Yes. This is inconsistent with libertarianism, but I consider it a good thing overall for society. To my knowledge, I’m agreeing with you on just about everything, I’m just trying to clarify things with Nemo.
But you’re cutting out he absolutely crucial qualifier that Shagnasty threw on there: “as long as your actions fall within your sphere of control and do not directly harm others”. Without that, the definition of freedom fails miserably, and I think we can all understand that. Without the qualifier that your freedom is limited by the freedom of others, no definition of freedom can make any sense. Otherwise we get absurd scenarios where we have to judge between my freedom to do whatever I want and someone else’s freedom from bodily harm when I shoot someone for no reason beyond “I felt like it”.
Except that in libertarianism, you do not have the freedom to impose yourself on the private properties of others. It’s really that simple. You don’t have the freedom to force him to serve you. This is not any sort of inconsistency within the system; it’s simply a result of the system we both don’t agree with. So this:
This is simply false. I don’t like the conclusions of libertarianism, but let’s not pretend that it’s being dishonest or duplicitous. It’s simply that you are not understanding how freedom works within the system. And given that not only libertarians, but numerous people hostile to libertarianism (myself included) have told you this multiple times, you should really check again to make sure you’re in the right.
I didn’t ignore it. I specifically addressed it in my post.
I think this exchange illustrates what the central issue is here:
Bone and Shagnasty are using different definitions of freedom than I’m using. (And I think more people would agree with me definition than theirs.) Bone even said this:
They’re saying their system guarantees absolute freedom. But to accomplish this, the freedom they’re talking about is much smaller than the freedom I’m talking about. My system may not guarantee absolute freedom. But the partial large freedom I’m guaranteeing is bigger than the absolute small freedom they’re guaranteeing.
In most of America, the bigoted restaurants (yes, I know a restaurant can’t be bigoted…) would suffer. But in parts of America, they would thrive. In fact, in parts of America, were it allowed, I believe that bigoted restaurants would be mostly welcomed.
In short, we would see the return of sundown towns. Not everywhere, but in enough places to matter. We would see a return of guidebooks that tell black people where they can safely stop for the night.
The government could not discriminate against you. SSM would legal at the federal level and in the states. You could be married in CA and move to another state and have your marriage recognized.
Now, keep in mind that for a Libertarian Government to exist, the people would have to be largely Libertarian. Have you met many Libertarians that want to discriminate against you? Sure, there would still be people who wouldn’t want you to patronize their business or to hire you, but would you want to patronize a business owned by homophobes or work for someone who was one?
I disagree. I think there might be a few “sundown towns” here and there, but NOT enough to matter. I can’t imagine any town other than some small backwater being such a town.
Keep in mind, too, that a Libertarian government must be democratically elected. In that case, you’re going to see most of the people ascribing to Libertarian beliefs. My experience is that people who are members of the Libertarian Party are rarely racists. That is something I left out of my hypothetical.
Not that I necessarily disagree, but I think the answer to your question is that government should apply as light a hand as possible in order to achieve any goal.
I’ll modify the hypothetical, if that’s okay. Suppose that I’m right about the return of sundown towns – let’s say they’d be moderately prevalent in the South (like 1 out of every 5 to 10 communities), and more rare outside the South (like 1 out of 50 communities). So not the norm, but still common enough that minorities are regularly seriously inconvenienced (and occasionally assaulted). Would you still support the repeal of the protections being discussed?
That’s odd, since equal treatment is explicitly part of the party’s platform, at least in the US. Are you in the US? Are there any Libertarian racists on this MB? Not that that is a scientific sample, but if we’re talking about people in a group being racist, it would be good if we could point to some who actually are.
If you were a racists, why wouldn’t you join one of the parties that promote racism rather than one that does not?
I grew up in Louisiana, served in the Navy, and now live outside of DC. I’ve known lots of libertarians. I think a little less than half of the white libertarians I’ve ever known were racists. Not violent Frazier Glenn Miller (who, I’ll note, seems to be an obsessive Ron Paul fan) types, but still folks who preferred to keep to ‘their own kind’, regularly made racist comments (and used racial slurs), and assumed that those around them shared their attitudes.
