardship: ration cards, shortages, black markets, you name it.
May 21, 2010, 1:36 pmzuch says:
Billie Holiday, of course, understood the dynamic far better than Rand, Hayek, or Epstein: “God bless the child…” Or perhaps even more here: “Strange fruit…” But then again, she was more of a “humanities major”, and not a J.D….
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:39 pmSarcastro says:
McDonalds, the multinational corporation, is truly representative of all businesses!
Also, as Prof. Bernstein noted, since Democrat’s position on race was ambiguous in the ’50s, it was not a big issue at the time. Democrats: if they’re for it, it must be huge! (Pay no attention to their walking back from gun control)
May 21, 2010, 1:44 pmShelbyC says:
I’m arguing in the face of evidence? Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I thought you were the one that was arguing that things changed because of banning private discrimination, and not because of allowing blacks to vote, increasing access to and quality of public education, increased sanction of private violence, etc. without showing any evidence at all that this is the case. Now maybe there would be some private discrimination, but who cares? There’s private discrimination anyway. There’s a gym right down the road that doesn’t allow men, I just go to a different one.
May 21, 2010, 1:44 pmMark Field says:
Sure — that happens in war time. I wouldn’t necessarily call it hardship, I’d call it sacrifice. But that’s really a distraction from the point that the Depression was ended by WWII, a point that’s hardly controversial.
May 21, 2010, 1:46 pmShelbyC says:
I’d imagine that they feel that people have a right to give the fruits of their labor to their kids.
May 21, 2010, 1:46 pmJeff Black says:
Only if you get to define “utopian” however you want. In English, it is defined as:
adjective
1.of, pertaining to, or resembling Utopia.
2.(usually lowercase) founded upon or involving idealized perfection.
3.(usually lowercase) given to impractical or unrealistic schemes of such perfection.
Libertarianism rejects any attempts to make people conform to any “idealized perfection.”
May 21, 2010, 1:47 pmDilan Esper says:
Liberals must hate unborn children, especially if they are members of minority groups (Roe v. Wade), Holocause survivors and other victims of hate speech (Skokie), victims of terrorism (Guantanomo cases), Christians who want to express their faith in public schools, inner city victims of crime (Miranda et al), and so forth–especially unborn children! See, once we assume that policy preferences are a result of animus toward the “victims” of those policies, and not principles, everyone can play this silly game.
You are way off.
First, abortion. Liberals really do think that the interests of zygotes and embryos are outweighed by the interests of women. That’s exactly what pro-choicers believe! And saying “you are undervaluing the interests of the fetus” is a perfectly legitimate attack on the pro-choice position!
Second, hate speech. How one feels about this issue, in actuality, is often directly related to how important one things free speech is and how compelling one thinks the interest in not being targeted with hate speech is. The academics who argued for hate speech laws, such as Catherine MacKinnon and Mari Matsuda, argued both these points– that we are way too obsessed with free speech and understated the injury done by hate speech. Again, what’s wrong with this argument? I don’t agree with it, but there’s nothing illogical about it. It’s true– people oppose hate speech laws because they think free speech is more important than the interests of hate speech victims in not being victimized! Just like libertarians who oppose civil rights laws think their libertarian principles are more important than the interests of black job- and housing-seekers.
Third, terrorism. Again, does anyone really think that it is illegitimate to argue, as many, many conservatives have, that liberals are taking too big a risk, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, etc., in attacking liberal arguments for civil liberties in the war on terror? These arguments may be wrong on the merits, they may overstate the threat of terrorism and understate the cost to civil liberties, but that is, precisely, what the debate is, isn’t it? So again, why should libertarians get so mad when someone points out “your policies would have been really bad for black people, and you are wrong to think your abstract principles are more important than preventing racial discrimination”?
Fourth, Christians who want to express their faith in public schools. Here you are just wrong on the facts. Christians have every right to express their faith in public schools. The GOVERNMENT isn’t allowed to endorse Christianity in public schools. There’s a big difference.
Fifth, crime. See terrorism, above.
So you see, the debate on almost all these issues is the same– the tradeoff between the abstract principle and some concrete cost. And it’s always legitimate to argue that the tradeoff imposes too high a concrete cost. In the case of libertarians, their hatred of government intervention in the economy comes at the expense of black victims of private discrimination. So they are open to the legitimate attack that they are more interested in their abstract principles than they are in the interests of black victims of discrimination.
May 21, 2010, 1:48 pmzuch says:
cf.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:48 pmMark Field says:
You’re misunderstanding. I’m arguing that banning private discrimination was A factor in ending segregation. The statement that I haven’t shown any evidence is silly — the evidence consists of (a) the CRA; and (b) the fact that changes occurred thereafter. Now, you may argue that this isn’t proof — and I’d agree — but to claim that it’s not evidence is, well, silly.
May 21, 2010, 1:49 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
zuch,
Bartlett and Barnett are two people that, at least here, oughtn’t to be confused.
May 21, 2010, 1:49 pmzuch says:
Wow. Who wouldda thunk it? Of course, no true Scotsman…. ;-)
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:51 pmRicardo says:
Adlai Stevenson was not a “segregationist” as I pointed out before. He was a bit of a political coward who ran scared from the topic of segregation whenever it came up, but he was a northern Democrat who was not nearly in the same category as Strom Thurmond, Richard Russell (who was passed over for the Democrat nomination due to his noxious racial views), or Robert Byrd. It’s true that Stevenson’s VP running mate in 1952 was the segregationist John Sparkman — however, after signing the Southern Manifesto opposing Brown v. Board of Education, he was rejected as Stevenson’s running mate in 1956.
JFK’s equivocations on the issue are well-known. However, southern segregationist Harry Byrd outflanked him on this issue and captured the majority of electoral votes in both Alabama and Mississippi.
May 21, 2010, 1:52 pmzuch says:
And of course, this explains why BET (or rappers or whatever) is responsible for the horrible debacle looming in CRE and all the jumbo foreclosures.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 1:55 pmJoseph Slater says:
Jeff Black:
So libertarianism has all the disadvantages of a utopian system (hasn’t been tried, won’t be tried, reality-based critiques are dismissed essentially because of this), and it doesn’t make a strong argument that if it were implemented society would be a lot better?
Yeah, I understand that there’s no claim that society or man would be perfect under libertariniasm. That’s not the defining quality to “utopian political system” for me, but I will quibble no more on that point.
May 21, 2010, 1:59 pmq says:
Words can hurt; they can hurt as much as being disinvited from a restaurant. They are both psychological harms, with the one caveat that in a competitive market, being disinvited from a handful of restaurants is not much of a loss. However, it’s likely that in the South (and even in the North to some extent), restaurants had tacitly agreed to “cartelize” their industry with regards to banning a certain class of persons. Governmental intervention is surely justified in such a context.
Someone up above asked if today we should allow private business owners to discriminate. I’m of the opinion that we should, as it’s very unlikely any owner of a public accommodation would want to discriminate given our current social mores. You may ask, well why not just keep the CRA because we all recognize private discrimination is bad? Because the CRA causes a lot of unnecessary risk in the hiring process, out of fear of a lawsuit, even if the hiring company does not have a single iota of animus (against whatever protected class).
Also, today we still allow quite a lot of private discrimination, and it’s not like people are clamoring to outlaw it. Sometimes it’s not even out of animus, but simply a matter of comfort (you’ll see this more often in gender segregation contextx).
May 21, 2010, 2:01 pmDilan Esper says:
Libertarianism rejects any attempts to make people conform to any “idealized perfection.”
At least in this debate, libertarians are being pretty utopian. Specifically, when they argue that in their perfect world, there would be no employment discrimination or fair housing laws, but there would also be full protections against governmental discrimination and police protection against private violence.
In the real world (again, especially given libertarian campaign finance rules), massive private discrimination would leave blacks in poverty and with little political power to enforce laws against governmental discrimination or private violence against them. Further, while federalism isn’t a necessary component of libertarianism, many libertarians are federalists and the state governments of the South were not willing to stop discriminating against blacks or to protect them against private violence. (Remember, southern trees bore a strange fruit.)
So the defense of the libertarian position on this issue ends up being completely utopian. In the real world, there’s no way to accomplish the things that libertarians say they wanted to accomplish on civil rights without also using federal power and barring private discrimination, which are two things that most libertarians found offensive to their principles.
And one of the problems here is that libertarians won’t give us a straight answer as to THAT issue, i.e., assume that I am right and that the only way to significantly reduce discrimination WAS to bar private discrimination on the federal level. If that is the case, would you rather the federal government do it or are your principles so important to you that you would be willing to permit massive discrimination to continue for an indefinite period of time rather than allow for federal intervention into economic transactions?
May 21, 2010, 2:01 pmlukas says:
Mark Field, there was no “do nothing”, unless you think funding and defending racist state/local authorities without oversight (and in blatant violation of the 14th Amendment) amounts to “doing nothing”.
And certainly the CRA was an important improvement over the previous regime in that it ended this faux do-nothing policy, and the restrictions on private behavior that it imposed are in my opinion not too big a price to pay for this increase in freedom. But isn’t it reasonable to ask whether those restrictions were harmful overreach?
We’ll never have a controlled experiment, alas, but the Reconstruction Era experience under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 makes me hopeful that even private discrimination can not do much to hinder the progress of a former underclass that comes to enjoy the full and equal protection of the law.
