I can legally deny people entry to my private residence, or other private property, for whatever reasons I deem fit. Why should I be forced to entertain and do business with people I don’t want to do business with, just because I’m engaged in a commercial venture? What does that particular bit of liberty have to be sacrificed?
That is to say, I fail to see why commercial property should be treated differently here, and as noted, I default to liberty.
He’s not a great public speaker, but he’s right. It’s disingenuous to claim he flipped on this issue; he’s not the one who brought it up, and he merely said (in a clumsy way) that he disagreed with one of the Civil Rights Act’s 11 titles, but would have voted for the Act based on the other 10 titles.
That’s fine- I default to liberty too, which includes appropriate regulations (as I see it). A society with mandated meat inspectors is more free, IMO, then a society without mandated meat inspectors. A society that bans the sale of extremely flammable children’s toys is more free, IMO, then a society that allows them. A society that allows turning away black people from your business is less free, IMO, then a society that prohibits turning away black people from a business.
That’s not to say all regulations are appropriate- many are burdensome and serve little purpose, like (for example) a local regulation that might require barbers to take training classes and get licensed to cut hair- this kind of regulation exists to protect the existing barbers and make it harder for new hair-cutting businesses to come into being, not to serve the public good.
Do you “default to liberty” on every single regulation and requirement for how businesses (and other private property) are run? Would you allow full-time child labor in hazardous areas? Would the inevitable resurgence of “sundown towns” be acceptable to you?
You are defaulting to liberty for one group. And your favored group has freely decided to open their private property to the general public in order to conduct commerce. When your property owner freely decides to engage the general public in an act of commerce, he had invited himself to abide by whatever rules the government of ‘we the free and equal opportunity people’ have decided to impose upon him for the privilege.
Your favored group is certainly free to act out his assholishness wherever he wants as long as it is away from public commerce.
Ok, I was trying to avoid a Libertarianism 101 conversation, which a) takes more time than I have right now and b) belongs in its own thread, and instead focus on this specific manufactured controversy of Rand Paul’s disapproval of Title II of the Civil Rights Act, and whether that disapproval is the morally and/or legally correct position. That said, I will address your questions:
“Default to liberty” means that the baseline for evaluating a law is that it shouldn’t exist. It means that the burden of proof is on the lawmaker: this restriction on freedom is a necessary evil, because of X, Y, and Z.
As a class, laws that restrict behavior that harms others are pretty universally accepted as being necessary, because the alternatives are all worse: either the strong brutalize the weak, or people avenge being harmed on their own, or via mob justice.
Children, by their nature, are entitled to a much higher degree of legal protection than adults are. Children are not property of their parent/guardians, and children can’t be expected to make reasoned decisions about what’s best for them (which is why they have legal guardians). So, short answer: no, and this is consistent with all of my views.
You’ll have to clarify: do you mean driving minorites out with violence, or something like a developer buying land and only selling or renting lots to white families?
The group whose liberty is being infringed. You wouldn’t object to a rude or loud customer being denied service, nor one who couldn’t pay for it. Clearly, we permit the denial of service; there’s no absolute right to patronize a business.
So long as the rules are Constitutional, which in this case is also disputed.
I’d like to have seen a free-choice version of the CRA at least attempted As I said, the business owners went from being forced to discriminate to being forced not to. We can’t know how effective or ineffective a non-coercive approach to private-property discrimination would have worked out. Folks here are mostly assuming it’d have been wildly ineffective, I’m not so sure.
I bet you’d reject that same argument if it were applied to a free-speech limitation: you have no free speech as part of commerical activity, but you can say whatever you want in private. Would you?
I mean the way sundown towns really were- tacit, mostly unspoken agreements by a town’s residents. If a black family walked in, the restaurant conveniently is about to close for the night. A merchant just happens to be out of what the black customer is asking for. Gas stations just happen to be out of gas- unless they’re driving out of town. Hotels just happen to be full. Black drivers just happen to have been violating traffic laws, and the police officer gives them a helpful warning and asks them to leave town. This stuff really happened, and for decades.
I’m generally fine with this definition. So our only disagreement is whether various regulations are necessary- and I see it as “enhancing” liberty when the necessary ones are in place.
No one’s free speech is protected when it causes direct harm to others. So if you take the case of a racist gas station owner who refuses to sell gasoline to a black family that is traveling from state to state; that business owner is interfering with the gasoline producer’s attempt to get a commodity to customers that use it. He is infringing upon that black family’s equal benefit to travel as equals to white people.
That is harming them, for no good reason.
The racist businessman still has freedom to speak his hatred of black people. He simply and justifiably cannot use his power as a property owner to injure random members of the general public by denying them a commodity they have an equal right to purchase as anyone else on a first come first serve basis.
He is after all just a temporary owner of a commodity such as gasoline. If he doesn’t like the laws passed in regard to interstae commerce with regard to selling it, then he should find s new profession.
His intent of discrimination is to do harm and if allowed it does harm,
That is not protected free speech and it should have never been considered protected.