These people were members of the Libertarian Party? There are lots of self professed “libertarians” who are, in reality, more like survivalists or extreme economic conservatives, but who do NOT ascribe to the social beliefs of Libertarians.
If you’re a black family that runs out of gas and you have to walk 20 miles to find a station willing to sell you a can and gas to put it it, I’d say you were pretty seriously inconvenienced. The Civil Rights Act was passed because the free market simply didn’t address the problem and the free market would revert right back to sundown towns the instant the CRA was repealed. Luckily for us, a libertarian government will never exist because libertarians will forever be a tiny insignificant minority.
Fair enough. I apologise for casting aspersions on your posting.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
That’s funny. I thought the people who would come out ahead, economically, are the ones who don’t discriminate. Don’t they have a larger customer base?
Or did you mean something else by “come out ahead”?
Do you think that restaurants today with “we don’t serve blacks” would come out ahead compared to restaraunts that serve all customers?
[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t say that those who discriminate have a necessarily smaller customer base, no. For one thing, there’s ignorance of discrimination. If, as others have pointed out, their reaction to this is just to spit in the burgers of every person they don’t like, they might well not find out about that. There’s the question of what the local demographics as far as agreeing with the discrimination are like. There’s the ability for others to provide alternate services - it’s brought up fairly often, but the need for an alternate service doesn’t always translate into the creation of one. There’s inertia of the product you have experience with; if Microsoft declared themselves anti-whoever tomorrow, they’d lose market share I have no doubt, but not as much as would a company that didn’t already nigh-control the market share.
But fundamentally, “coming out ahead” isn’t important as a standard. It’s whether they can continue to do business. People are not rational to the extent that they will, guaranteed, realise they’re doing less business with their discriminatory principles in place and change them for the sake of the cash. I mean, flip it around. Imagine we have a car company that is incredibly discriminatory towards one group or another. They refuse to sell to that group; they refuse to hire that group, and they make that very well known. However; their product is the best on the market, and best for value.
By the same standard that would say the business owners would ignore their principles and go for the extra value, likewise, it would indicate that consumers would ignore their principles and continue to buy the best product available to them. If that’s not the case, then it would show that people (and the market) aren’t inherently or assumably rational. If that is the case, then it’s easy to show how the libertarian marketplace can be discriminatory and successful; just run any principle up against the market itself, where it would lose.
For what it’s worth, i’ve seen Americans online (as i’m in the UK) ascribe to what i’d consider libertarian principles and be fairly wildly racist, too. I couldn’t tell you whether these were members of the party, though, but the philosophy was there.
If after all of this discussion this is how you’ve interpreted the principle of libertarianism then I suspect you will never actually understand the point. Good luck to you.
I would. I don’t think it would happen but the point of repealing those protections is not to offer solace to racists - it’s to get government out of commerce. The fact that it would also allow businesses to behave badly in some respects is a side effect.
Much like we allow people like Fred Phelps to protest, or the KKK to march, or NAMBLA to do whatever the hell they actually do, business would be allowed to do certain things that are bad because the principle of getting government out of business is the goal. Free speech is so cherished that we defend everyone’s ability to exercise it, even poorly. Getting government out of business and a net increase in individual liberty is valuable enough to suffer the bad actors. Yes allowing certain racists to prosper is a bad result, but there are plenty of other good results that flow from this concept.
Hopefully that makes sense whether you agree or not.
I think it would be near impossible to create a sundown town without the cooperation of the government. I think once you get the government out of the discriminating business, your greatly weaken the ability of the private sector to do so systematically.
I disagree, at least with regards to the Federal Government. And I think it’s very likely that in some communities, the local government would tolerate (or even informally favor) unwritten sundown policies.
All it needs is most of the community to agree that they don’t want x minority to be served at restaurants/hotels/etc. If the specific title of the CR Act is repealed, I think it’s very likely that a significant number of racists would band together, including moving together, to dominate some number of small communities and reinstitute sundown-like unwritten rules.