May 21, 2010, 2:03 pmlibertyreader says:
“in the real world, massive private discrimination would leave blacks in poverty”
Given peculiar historical circumstances, that may be true. But minority groups that have suffered from a great deal of private discrimination, including Japanese, Chinese, and Jews in the U.S., have often not only NOT been left in poverty, but have done better economically than the majority.
May 21, 2010, 2:04 pmDilan Esper says:
By this logic, e.g., the ACLU should certain “expect to be accused of animus” against Holocaust survivors re the Skokie case, pro-choice activists should “expect to be accused of animus” against unborn minority children, and so forth.
You don’t think both things happened? I believe the ACLU lost something like 1/3 of its Jewish donors over Skokie, and pro-choicers are called baby killers every day.
The fact that I don’t agree with the anti-march position in Skokie or with pro-lifers doesn’t mean that it isn’t legitimate for either group to say that the ACLU undervalued the interests of Holocaust survivors and that pro-choicers undervalue the interests of the fetus.
Libertarians overvalue their principles and undervalue the interests of blacks in this discussion. That’s the problem here and you don’t seem to be confronting it.
May 21, 2010, 2:04 pmJoseph Slater says:
Co-sign Dilan Esper’s post at 2:01.
May 21, 2010, 2:05 pmptt says:
All this discussion about Rand Paul and Libertarianism seems rather pointless.
Whether what he says about the CRA and racism in the 60s is ignorant or principled doesn’t much matter if he doesn’t really believe in what he says.
Look at his views on today’s parallel question of civil rights for gay people. Of course, he’s adamantly opposed to government infringement on private behavior. But he’s also in favor of discrimination by government.
The man is not a Libertarian.
May 21, 2010, 2:06 pmDilan Esper says:
Given peculiar historical circumstances, that may be true. But minority groups that have suffered from a great deal of private discrimination, including Japanese, Chinese, and Jews in the U.S., have often not only NOT been left in poverty, but have done better economically than the majority.
Without necessarily agreeing with your premise, nonetheless, doesn’t what you say here suggest that I am right and that libertarians needed to bend their principles in that instance.
Indeed, I don’t see what exactly is so wrong with just saying “I’m libertarian, I believe strongly in the sanctity of private economic transactions, but you know what, in this special case, an intervention may have been necessary”. That’s essentially what the guys at National Review are saying now (granted they are conservatives, not libertarians). And it seems to me that if you don’t say that, you leave yourself open to the charge that you aren’t sufficiently weighing the interests of black victims of discrimination.
May 21, 2010, 2:08 pmlibertyreader says:
(IOW, private discrimination does not necessarily lead to the impoverishment of the group discriminated against, nor, as we have seen in the last 5 decades, does laws banning private discrimination necessarily lead to group equality. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the correlation between legal protection from private discrimination and economic success of minority groups is weak)
May 21, 2010, 2:08 pmDilan Esper says:
IOW, private discrimination does not necessarily lead to the impoverishment of the group discriminated against, nor, as we have seen in the last 5 decades, does laws banning private discrimination necessarily lead to group equality. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the correlation between legal protection from private discrimination and economic success of minority groups is weak
This is a really weird position. How many blacks were there in major universities before the 1970′s? How many black doctors or lawyers were there? How many black CEO’s? How many black corporate executives?
And how many workplaces were segregated to the point where, if there were blacks, they worked in the least glamorous, most menial positions, such as busboys, sleeping car porters, bellhops, etc.?
We take this all for granted now, but if you had gone to, say, the Kansas City Hilton in 1958, the chances of seeing a black shift manager would have been precisely zero. The Civil Rights Act opened up huge sectors of the economy that had been completely closed to black Americans.
May 21, 2010, 2:13 pmptt says:
Sloppy way for me to put it. I mean he’s adamantly opposed to government imposing non-discrimination rules on private behavior like employment. He opposes ENDA.
May 21, 2010, 2:13 pmzuch says:
Ahhh, yes, that “Segregation Now! Segregation Forever!” Adlai Stevenson. And Estes Kefauver (Veep, 1956), that noted refusenik on signing the “Southern Manifesto” and target of pro-segregationists….
When you don’t have the facts, make ‘em up!…
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:14 pmChris Green says:
The problem with this is how you fix it, what if it can’t be fixed by direct intervention, who pays for it and does the fix cause more harm then good. Are you talking about reparations? Has affirmative action really done much to solve the problems that plague the black community? Does knowing you may have been turned down for a job/scholarship/position at a university because you weren’t a minority reduce any racism you might have been raised to feel? Does affirmative action keep families from breaking apart or reduce the number of children born out of wedlock in certain ethnic and/or economic demographics? Can we point to real evidence one way or the other? That being said, I respect the sentiment which wants to help poor communities to the extent that it is motivated by genuine concern. Unfortunately, the world is cruelly unfair in the sense that the goodness of an outcome is often not well coordinated with the amount of compassionate idealism that produced it, at least when the goal is to change human circumstances without first changing human nature.
May 21, 2010, 2:19 pmShelbyC says:
IIRC that’s what DB is saying as well. But given that blacks were subject to a whole host of institutional discriminatory measures including being denied the right to vote, I’m not sure how you conclude that an intervention was necessary. Since governments at the time denied basic human rights to blacks, I’m still don’t understand why people are sure that it wasn’t the provision of such basic human rights, and not the interference in private choice, that made the main difference.
May 21, 2010, 2:21 pmzuch says:
I think that’s “strawmanily”. No charge. Die Gedanken sind Frei!
But your strange ejaculation here does have one interesting tidbit: “It’s a good thing the Nazis didn’t have any libertarian notions of rights running around in their heads, German country clubs might have been allowed to exclude Jews!”
So you acknowledge that it took the synergy of the government and a prejudiced population to account for all of the observed
persecution of JewsJim Crow era repression. Progress of a sort.Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:23 pmDilan Esper says:
IIRC that’s what DB is saying as well. But given that blacks were subject to a whole host of institutional discriminatory measures including being denied the right to vote, I’m not sure how you conclude that an intervention was necessary. Since governments at the time denied basic human rights to blacks, I’m still don’t understand why people are sure that it wasn’t the provision of such basic human rights, and not the interference in private choice, that made the main difference.
Here’s what I said upthread:
“In the real world (again, especially given libertarian campaign finance rules), massive private discrimination would leave blacks in poverty and with little political power to enforce laws against governmental discrimination or private violence against them. Further, while federalism isn’t a necessary component of libertarianism, many libertarians are federalists and the state governments of the South were not willing to stop discriminating against blacks or to protect them against private violence. (Remember, southern trees bore a strange fruit.)”
May 21, 2010, 2:23 pmRPT says:
We’ll see how far he goes. He now suggests that the feds should not be telling BP what to do because “accidents happen”. Since most of the questions I heard at the Gibbs presser this morning focused on why the feds are not doing more, and even taking control of the process, and, given DB’s prior thread that the feds’ failure to act demonstrates their incompetence, I don’t see how Paul can maintain his hands off approach. If anything, the linger he maintains that position and BP’s prior and ongoing culpability is manifest, the more the hands off approach is discredited, as it should be.
May 21, 2010, 2:25 pmShelbyC says:
And how much of what you describe was due to institutional discrimination? Who shut down all the black medical schools? Why were blacks required to be sleeping car porters?
May 21, 2010, 2:25 pmRowerinVA says:
Comments like this really make you wonder if people read posts before they attack them. And each of the posts above that mentions mine makes the same mistake.
Gosh, I wish I had said that “the South was pretty racist …. It was much closer to a police state” …. oops, I did. That’s not apologizing for the racist South.
Again: the Jim Crow laws were there because a large number of ordinary whites were quite willing to treat blacks decently, employ them, socialize with them, marry them (see Loving v. Virginia), and otherwise not be horrible. The worse folks passed laws to try (not always successfully) to prevent that, because the dominant political power realized that the more that occurred, the more it would become the norm, and their political power would wane. (Strom Thurmond was a Democrat at the time, remember?)
Sarcastro accidentally supports my point. Actually, yes, we have laws against murder because some people are, indeed, very interested in killing (or using violence that, sometimes, kills people — remember, common-law “murder” requires only recklessness as to lethality, not certain intent). Murder is a bit of a special case, for reasons law professors will explain, but other laws make the point just as well. We have anti-tax-evasion laws because we would have large-scale tax evasion without them (and we already have a lot). We have anti-speeding laws because we would have large-scale speeding without them (and we already have a lot). And the Jim Crow South had anti-treating-blacks-decently laws because otherwise it would have had large scale decent treatment (and, contrary to your ahistorical assumptions, it did already have a lot).
But none of that was the point of my post. My point was that the South was anything but libertarian. It was an anti-black police state, from blacks’ perspective. Thus, criticizing libertarianism by pointing to the Jim Crow South as an example of what happens when liberty is permitted, is ahistorical.
May 21, 2010, 2:26 pmhobson says:
Let’s see, after Paul won, Mr. Bernstein just about wet his drawers posting about how it was “change he could believe in.”
So the question is, Does Mr. Bernstein agree with Mr. Paul that people should be able to refuse to serve black folks in restaurants?
Is this one of the “strong libertarian views” of Paul’s that Mr. Bernstein was so tickled about?
May 21, 2010, 2:27 pmChris Green says:
I think most libertarians would describe libertarianism as follows: Government gets worse the bigger and more powerful it gets, not that government performs every function with incompetence whatever the size. I think for most libertarians there is a sweet spot where government performs it limited actions reasonably well.