Couple things: one, the CRA Title II would only prevent that in certain, fairly narrow circumstances. It applies as follows:
So, your local cops, gas stations, and (most) merchants are still free to do what you’re describing, yet they (generally) don’t. This is telling.
Secondly, again, if these unspoken agreements were so ironclad and reliable, then why did cities, counties, and states pass laws mandating segregation? Seems like they felt they could not rely on unspoken agreements and social pressure.
Yes, I think so, and I agree with your statement about “enhanced” liberty, though probably not pertaining the same regulations.
When I read that quote from the bill, it seems like it does indeed prohibit the behavior I described from gas stations and merchants. Cops would be prohibited from that sort of behavior by their own codes of conduct, most likely- though this didn’t stop it at times in the past (and perhaps even at times nowadays).
Some did, some didn’t. And some sundown towns lasted well after the Civil Rights act.
Hold on, now, I think you mistook what I was saying. You wrote:
That is, people who wish to engage in commerce must abide by all government regulations, even those that infringe on the rights of the person engaged in commerce, because they are engaged in commerce. This is that quasi-public state I property I referred to earlier.
My question was, would you apply this same reasoning to any right beyond Fifth Amendment property rights? Does being engaged in commerce erode First Amendment rights, or Fourth, or Eighth, or…? If only Fifth, why?
Further, your gas station owner owns the fuel, he buys it from a supplier. What the producer of the fuel desires has nothing to do with it, the producer’s already been paid. I’m a “temporary owner” of all my property, in that if I get a good enough offer, I’ll sell any of it. That doesn’t affect my Fifth Amendment right to my property one iota.
Also, there is clearly no “right” to buy gasoline. Again, if a customer is rude or demanding, you wouldn’t prohibit the owner from telling him to beat it, woudl you? So we accept some criteria for denying service; the dispute is whether some criteria can be made illegal. If being denied service is really an injury, then if I tell the gas jockey to get his ass in gear and pump, and he tells me to bugger off, I would have legal redress. And yet, I don’t.
Bear in mind that the Supreme Court didn’t uphold the CRA Title II because being denied service is an injury, or because there’s a right to buy from a particular hotel or restaurant. Their reasoning was that the law was a valid exercise of Congress’ plenary power over interstate commerce, that didn’t rise to the level of infringement of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, because the denial of use of property wasn’t a “direct appropriation” of the property. They didn’t directly address the Due Process Clause, saying only:
I’d rather they’d have addressed this issue at length, the above feels like a brush-off.
You’re right, I missed “any gasoline station” in section 2. The merchants have to fall under the criteria in (c), though.
Cops indeed still engage in that sort of behavior.
Based on that article, it’s government action that’s behind it. Excerpts:
Though, the article seems to conflate a town having a low or zero black population with a concentrated effort to drive black folks away, which doesn’t necessarily follow.
Well that’s bad too, but it’s not just government action (or at least not just federal government action).
But my main point is that were business owners allowed to turn away black people, some would, and I believe they would congregate together. Most would not, because that’s bad business in general, but without such prohibitions against discrimination, some communities might find that they contain enough racists (or enough racists decide to create or move into a community) that a “no [black people] allowed” sign might actually help their bottom line.
I don’t know that any of it’s federal; the segregation laws I referenced earlier were mainly at the state level, and the article you cited seems to focus on local and state laws and ordnances.
Based on the article you cited, that happens now anyway, even with the Civil Rights Act.
This gets back to what I mentioned earlier about tolerating others’ freedoms. In a free society, some people are going to use their freedom to be massive pricks of one stripe or another. That’s just part and parcel of freedom; you get Breaking Bad but also a vocal, influential anti-vaccine movement.
So, to sum up, if a few people want to get together and form Whiteville on their own land, that’s their right. It’s a terrible, offensive idea, but that doesn’t automatically mean it should be illegal. And, of course, no law would (legally or morally) be able to aid Whiteville on their quest for exclusion, it would depend on each resident only selling land to white folks and other voluntary measures.
Setting up Whiteville is not forbidden in the Civil Rights Act. Whitevillians just cannot conduct commerce such as a motel or gas station on a public road and promote it’s agenda within those establishments.
If Whitevillians wish to engage in commerce by producing calendars commemorating all the lynchings of Negroes in the South for decades and sell them they are free to do so.
If they wish to go to nearby downtown and sell fluorescent on black velvet paintings of Jesus to raise money for Whiteville nothing is stopping them.
Again I have stated that the act of buying gasoline is not a ‘right’ to any human being on earth. But a society’s racial minority both morally and constitutionally must be given equal status with that society’s majority to an equal opportunity to purchase gasoline on a first come first serve basis. To deny that equal opportunity on a basis of race is an injury to that group being denied and harmed.
Do you agree that a human being is harmed when denied an equal opportunity to put gas in his car if the supply is there so he cannot get to his destination based solely on his race. It is harm to be out of gas and stranded while watching the White Folks filling up their cars doing business as usual?
They could, they just couldn’t violate Title II. I don’t see what the problem is.
Which brings up a question- suppose Title II was tossed out. In what specific ways does the country get better? What good things come out of getting rid of Title II?