The same actually hold true of most socialists, but from a different angle. Most socialists believe in a sweet spot, somewhere between regulated American capitalism and radical collectivization (communism) where society and government works best.
May 21, 2010, 2:30 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Kefauver, unlike that great liberal Barry Goldwater, supported segregation in the armed forces as late as 1950. Stevenson was a soft segregationist, just like FDR (and Ike). And A.S.’s 1952 running mate was hardcore segregationist.
May 21, 2010, 2:32 pmzuch says:
No one has claimed the former, and the latter may or may not be true on an individual basis. What is alleged (and what you seemingly accede to, for the case of Ayn Rand) is a lofty indifference to racial issues and conundrums. Where this indifference leads to inaction, one might fairly affix some culpability, though. As we said in the ’60s, “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem….”
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:32 pmDilan Esper says:
And how much of what you describe was due to institutional discrimination? Who shut down all the black medical schools? Why were blacks required to be sleeping car porters?
Um, there was massive private discrimination against blacks. Colleges and universities wouldn’t let more than a few of them in (and segregated public schools ensured less of them met entrance requirements). Heck, it was hard for a black to even get an athletic scholarship, and that’s even true outside the South. Pete Newell won the 1959 NCAA basketball championship at California(!) with an all-white starting lineup. (I realize Cal is a public school. But things weren’t any better over at Stanford in that era.)
And employers wouldn’t hire blacks for better-paying, more prestigious, and leadership-type positions. You think that a black doctor could get a job at the Mayo Clinic? No way. They got jobs in their own communities and at small hospitals, if they got jobs at all. It was similar to Sandra O’Connor graduating second in her class at Stanford Law and only being recruited by big firms for legal secretary work.
If a black man applied for a job at a restaurant, he would only be offered work as a busboy or maybe in the kitchen, not as a waiter or manager. If a black man applied for a job at a manufacturing facility, he might get warehouse work and certainly couldn’t expect to rise into management.
Blacks also couldn’t join professional organizations and clubs that were used for networking.
And many firms, of course, hired no blacks at all, not only in the South but throughout the country.
This was America pre-Civil Rights Act. There is apparently a huge amount of historical amnesia taking place among some libertarians on this issue.
May 21, 2010, 2:32 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Hobson/Pload. Just keep asking the same question in increasingly obnoxious ways, because that’s exactly the way to get him to engage with you.
May 21, 2010, 2:35 pmzuch says:
Discrimination? Or prejudice (or bigotry). There’s a difference, of course.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:35 pmopenrange says:
Rand, (Ayn, not Paul) wrote quite eloquently about the evils and irrationality of racism.
Why Mr. Bernstein chooses to talk the absence of the topic in her fiction is puzzling.
May 21, 2010, 2:35 pmJoseph Slater says:
ShelbyC: Well, for one thing, the formal right to vote doesn’t get you a job, or equal access to credit, public accomodations, housing, etc. And many of those making the “private choice” to deny those things struggled mightily to keep doing them, in many cases forcing lawsuits under the laws that were passed.
I’ll also note again that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in general thought that the CRA provisions governing certain private actors were crucial and necessary. I’m an historian so I don’t always take the word of contemporary actors as truth. But I would not be quick to conclude that I had a better understanding of what would help blacks in the early-60s U.S. than those folks did.
May 21, 2010, 2:38 pmq says:
I see no reason to condemn someone for thinking people should have the right to associate with whom they please. If a restaurant owner is willing to bear the social opprobium, then let him be a racist. We allow this in plenty of other contexts and I see little harm from it as long as we’re not talking about a culturally-ingrained institution of discrimination (which we had 60 years ago, but very likely do not have today).
I think we can all agree that restaurant owners shouldn’t discriminate, but the libertarian position is that the government shouldn’t go around banning fringe, but morally abhorrent activities because of the likelihood of overreach. Arguably, that is the case with regards to the ban on private discrimination today.
May 21, 2010, 2:39 pmopenrange says:
“David Bernstein says:
Hobson/Pload. Just keep asking the same question in increasingly obnoxious ways, because that’s exactly the way to get him to engage with you.”
————————–
It is somewhat odd that Bernstein has refused to discuss the merits of (Paul) Rand’s view and, instead, chooses to scamper off into these ancillary rabbit holes …
May 21, 2010, 2:42 pmzuch says:
It’s a good thing then, that other laws and principles are in play outside of a singular reliance on
libertarianism“statism” on all matters of public taste.Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:43 pmq says:
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think you’re overplaying your hand. Surely a lot of the change should be credited to cultural shifts and not the Civil Rights Act per se. The libertarians are simply arguing that this cultural shift was inevitable and that whatever marginal effect the CRA had on private discrimination, it wasn’t worth the increase in governmental regulation. I’m pretty sure nobody is unaware of the highly unjust situation facing African-Americans prior to the CRA (the OP already offers a fairly accurate description), but we can’t simply assume post hoc ergo proptor hoc.
May 21, 2010, 2:43 pmq says:
? Bernstein has publically discussed whether or not the CRA was a good idea at the time, which is one of things Rand Paul brought up. Another aspect is whether or not we should allow private discrimination today, but I’m pretty sure Professor Bernstein would say yes given what he wrote in the OP.
May 21, 2010, 2:45 pmDilan Esper says:
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think you’re overplaying your hand. Surely a lot of the change should be credited to cultural shifts and not the Civil Rights Act per se. The libertarians are simply arguing that this cultural shift was inevitable and that whatever marginal effect the CRA had on private discrimination, it wasn’t worth the increase in governmental regulation.
This is a copout akin to the argument (actually made by some Confederate apologists) that slavery would have died out on its own and there was no need for an abolitionist movement.
I would further note that the cultural shift that you are talking about was likely in part a direct result of the integration of workforces and housing that was mandated by the Civil Rights laws.
In another thread, we are discussing sexual harassment law. And whatever the merits of sexual harassment law, I think it is undeniable that just about everyone is a lot more aware of the issue of working women feeling uncomfortable and unable to do their jobs when there’s a whole bunch of inappropriate sex talk at work, whereas in the era of “Mad Men” in the early 1960′s the average male worker probably never gave this issue a second thought. It would be odd, to say the least, to argue that the advent of legal doctrines prohibiting sexual harassment had nothing to do with that change.
May 21, 2010, 2:50 pmzuch says:
The tu quoque, eh? But where do you get this interesting “statistic”? You know, if such as Rodriguez hadn’t happened, maybe we might have less people complaining about schools (theirs or others)….
Wow. Parents want their kids in good schools (but why the scare quotes?).
But FWIW, I went to a public high school, as did most kids I knew. One girl friend of that time availed herself of the voluntary transfer program to go into an “inner” city school.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 2:54 pmopenrange says:
q, given that Bernstein wrote that libertarians believe that “Private discrimination should, in general, be legal” I would think that Mr. Bernstein agrees that a business owner (who does not have monopoly power) should legally be permitted to throw blacks, mexicans, jews out of his or her business.
That’s why it’s odd that he doesn’t make a principled (for him) stand in defense of Rand Paul. Why not explain how we would all be better off, how liberty would be advanced, how mankind’s glorious individualism would be better served if the owner of a store could shoo off little black grade school children?
There seems to be a distinct lack of testicular fortitude.
May 21, 2010, 2:56 pmSteve Sailer says:
Libertarians should keep in mind the advantages gained by Southern businesses in the 1960s from federal intervention eliminating their first mover problems for them.
Say you open a restaurant in the South in 1960. If you were allowed to serve blacks, you could boost your sales by, say, 25%. You would very much like that extra 25% in business. But if you were the first restaurant in town to do that, you might be deserted by your white customers, persecuted by local health inspectors or other government officials, perhaps have your windows broken in the night. So, why stick your neck out?
Then the federal government comes and tells all restaurants they have to serve blacks. Bingo! Your problem is solved. The United States government is forcing you to make an extra 25%! It’s cruel of the dam Yankees, you loudly complain to your old customers, but you’ll just have to submit to your fate (of enjoying a nice increase in your standard of living).
May 21, 2010, 2:58 pm1040 says:
The funny thing is.. Rand Paul is trying to run away from the libertarian label as fast as he possibly can.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1972721,00.html#ixzz0oUZzsxa9
“They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I’m not a libertarian,” Paul says between Lasik surgeries at his medical office, where his campaign is headquartered, with a few desks crammed between treatment rooms.
And yet, he opposes the Civil Rights Act, although latest news from Rand Paul says that Rand Paul may have misquoted Rand Paul.
May 21, 2010, 2:59 pmzuch says:
While yours came free, no doubt. Sometimes you get what you paid for.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:03 pmPubliusFL says:
Perhaps he means Franciscans, Jesuits, Capuchins, etc. under a solemn vow of poverty. ;)
May 21, 2010, 3:04 pmSteve Sailer says:
Still, all this endless rehashing of the Civil Rights Era is (rapidly increasingly) ancient history.
The reality of the 21st Century is very, very different: instead, we watched, for example, a bipartisan coalition of politicians from George W. Bush to Henry Cisneros teaming up in the name of fighting racism with piratical financiers like Angelo Mozilo to debase traditional credit standards, leading to the mortgage meltdown that set off the economic crash.
Libertarians could have much to say about those events if they were to study up on them.
May 21, 2010, 3:07 pmChris Travers says:
I don’t like playing “if” history. “If there was no civil war, slavery would have died out for purely economic reasons” is just not provable one way or the other. I prefer to stick with areas which can be argued from clear facts.
However, there’s another fundamental question here: given the rights of association guaranteed in our Constitution, should anti-discrimination law (quite obviously necessary at the time) be temporary in scope? Should it sunset at some point when it is no longer necessary? I’d argue we should be scaling it back today rather than expanding it. If our society has changed, we should consider loosening older laws to see of they are still necessary.
My concern here isn’t libertarian per se, however. I think that laws which protect identifiable groups are fundamentally and moderately incompatible with the notion of equal protection under the law. In some cases they may be necessary (as the civil rights act was), but these have hidden costs which over time undermine the ideals they are designed to enact. In essence antidiscrimination laws are fundamentally at odds with themselves and if they are successful must be gradually eliminated.
I actually make one exception to this in that I am currently a supporter of race-based affirmative action in education. The reason is that there is a test score gap which persists even when isolating for economic levels and comparing middle-income blacks to middle income whites. I believe that it is possible that there are neurological differences which make it harder for blacks to succeed in our current educational system but that these are not symptomatic of an identical gap in overall intelligence levels. Until we know more about designing schools which better serve all Americans, then it seems to me that affirmative action in education based on race needs to stay.
May 21, 2010, 3:11 pmJeff Black says:
It’s not just that there’s no claim that society would be perfect under libertarianism, its that perfection of society is not the goal of libertarianism. Maximizing individual liberty, not making everybody fat and happy, is the goal of libertarianism. You leave the fat and happy part for people to figure out themselves, knowing full well that some won’t.
Only if better=freer. Libertariansim is designed to maximize individual liberty, not make sure all the mouths are fed and all evils are done away. Individual liberty is the supreme good of libertarianism. Maximizing individual liberty does not lead to utopia because it allows people to do terrible things like [pick your favorite social bugaboo].
By the way, if an untried political philosophy is a problem, perhaps someone should have told James Madison. Damn you pioneers trying the untried!
May 21, 2010, 3:13 pmzuch says:
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if this said relative was white … or if he was black. Which should explain you confusion here.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:15 pmCJColucci says:
Say you open a restaurant in the South in 1960. If you were allowed to serve blacks, you could boost your sales by, say, 25%. You would very much like that extra 25% in business. But if you were the first restaurant in town to do that, you might be deserted by your white customers, persecuted by local health inspectors or other government officials, perhaps have your windows broken in the night. So, why stick your neck out?
Close, but not quite right. In many places, they were “allowed” to serve blacks but didn’t dare, for the reasons pointed out. (Most of them probably also didn’t want to, but that’s another issue.) What they were “allowed” to do, and what the civil rights laws forbade them — and their competitors — to do, was refuse to serve blacks. Then the nasty Yankees leveled the playing field.
May 21, 2010, 3:24 pmJoseph Slater says:
Jeff: I understand your point, I really do. But your argument implicitly includes the idea that “maximizing individual liberty” — which you claim libertarianism would do — is a really good way to organize society, indeed, in your view, the best way. I don’t think “Utopian” necessarily means “every one is fat and happy.” Your mileage may vary.
Personally, I’m relying more on the “never been tried, has no current prospects of being tried, and reality-based criques are dismissed because of this” points to get to the word “utopian.”
May 21, 2010, 3:26 pmChris Travers says:
Nothing leads to Utopia….
However, it’s worth noting that in Iceland in the 10th century, life expectancy was approximately 45 years on average, while in Continental Europe it was 20. This is almost the PERFECT Libertarian paradise: a place with a legislature that basically defined tort law, a court system, and no executive organizations at all.
Despite being far more violent, the Icelanders lived TWICE AS LONG on average. They also tended to die without losing many teeth (carious and lost tooth rate was approx 2% in Viking areas, compared to about 10% in France over a lifetime, and note that in France the lifetime was half as long).
I dunno. Sounds like a good trade to me…
May 21, 2010, 3:26 pmMark Field says:
I’ve already agreed that there were federal policies which affirmatively benefited white people. The examples I cited, though, were those in which the federal government failed to act.
In addition, my previous response didn’t mention the state governments. Southern states in that era were run in ways surprisingly akin to libertarian recommendations: low and regressive taxes; small state budgets; little investment in public goods; etc. All of those policies contributed to the supression of blacks because they meant that only those with historical sources of personal wealth could benefit. Blacks, having started from a condition of slavery, couldn’t.
Southern governments were also non-actors in many other ways, most notably in failing to provide police and other services to their black population.
Ditto this. And I’d add that it’s interesting on that score that the CRA came before the VRA.
May 21, 2010, 3:30 pmSteve Sailer says:
Or they can go on forever, with disparate impact lawsuits and de facto and de jure quotas serving as the Slavery Tax.
What isn’t sustainable, but what nobody is at all interested in discussing, is how the application of disparate impact/quotas (i.e., the Slavery Tax) to immigrants, including illegal immigrants, and their descendants threatens to ultimately bring the entire system down.
Most Americans get very worked up over talking about anything having to do with blacks and whites, but few are interested in thinking about the vast demographic change being brought about by the mass immigration of legally protected classes of people such as Hispanics By the middle of the 21st Century, Hispanics will vastly outnumber blacks, yet they continue to enjoy all the same legal privileges under disparate impact law as the descendants of slaves.
How exactly is that going to work?
May 21, 2010, 3:31 pmRPT says:
“Steve Sailer: Few whites who have a choice will allow their kids to be in classrooms in middle school or high school that are more than about a quarter or so black, instead paying vast sums for houses in school districts with “good” schools (i.e., mostly white or Asian) or for private schools.”
Actually, we paid to take the bus from an almost all white Miami suburb to a Catholic high school in downtown Miami in the ’60′s; about 25% black, 25% Cuban, and the balance a range of whit kids from Star Island Donzi owners to basic working class. Wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.
May 21, 2010, 3:34 pmMark Field says:
As Madison noted in Federalist 10, republican government had been tried repeatedly and was considered to have failed. What he offered was a way to “behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
I’d say we’re still testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
May 21, 2010, 3:35 pmzuch says:
Might explain my confusion in PropLaw, eh? I do recall that on the first day of class, I scribbled “Property is theft!” on the board before the arrival of the teacher. He took one look, and said: “That’s a different class….” (although the reading materials included this famous quote at one point).
But enlighten me: Why is my conception (whether snide or pragmatic) of property lacking?
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:35 pmJeff Black says:
Please explain how that is “utopian” using the English definition of the word. I sincerely don’t understand. Utopian is a word borrowed from STM’s book with the too-long title that describes a perfect society where everyone has more than enough food, money and shelter; everyone gets along; and everyone is treated perfectly fair. It’s modern connotation in politics describes a political system in which the goal is create such a perfect society. How is an argument that laws governing private behavior are bad because they decrease individual freedom and government protection of individual liberty is good utopian? Under such a system, goods will be quite unequally distributed and people will be able to do all sorts of bad things.
Even if I assume that this ridiculous statement is true and/or relevant, what does that have to do with whether libertarianism is utopian. It doesn’t claim to solve society’s ills.
As you mentioned, federalism is not libertarianism or even a component thereof. What’s the point of this statement?
The problem here is that you have are either ignorant about libertarianism or you are wilfully distorting what it means. What “things that libertarians say they wanted to accomplish on civil rights” are you talking about? The only thing libertarianism proports to do about civil rights is to make sure individual rights are protected.
May 21, 2010, 3:37 pmSteve Sailer says:
In other words, you went to private school.
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn’t send their kids to the mostly black public schools in their neighborhood. (Jimmy Carter did send Amy to the local public school, but times have changed, and liberals aren’t expected anymore to practice what they preach.)
May 21, 2010, 3:37 pmzuch says:
As I said elsewhere, I think that Billie Holiday had it down.
Or you might consider this other link of mine (also given above).
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:39 pmJoseph Slater says:
Steve Sailer: Well, around three decades of disparate impact suits involving blacks haven’t “brought the entire system down.” I strongly doubt that extending similar protections to Hispanics will either. But if there is evidence that a sane person would see as threatening that, well, that’s what we have a political process for.
May 21, 2010, 3:40 pmzuch says:
Yes. But by what right are the hiers entitled to keep it? Here’s the original post:
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:45 pmzuch says:
Oooops. My misteak. Mea, mea culpa. Thanks for the head’s-up; too late to edit previous posts, but I’ll watch it from now on.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:47 pmJeff Black says:
Again, if you get to define utopian however you want, you win.
Of course, if utopian=someone’s idea of how to best order society, then every political philosophy is utopian and the word has lost all meaning.
May 21, 2010, 3:49 pmCJColucci says:
the mass immigration of legally protected classes of people such as Hispanics
It may have escaped people’s notice that the civil rights laws apply to everyone, not just the currently-fashionable minorities. As it happens my docket of discrimination cases, always the largest part of my caseload, is currently made up entirely of suits by white folks. They differ from the ones brought by non-whites only in being generally even less plausible.
May 21, 2010, 3:50 pmMichael Ejercito says:
It was written on this post, on which I can not comment, that
The problem is that even if the Thirteenth Amendment could be justified in striking down Jim Crow as an incident of slavery, it would not be sufficient for striking down similar laws in states where slavery never existed, like Illinois and Oregon. Illinois was an egregious example, as it had a law forbidding black people from living there. Considering that slavery never existed there, that law can not credibly be blamed on slavery.
People seem to attack libertarianism while not knowing what libertarianism is , just like people attack homosexuality while not knowing what homosexuality is .
In that regard, they were a lot like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
This is true.
However, allowing private discrimination is true equality, since people of whatever race are permitted to discriminate as they see fit.
The solution to whites only lunch counters is to permit blacks only lunch counters.
No libertarian claimed that protection of individual rights was not a legitimate function of government.
As long as other people can keep whites out of their privately-owned restaurants.
See how that works?
Very good point.
Why not?
If you do not like discrimination in business, start your own business.
Explain why this would be so, if black people and white people were equally free to discriminate as they saw fit.
Indeed.
And who is it that gets pistol permits in New York?
And blacks could refuse to do business with him, or all whites for that matter.
See how it works. An equal right to discriminate.
The more politically-astute answer would be, “Blacks shouldn’t be forced to serve Lester Maddox at their businesses. Fair is fair.”
Only if other people are allowed to exclude white people from their privately-owned restaurants.
Either everyone has an equal right to discriminate, or no one does.
You are assuming that the federal government wanted to end discrimination but their hands were tied.
The fact that D.C. schools were racially segregated until 1954 should give a big clue…
It is their right, just as private parties are free to deny the Holocaust.
What part of libertarian doctrine predicts utopia?
that is impossible. Discrimination leads to impoverishment. Just ask the Chinese in Malaysia.
Why could not black people open their own restaurants?
May 21, 2010, 3:51 pmJeff Black says:
As someone has already mentioned, property, in the context of a discussion of property rights, includes any fruit of your labors. I don’t own land or a home but I have property rights in the money I earn, in the furniture I’ve purchased, in the cars I drive, etc.
You argued that only the privileged property owners were entitled to property rights while the rights of the rest are only protected in the abstract. Under the broader definition of property, there are very few people in this country who do not have property and, therefore, property rights.
May 21, 2010, 3:56 pmRPT says:
Yes, it was a private school because the religious component was important to my small town high school educated parents. The local high school (Hialeah) was good as well. The point was that the integrated student body experience was valuable if not essential to understand the world.
In other news, Rand Paul has revealed his view that the 1A does not permit the President to criticize BP. Criticism of a foreign based oil company is “un-American”. Looking forward to a new libertarian revelation on a daily basis now.
May 21, 2010, 3:56 pmSteve Sailer says:
Similar protections are extended to Hispanics. It’s funny how people don’t think about this. It shows that disparate impact is really about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. That’s okay by me, but then why do people who just snuck across the border last week qualify for disparate impact?
Currently, there are about 40 million blacks and 200 million whites, so every quota slot for a black impacts, in effect, 1/5th of a white. Okay, that’s affordable.
But the Census Bureau projects that by 2050 there will be 132,000,000 Hispanics. By 2100, Hispanics will outnumber whites.
How exactly is that going to work?
May 21, 2010, 3:57 pmzuch says:
Enough of this crapola.
Here’s what you said with the salient part bolded to help you catch on:
The facts are otherwise. The best you can do here is claim that the 1952 vice-presidential candidate, Sparkman, was such. That the ticket was such is not obvious on any facts you’ve presented, and as for the later election, Kefaufer by 1956 had already refused the “Southern Manifesto” signing and incurred the wrath of the pro-segregationists (as Ricardo also explained to you above).
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 3:59 pmlukas says:
A selective failure to act is an act too. The federal government continued to provide for railroad construction, national defense, tariff protection and social welfare programs in Southern states, thus unconstitutionally funding segregation while maintaining plausible deniability. Not very libertarian if you ask me.
Sure, and Stalin ran the Soviet Union in ways surprisingly akin to progressive recommendations. He allowed workers more control over how their factories were run, and he had a national old-age pension and health care system. Oh, and maternity leaves. Don’t you see how it all naturally leads to tyranny?
We can play this game all day.
May 21, 2010, 3:59 pmSteve Sailer says:
Disparate impact law benefits lower performing groups (e.g., blacks and Hispanics) at the expense of higher performing groups (e.g., Asians and whites). For example, the EEOC’s Four-Fifths says that if the worst performing group performs less than four-fifths as well on an employment measure than the best performing group, the burden of proof is on the employer to justify it.
May 21, 2010, 4:07 pmJoseph Slater says:
Steve Sailer writes: Similar protections are extended to Hispanics. It’s funny how people don’t think about this. It shows that disparate impact is really about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.
I’m well aware that similar protections are extended to Hispancis. And, for that matter, to women and other groups. People really do think about this. And it shows that disparate impact is not “really about reparations for slavery,” since disparate impact analysis has uncontroversially been applied to all Title VII categories for decades.
It was your point that the application of this doctrine to Hispanics was going to bring the system crashing down. I don’t buy it.
May 21, 2010, 4:11 pmMark Field says:
I certainly agree with this, but it’s not going to help the libertarian cause any. In fact, I think it pretty much destroys it.
May 21, 2010, 4:13 pmDilan Esper says:
Dilan Esper: If you permit private discrimination, blacks in the South will have less economic power. Explain why this would be so, if black people and white people were equally free to discriminate as they saw fit.
The law, in its majestic equality….
May 21, 2010, 4:15 pmDilan Esper says:
Dilan Esper: If a black man applied for a job at a restaurant, he would only be offered work as a busboy or maybe in the kitchen, not as a waiter or manager. If a black man applied for a job at a manufacturing facility, he might get warehouse work and certainly couldn’t expect to rise into management. Why could not black people open their own restaurants?
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow…
May 21, 2010, 4:22 pmq says:
Not really, you fail to account for scale of harm/benefit. When I said “marginal,” I meant it in the economic sense. I agree that the CRA helped push the cultural shift, but I question your assumption that it was the CRA that had the most effect. I happen to think it was necessary to break the discrimination “cartel” (so to speak), but I can’t say with confidence it wouldn’t have broke on its own.
Clearly you view the CRA as a relatively small price to pay to effect its goal, but I think you’re overestimating its role in producing our less racist society and completely ignoring the costs. (Personally, I think the CRA was definitely beneficial at the time it was enacted, but I question its use today.)
In any case, I think the better comparison is whether or not abolishing slavery was worth the price of war. There was a clear trend that slavery was becoming obsolete, and so was the price of several million lives and 50 years of southern terrorism worth the extra years of emancipation?
May 21, 2010, 4:31 pmlukas says:
It might weaken the federalist cause, but I don’t see how it impacts libertarianism, unless you are talking to the kind of libertarian whose political philosophy starts and ends with “smaller government!”
May 21, 2010, 4:33 pmCJColucci says:
Steve Sailer says:
CJColucci: It may have escaped people’s notice that the civil rights laws apply to everyone, not just the currently-fashionable minorities.
Disparate impact law benefits lower performing groups (e.g., blacks and Hispanics) at the expense of higher performing groups (e.g., Asians and whites). For example, the EEOC’s Four-Fifths says that if the worst performing group performs less than four-fifths as well on an employment measure than the best performing group, the burden of proof is on the employer to justify it.
Maybe you’d like to take over the defense of one of my cases, where the disappointed white applicant is whining about what she perceives as a pro-minority statistical disparity in hiring.
May 21, 2010, 4:33 pmMark Field says:
No, that fails to recognize the distinction between speech and action which I noted above.
Depends on how broadly you define “federal government”. Congress regularly tried to pass various national civil rights acts and other statutes to ameliorate conditions for blacks. Sometimes the Senate was blocked by filibuster, other times presidential adherence to “states rights” did.
A perfect example in which the anti-majoritarian provisions of the Constitution and the Senate rules blocked a majority from acting.
May 21, 2010, 4:35 pmDilan Esper says:
Clearly you view the CRA as a relatively small price to pay to effect its goal, but I think you’re overestimating its role in producing our less racist society and completely ignoring the costs.
This is a debate I am willing to have. What I object to is those libertarians who are saying “how dare you accuse us of undervaluing the interests of blacks”. It’s perfectly legitimate for a liberal to make that argument, as it is perfectly legitimate for a libertarian to argue that liberals are undervaluing economic liberty.
May 21, 2010, 4:35 pmMark Field says:
Most libertarians I see DO emphasize “smaller government”.
When I’ve equated non-action with action on other threads, self-described libertarians have leaped up to deny the propriety of that. In their view, government has no obligation to intervene to ameliorate injustice. In my view it does (at least some times).
May 21, 2010, 4:38 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
They did, of course. What is your point? That an racist socioeconomic system where undercapitalized black restaurants serving only blacks were allowed is OK? Basically, you’ve restated the observation that the law in its majesty prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping under the bridges, but you missed that was intended as snark.
May 21, 2010, 4:46 pmShelbyC says:
I don’t see any link that discusses people who don’t own any property.
May 21, 2010, 4:48 pmlukas says:
Smaller government, in my view, is more of a corollary of libertarian political philosophy. Equal protection and the rule of law are much more fundamental in securing rights.
Equate non-action with action is hairy, but selective non-action by government implies government action by logical necessity. And in many cases, what superficially looks like non-action is in fact selective (non-)action that ends up denying equal protection under the law to disfavored groups or individuals (See: BP regulatory failures.)
May 21, 2010, 4:50 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Except no one had bothered to persuade the slave holders of this. Indeed, I have already referred to the libertarian preference for wishing away Jim Crow through a mysterious ‘withering away’ familiar to Marxists, and this is its application to slavery.
Nor is this claimed trend so clear, with the potential addition of parts of Mexico and Latin America as new slave territories. Moreover, a previous trend towards extinction had been reversed by the invention of the cotton gin; what was to say further inventions would not occur to make slave economics even more profitable?
May 21, 2010, 4:51 pmShelbyC says:
Everybody thinks that, depending on the scope of X. I’ll never understand folks who want the government to control their health care, but then suggest that it’s beyond the power of government to tell them what gender they have to marry, or what kinds of sex they should have.
May 21, 2010, 4:53 pmq says:
You’re starting to set up a strawman. I don’t think I’ve seen many (or any) libertarians advocate that the government ignore private violence. In fact, I kind of think they’re generally supportive of increased sentencing for violent crimes. Moreover, libertarians are very strong believers in government enforcement of property rights.
May 21, 2010, 4:54 pmSteve Sailer says:
Isn’t the more important issue not whether libertarianism was a good idea a half century ago, but whether it’s a good idea now and in the future? Isn’t that also the more important question about, say, disparate impact laws?
May 21, 2010, 4:58 pmStephen Lathrop says:
You may be using utopia to mean “perfection.” My emphasis is on “impossible.” I think it’s literally meant to be “nowhere.”
As Travers noted above, nothing leads to Utopia. But libertarianism is fundamentally utopian. Why? Because its basic tenets work against the possibility of its implementation.
Ask libertarians by what principle a government might justly be founded, and by whom, and no one seems to have an answer. They oppose any majoritarian principle. Divine right is apparently off limits, they don’t seem to prefer dictatorship or warlordism. Exhaust the possibilities and you will not find one that appeals to libertarians. Or if there is one, could some libertarian please speak up now?
From that I conclude libertarianism is not meant to be taken seriously as a free-standing system of government, but rather as a critique of governments of other sorts. Hence, a utopian ideal. Maybe a useful utopian ideal.
May 21, 2010, 5:01 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Opposing the southern manifesto doesn’t make you a non-segregationist, it means that you recognize federal authority to abolish segregation. Saying that Roe v. Wade is the legitimate law of the land and must be obeyed doesn’t make one pro-choice.
May 21, 2010, 5:03 pmIf you can come up with something Kefauver said by 1956 suggesting that he actually thought Brown was correctly decided, or otherwise championed an end to segregation beyond acceding to federal authority, I’ll acknowledge that he wasn’t a segregationist by 1956.
q says:
This is incomprehensible. Slavery “withered away” one way or another. In the U.S., it took a Civil War and a century of terrorism. In Britain, it took an Act of Parliament. I just wonder if given enough time, the latter also would’ve happened in the U.S.
Because slaves are costly to “maintain,” much more than automated tools. Also, there was a limited supply of slaves. It’s pretty clear that pressure to reduce the price of “input” would’ve and did allow inventions that made using slave labor prohibitively expensive. And let’s not forget industrialization. Britain could easily abolish slavery because nobody had money riding on the institution.
The Civil War didn’t really end slavery anyway. Slavery and institutional racism didn’t start to deteriorate until the market changes in America came about.
May 21, 2010, 5:12 pmRPT says:
You are exactly right, which is why I am so surprised no one here has stepped forward to defend Paul, the current candidate who will embody libertarians to the nation. Time to move to the newer threads….
May 21, 2010, 5:12 pmzuch says:
FWIW, Rand Paul’s assertion that only one of the ten titles of the 1964 CRA dealt with private discrimination (and therefore, that he didn’t agree with) was simply wrong. Titles II and VII both prohibited private discrimination (in public accommodations and employment, respectively). In addition, the insinuation that the rest of the titles dealt with governmental discrimination was misleading at best, if not wrong. Titles I, III, IV, and VI only dealt with prohibitions of government (or government-funded) discrimination, and the remaining four provided means and resources for enforcement of the act. Thus a ratio 2-1 government/non-government prohibition.
Not to mention, arguably government discrimination was already prohibited under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments; the CRA was just to enforce compliance pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth. The big advance of the CRA was to extend prohibitions against non-government actors.
That said, people like Rand and Bernstein should, if they felt that the CRA was an illegal intrusion on people’s right to discriminate, be opposed to the CRA regardless of whether “most of it” (or “nine out of ten” titles) were benevolent and allowable. A law is no less illegal for being mostly good-intentioned, and should be no more acceptable. If one section (or rather, two) was patently illegal, the whole act should be rejected, particularly since what it supposedly did well and legally was superfluous and could be accomplished without any trampling of people’s rights. This would be a principled stance. Neither of them will do so.
Cheers,
May 21, 2010, 6:20 pmDilan Esper says:
Opposing the southern manifesto doesn’t make you a non-segregationist, it means that you recognize federal authority to abolish segregation. Saying that Roe v. Wade is the legitimate law of the land and must be obeyed doesn’t make one pro-choice.
If you can come up with something Kefauver said by 1956 suggesting that he actually thought Brown was correctly decided, or otherwise championed an end to segregation beyond acceding to federal authority, I’ll acknowledge that he wasn’t a segregationist by 1956.
I don’t really have an opinion as to whether he was a segregationist in 1956, but it is worth noting that it took a heck of a lot of courage for any Southern politician to say that Brown was the law of the land in 1956 or to oppose the Southern Manifesto, as demonstrated by the small number of politicians who were willing to take the risk and do it.
I think you are holding the Democratic Party, which was, in that era, deeply flawed and severely split over segregation (to the point that in 1948, Southern Democrats split off and backed a third party presidential run), to an impossible standard in terms of their response to segregation.
The reality is that the Democratic Party of that era had both segregationist (the Dixiecrats) and anti-segregationist (Harry Truman) elements, and lots of people who were trying the straddle the groups (including Stevenson, Kefauver, Kennedy, and LBJ). The straddlers were not very honorable, but on the other hand, it wasn’t a time filled with a lot of political honor. (Meanwhile, many on the right were behaving just as shamefully when it came to Joe McCarthy and red-baiting. And William Buckley and other movement conservatives were openly supporting segregation on overtly racist grounds.)
Should the Democrats have done more about racial injustice in the 1950′s? Should prominent Democrats stood for the rights of black Americans? Of course. Does that excuse any libertarian now who takes the position that a private business should be perfectly entitled to refuse to hire a black man or that a landlord or hotel should be perfectly entitled to refuse to rent to one or a restaurant should be perfectly entitled to refuse to serve one? Not in the least.
May 21, 2010, 6:28 pmMichael Ejercito says:
How so?
Self-identified Libertarians on Reason.Com have claimed that the federal government has to enforce the 14th Amendment. Some of them have even extended this to requiring legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” .
Indeed, the law in its majestic equality forbids both black and white people from engaging in discrimination.
Permitting private discrimination would not be racist if everyone of whatever race was permitted to engage in discriminatiION.
Cite laws that forbid black people from owning restaurants and factories.
Thomas Sowell pointed out on page 143 in his book Basic Economics that black people were not permitted to enlist in the United States Navy in the 1920′s. Congressman Allgood said about the Davis-Bacon Act (a minimum wage law)
And racial segregation existed in public schools in Washington,
D.C., a place where Congress has exclusive jurisdiction; there was even a court case over school segregation (Bolling v. Sharpe)
It depends on the nature of the injustice.
May 21, 2010, 6:35 pmptt says:
Not Rand Paul, nosiree. When it comes to gay people, he favors discrimination by the federal and state governments.
The man is a conundrum…
May 21, 2010, 6:48 pmShelbyC says:
Don’t know about Rand, but doesn’t DB believe that all portions of the CRA were both legal and justified? See here.
May 21, 2010, 6:50 pmMichael Ejercito says:
Only if other people were free to open restaurants serving only whites.
Otherwise, it would not be okay.
How is that snarky?
What this issue fundamentally boils down to is to whether or not social engineering is a legitimate government interest.
Libertarians believe in equality under the law, and that no one should be denied rights on unequal terms or without due process of law. Some of them even believe that “the package of legal arrangements known as civil marriage should be available to all couples, regardless of sexual orientation”
Under their idea, the government should not discriminate on the basis of race.
However, because there is no inherent entitlement to a particular job, good, or service, private discrimination is permitted.
Of course, the government should not forbid black people, but not white people, from discriminating on the basis of race.
May 21, 2010, 6:58 pmMichael Ejercito says:
Severability.
Not everywhere, with Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as two examples.
May 21, 2010, 7:01 pmGrover Gardner says:
David Bernstein wrote:
No, that’s not correct. See this article, in particular this paragraph:
May 21, 2010, 7:17 pmGrover Gardner says:
Isn’t that what Jim Crow was all about?
May 21, 2010, 7:20 pmMichael Ejercito says:
Did Jim Crow laws even permit blacks-only lunch counters?
Was everyone equally free to discriminate against white people on the basis of race, as they were free to discriminate against black people on the basis of race?
Stossel was right.
May 21, 2010, 8:01 pmembiggen says:
I’d like to see some proof that you are here in this country legally.
May 21, 2010, 8:10 pmElliot says:
Ending segregation? Racial segregation is alive and well. It’s thriving. We all self-segregate by race because we all like it that way. Blacks like black neighborhoods, and whites like white neighborhoods. We associate with the same race, marry the same race, and support others of the same race. This is the case all over the country, at all economic and educational levels… liberal, conservative, libertarian…everyone.
Is it possible libertarians have started the national conversation on race Obama wanted? Is this how it was planned to go?
May 21, 2010, 9:47 pmDavid Bernstein says:
You didn’t read this closely. It says that people spent more on some things, because they couldn’t buy big-ticket items like cars. It also notes that some economists think that the overall U.S. standard of living declined during WWII.
May 21, 2010, 10:00 pmRandy says:
Rowerin VA: “But Jim Crow laws were there because if those laws weren’t enforced, a whole lot of whites would have been just fine with dealing honestly with blacks”
Total BS. The rioters at the lunch counters were NOT political elites. They were young people who violently protested the fact that blacks wanted to eat at the same lunch counter as whites.
Steve Sailer: “For example, look at the Obama Administration yesterday firing physicist Jonathan Katz from their “dream team” of five supposed super scientists recruited to come up with a way to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The Administration fired him when it turned out he had written rude things in the past about gays’ responsibility for the AIDS epidemic. He’s against gays, so he couldn’t be allowed to volunteer his time to try to figure out how to plug the oil leak. Plugging the oil spill is unimportant compared to declaring forthrightly that the Obama Administration is on the side of the Right People.”
Obama is hardly a friend to gays, but regardless — if you have a scientist proudly proclaiming that he is a racist or a anti-semite and explaining in detail why jews or blacks are inferior people, I daresay you would find few people who would agree he should have anything to do with a government program. There are still plenty of other people to choose from.
Steve: “What’s definitely not affordable is the public stupidity fostered by political correctness.”
Agreed. And I find that the political correctness that goes by the name of ‘traditional family values’ and such for fear of offending homophobes to be particularly odious. Glad you agree.
May 21, 2010, 10:10 pmMichael Ejercito says:
Jim Crow laws obviously had the support of the population.
But then why would such laws be needed, if white people could be relied on to refuse to do business with black people? Could it be because without the law, some white people might do business with black people?
May 21, 2010, 10:27 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Son, why don’t you come back when you know what you’re talking about.
Although I think David Bernstein’s analysis is mostly wrong, he (and some other pro-CRA libertarians) come to grips with something you are missing. Jim Crow didn’t come from a vacuum and wasn’t written on some tabula rasa. It was the continuation of an extremely anti-libertarian system, namely, slavery. The actors involved in the Jim Crow economy came from very unequal beginnings in terms of available resources, and there is no reason to think that (in the absence of changes in the law) they would converge.
Your version of Libertarianism seems to be largely axiomatic (let business discriminate as they please is one of its fundamental axioms) and ahistorical. When I want discussions that are not historically contingent, I look at math web sites, not law.
May 21, 2010, 10:32 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Speak for yourself, please. (How can you stick a foot and a robe in your mouth at the same time?)
As has been pointed out upthread many times, some types of racial discrimination were established without the need for laws to enforce them. Since black people were, on average, much less wealthy than whites—a legacy of slavery, although I apologize for bringing some history into the discussion [not!]—businesses that wished to equalize treatment of customers stood to lose more revenue from bigoted whites than they could gain from blacks.
May 21, 2010, 10:42 pmrpt says:
Ah yes, John Stossel. There is still a market for the intentionally inflammatory.
May 21, 2010, 10:55 pmrpt says:
What does this mean? I’m only married once, but I associate with and support lots of different people of different races and political beliefs.
May 21, 2010, 10:59 pmGrover Gardner says:
I read it quite closely. Wages and GDP rose significantly, people had money to spend and they spent it where they could.
“Some economists” would be Robert Higgs, who maintains that the usual statistical measurements concealed a decline in the standard of living.
He may have a point, to some extent (I don’t think it’s much of one), but that doesn’t square with what you wrote:
I don’t think that statement is supportable.
May 21, 2010, 11:00 pmMichael Ejercito says:
the discussion is discrimination by private actors.
It was an expression of social attitudes, and was written on paper.
Of course, you should note that Illinois had laws forbidding black people from living there before the Civil War.
Only if they had the equal right the discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, and if people were not legally denied from owning a business on the basis of race.
Was this a problem the government was supposed to solve? There is no human right to the goods and services of any particular business.
May 21, 2010, 11:06 pmGrover Gardner says:
“Did Jim Crow laws even permit blacks-only lunch counters?”
Well, yes, that was the point. A white man could be arrested for drinking from a “coloreds only” water fountain or openly fraternizing with black people. It worked both ways.
That’s not to say that blacks could openly discriminate against whites, which is what you’re getting at. No, the power to discriminate was not equal. But the effects were pretty much the same.
I’m trying to imagine a society in which “the freedom to discriminate” is any broader than it is currently. There are countries like that. I wouldn’t want to live there.
May 21, 2010, 11:27 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The common law provided that innkeepers who put out a sign were advertising a willingness to let rooms. [The case cite at that link is from 1794.] That is, public accommodation meant public, and discrimination without cause was not permitted. Your quote above is just another argument from axioms, the hallmark of jejune libertarianism. Your definition of a right isn’t the one understood by our legal traditions.
The fact you don’t know whether or not all-black lunch counters were permitted by Jim Crow (Hint: in many, if not most, states where restaurants were segregated, there was no law requiring this segregation) means you simply aren’t qualified for a historical discussion of the CRA. To most people, the fact that segregation, one of the most shameful aspects of 20th Century US History, would be perpetuated under your axiomatic system means that your understanding of rights is deficient and the society you would establish obnoxious. Consider yourself lucky most people have more wisdom and less theory, and you don’t have to live in the dystopia you would create.
May 21, 2010, 11:28 pmElliot says:
It means if you stand on a busy corner and count private cars with more than one passenger, you will find very few containing at least one black and one white.
If you go to the park and look at softball teams, very few will have both blacks and whites.
If you walk into a restaurant or school cafeteria, you will see black groups and white groups, with very few mixed groups.
Unconstrained private associationa are overwhelmingly black or white. That’s self-segregation.
May 21, 2010, 11:42 pmMark F. says:
businesses that wished to equalize treatment of customers stood to lose more revenue from bigoted whites than they could gain from blacks.
You obviously don’t understand economics. If there is no business welcoming blacks that creates a special market for someone to take advantage of. Your argument would imply that operating a gay bar should be impossible because 95% of the population doesn’t want to go to a gay bar. Sure, a gay bar “loses” revenue from most of the 95% of population which is straight. But the 5% of the population it appeals to can provide enough money to do quite well.
If we have a population of 85% white racists and 15% blacks and non-racists, we should have a lot of businesses catering to everyone–unless there are legal restrictions like the Jim Crow laws or government supported violence.
People point out that many private businesses refused to hire blacks in years past. Yes, just like many businesses refused to hire Jews. But what did the Jews do—they started there own businesses. (Many blacks did the same—if that was possible) By the time 1964 came along, was there really much benefit the Civil Rights laws provided to Jews?
May 22, 2010, 12:19 amMark F. says:
Your definition of a right isn’t the one understood by our legal traditions.
So? Who said it was? Our “legal traditions” supported the “right” to throw gays in prison for hundreds of years. Our “legal traditions” supported slavery until recently.
Is English Common law perfect? This is just legal positivism.
And why exactly were there no all black lunch counters in areas with large black populations? How come no black business people started any? Were they too stupid to figure out how to make money? Or were there various governmental or regulatory restrictions?
You know why Montgomery, Alabama had segregated buses? Because the government monopoly bus company didn’t allow any competition. Look it up.
May 22, 2010, 12:30 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
It would be helpful if young’uns like Mark F. did a little research before treating us to their economic theories that have already been contradicted by history.
Except we didn’t, in many areas. As I point out now for the third time, no laws whatsoever required department stores to discriminate against black customers in trying on or returning clothes, but that was custom throughout the South. Segregated restaurants were the norm even in jurisdictions where they were not required by law. These are facts, and if your economic axioms can not account for them, it means your axioms are wrong.
To understand why things didn’t work out the way you predict they should, you might consider that the black 15% had much, much less than 15% of the available capital and serving the black community was therefore likely to be less profitable. As a rule, this meant services for the black community (hotels, restaurants, hospitals) were inferior to those for whites. Nothing like this is the case with gay bars and vegan restaurants—there’s history getting in the way of the general theory again.
You are right that in many cases segregation was enforced both by law and by custom, as with the buses. However, if you think a private bus company offering integrated service in Montgomery, Alabama could have survived economically (even assuming for the sake of argument it wasn’t firebombed), you are delusional. And as I mentioned before, contrary to jejune-libertarian philosophy that government regulations are the root of all evil, segregation existed in trades, services, and jurisdictions where it was not required by law.
Jewish leaders were unanimous in support of the Civil Rights Act, at which time discrimination against Jews was still routine in hotels and real estate and was only just ebbing in the legal profession. Maybe you want to ask Grandma and Grandpa what it was like to be turned away from a resort even if economically you were prospering (not, I realize, that jejune-libertarians can measure anything except money). I hope they haven’t just given up on you until you grow out of the twerp stage.
May 22, 2010, 1:48 amGrover Gardner says:
Good grief. Jews weren’t subjected to the kind of economic and social deprivation that blacks were, even in the Jim Crow South. They were still white. They were discriminated against to some degree, but they were educated, they could vote, they were merchants and shopkeepers and sometimes professionals, they had economic power. Blacks could achieve none of these things.
As “Bull” Connor remarked during the brief flurry of synagogue bombings in the midst of the civil rights crisis, “Nigras, maybe, but Jews–why?”
May 22, 2010, 2:58 amGrover Gardner says:
In fact there were black businesses, newspapers, even unions, under Jim Crow. There was a black “economy” and a fair degree of social and economic stratification within many black communities. But whatever economic or social power was attained could be wielded only within the that community, not beyond it.
May 22, 2010, 3:19 amStephen Lathrop says:
It would be interesting to know how many of the contributors to this bizarre thread were born early enough, before 1948 or so, to have personal knowledge of the social conditions being discussed here. How many lived in the South and experienced both de jure segregation and the pervasive social terror?
I ask this because many of these comments seem to show a surprising amount of knowledge about particular details of Jim Crow life, together with a complete disconnect on what it was actually like.
How old are you guys? Where did you live when you were growing up? I’m 63 years old, and lived in Virginia, Florida, and Maryland.
May 22, 2010, 7:39 amDavid Bernstein says:
Courage? Not if you’re running for president in 1956, and know that signing the manifesto would queer your chances of being on the ticket, as it did for Sen. Russell.
May 22, 2010, 7:53 amEli Rabett says:
You appear to ignore the fact of slavery and indentured servitude. By your lights, since property rights are primary, the slaveholders and their heirs are due large payments for seized property.
May 22, 2010, 8:12 amEli Rabett says:
The history of Jewish peddlers in the South before and after the Civil War are enlightening in this regard. While Jews were “technically” white, they were enough “other” that they could sell to both sides of the racial divide most of the time, still their opportunities were limited, although over a long period of time they were able to wedge out enough profit to start stores (known as “Jew” stores).
May 22, 2010, 9:05 amzuch says:
You’re pretty dense. Is that intentional? Read the “God Bless The Child” link again.
Cheers,
May 22, 2010, 9:53 amzuch says:
We’re talking legislative candidates here (Rand Paul), not judicial nominees.
Do they support the bill? Would they have voted for it? Do they want to repeal it?
Cheers,
May 22, 2010, 9:56 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
52, DC. Had many talks with my Dad about DC as a segregated city, which was just ending when I became old enough to remember.
May 22, 2010, 10:29 amYeggo says:
See, I’m not sure any of this really speaks to Rand Paul as much as it speaks to his ability to express the Libertarian philosophy in a cogent way. If you read what he’s said and compare it to the Libertarian Party platform, especially on the BP spill, they don’t seem to fully come into agreement.
Rather than treat Paul as a Libertarian in Republican clothing, I think he’s trying to combine two philosophies – his own beliefs of libertarianism and the more anti-Democratic ideals of the Tea Party that he needed to win his primary.
He’s not a bad guy, he’s just a bad spokesman.
May 22, 2010, 10:53 amhttp://bit.ly/9eCJKB
whisper says:
Have Bernstein or Somin answered the question yet about whether or not they believe it should be legal for a private restaurant owner to refuse to serve black folks?
I wonder why they just haven’t been able to find the time to respond?
May 22, 2010, 11:55 amchristian says:
Libertarianism is Fantasy Land. Galt’s Gulch for the politically infantile.
Of course, imagine if Rand Paul were talking about homosexuals, then Andrew Sullivan would be less anxious to continue to defend his idiocy.
May 22, 2010, 12:13 pmApril says:
Gotta say – I’m with Christian, but this has been a very interesting.
May 22, 2010, 1:20 pmRandy says:
Grover: “In fact there were black businesses, newspapers, even unions, under Jim Crow. There was a black “economy” and a fair degree of social and economic stratification within many black communities.”
Indeed. In Washington, DC, the whole U Street area was for blacks, principally because all the ‘white’ stores downtown either refused to cater to blacks or had policies that made it difficult. Segregation was legally enforceable as well.
And so U street rivaled Harlem in terms of entertainment, professional services and other black-owned businesses, which allowed some to reach the level of prosperous middle class, though certainly not everyone. As soon as segregation was abolished, many of the black customers started going to the white stores, and the U street businesses suffered as a result. (Pat Buchanan argues that for this reason, segregation was good for blacks, because it forced them to establish their own economy. But if it was so good, why would they shop at the white stores? He has a point, of course, but it’s still nuts).
But the real problem with segregation in any form is that it gave blacks the badge of inferiority, a term used by Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education. It doesn’t matter if what blacks have is as good as the whites. What matters is the notion that they, as a people or a class, are not good enough to mingle with the majority. They must be marginalized, pushed aside, out of the way, out of sight, of the white majority. This, I believe, is the real reason they flocked to the white stores — it was an affirmation that finally they are ‘good enough’ in the eyes of the law, if not yet society, to shop wherever they pleased. Just like whites.
The strength of our country is that we welcome everyone from anywhere, in the belief that all people have a value and something to contribute. We diminish ourselves if we say otherwise to any group or class. Any society that seeks to marginalize a group of people, no matter what the reason, rationale or justification, can’t be called liberal or libertarian.
May 22, 2010, 1:36 pmMichael Ejercito says:
People were thrown in prison for committing sodomy (an act), not for being gay (an orientation).
May 22, 2010, 1:38 pmzuch says:
Why would “violence and harassment [...] be pointless” if private discrimination was banned? On the contrary, it seems to me, it would be all that much more significant, after one of the other means of intimidation and suppression had been removed.
I’m not sure I buy Prof. Bernstein’s theory here.
Cheers,
May 22, 2010, 1:55 pmMichael Ejercito says:
What is your answer to your question?
Do you believe it should be legal for a private restaurant to refuse to serve white folks?
May 22, 2010, 2:11 pmbiomuse says:
Well if that’s “impossible,” then out the window would have gone any ability by a Libertarian federal government to desegregate schools in the early 50′s which involved direct conflict between fed and state government.
So then I guess we’d be well advised to steer clear of Libertarianism.
May 22, 2010, 2:17 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Why has “Whisper” been publishing the same question over and over under several different pseudonyms? Here’s what I tell commenters like you: I will answer any legal or policy question you want, if you are willing to pay my hourly consulting fee. I need a $2,000 retainer up front. You can send a check to my office.
Otherwise, I blog or comment about what I want to blog or comment about.
May 22, 2010, 2:31 pmnothing says:
The way this is phrased is rather troubling: “African-Americans’ standard of living kept rising after Reconstruction”. This free-market argument was raised, what, thirty years ago?, based on a handful of data points, which researchers then connected in a line, and called “the free market.” But after accumulating vastly more data and filling in the gaps, it didn’t look like a line, at all. Rather, it looked like stair steps: flat as a pool table, except for about half a dozen discrete events, each of which was the result of changes in public policy.
What didn’t work: free market utopianism. What did work: public policy.
This statement about “standard of living” is technically correct while avoiding the discussion entirely.
May 22, 2010, 2:58 pmRandy says:
Michael: “People were thrown in prison for committing sodomy (an act), not for being gay (an orientation).”
A distinction without a different. Sorry, but that’s just ridiculous. It’s like those religious people who claim that they hate the sin but love the sinner. They don’t — they hate gays, even the ones who are celebate.
Only gays were thrown in jail for committing sodomy, and only gays were targeted for the laws.
May 22, 2010, 3:17 pmRandy says:
David: “Why has “Whisper” been publishing the same question over and over under several different pseudonyms? Here’s what I tell commenters like you: I will answer any legal or policy question you want, if you are willing to pay my hourly consulting fee. I need a $2,000 retainer up front. You can send a check to my office.
Otherwise, I blog or comment about what I want to blog or comment about.”
Of course. Nonetheless, it’s a simple question, and continued dodging of it is evidence that you are unwilling to answer the question for some reason. Without giving an answer or reason for refusing to answer (aside from the cute answer you provide here) leaves us to speculate what the answer really is.
Yes, you are free to blog about what you want. But when you blog about an issue and raise it for discussion, then clam up when someone poses a reasonable question to you, your credibility diminishes greatly. And we are free to speculate as to what your answer really is.
I think the answer is rather clear, but you just don’t want to defend it.
May 22, 2010, 3:25 pmwhisper says:
“Why has “Whisper” been publishing the same question over and over under several different pseudonyms? Here’s what I tell commenters like you: I will answer any legal or policy question you want, if you are willing to pay my hourly consulting fee. I need a $2,000 retainer up front. You can send a check to my office.
Otherwise, I blog or comment about what I want to blog or comment about.”
Okay, I accept. I would guess that the hourly rate for a professor at a third tier law school would be about $300 an hour.
I assume you can answer the question in less than 6 minutes. All I need from you is a yes or no answer about whether or not you agree with John Stossel (And Bull Connor and the younger George Wallace) that a private restaurant owner should be able to refuse service to niggers, oh, I mean African Americans.
Will you agree to provide a yes or no answer to that on the terms I set forth above?
May 22, 2010, 3:26 pmMichael Ejercito says:
Why do you refuse to consider the fact that if the ban on private discrimination was repealed, other restaurant owners would be able to refuse service to white people?
No I ask you this question.
Do neo-Nazis have a right to peaceably march? Or publicly deny the Holocaust?
Are people who believe that neo-Nazis have a right to peaceably march or deny the Holocaust racist or anti-Jewish?
May 22, 2010, 3:47 pmJP says:
Where did libertarians stand on the Civil Rights Act in 1964?
Was there a single libertarian of note who actually marched with MLK in 1963?
May 22, 2010, 4:18 pmDavid Bernstein says:
The better question is, “was there a single libertarian of note in 1963?” Other than Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, neither of whom to my knowledge ever marched with anyone for anything, I can’t think of anyone. And even Rand always denied she was a libertarian, and I don’t think Friedman thought of himself as one in 1963. It’s kind of like asking, “did any women’s rights advocates of note sign the Declaration of Independence?”
But, as pointed out bef