Utilitarians are not anti-ethical to individual liberty. Their goal is “the greatest good for the greatest number”. So if everyone can be free, that’s great. But if one individual’s freedom reduces the freedom of ten other individuals, then utilitarians regard that as a new loss of freedom.
Libertarians make the same kinds of judgements. When they tell a restaurant owner “You have the liberty to ban black people from your restaurant” they’re also telling black people “You do not have the liberty to eat in that restaurant.” There’s still a balancing of individual liberties going on, it’s just a different balancing.
What we have is our own history. Businesses were routinely discriminating on the basis of race. Then we regulated against that type of discrimination. Now, he have an economy where very few businesses discriminate on the basis of race – although it does happen – but that economy is regulated to prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses.
So, our own history tells us that in the absence of a regulatory regime prohibiting racial discrimination, a lot of people may very well discriminate on the basis of race. And that’s not something that’s unique to the US, that’s something that happened the world over.
If people want to make an argument that we don’t need it anymore, I’m waiting for it. But what’s been happening in this thread is that people either (a) dismiss all this history out of hand or (b) propose non-libertarian (I think?) solutions (like Yelp, which rests on an internet backbone built with heavy government intervention in the market). Either way, I’m not seeing a cogent argument that shows me that racial discrimination wouldn’t be the result under a libertarian system.
I do not. Libertarians do not support widespread discrimination based on any cosmetic and superficial trait at all even though it may sound like it on the surface. Many of us do support the right of individuals if they choose to however in the same way the ACLU occasionally decides to defend a KKK march or a neo-Nazi movement’s right to free speech. I believe that is a good ideal to follow and will have a more negative effect on them than it will the people they are supposedly discriminating against.
As I noted earlier:
Widespread discrimination in earlier times was based and enforced on government policy such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. Libertarians would not have supported those at all. The social programs needed to correct that are a necessary government reversal of something that the overreach of government started in the first place.
Discrimination in private businesses is both allowed and a feature of many private enterprises even today and they aren’t specific to any particular group. People keep throwing up theoreticals but they exist even now. Try to stand in line at a popular club in Manhattan or Las Vegas and see if you get in if you don’t fit their target demographic. They have large bodybuilders telling you that you will be arrested if you try to complain when they tell you to leave. Hint: most of them are not looking for random 40+ year old white men to let in the door. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
This is the policy: * Private businesses are free to discriminate for any of those reasons. *
This is the argument: * Free people should be able to associate freely, and the government has no business telling me to whom I must sell my goods or services.
*
Do you see the distinction?
I’ll try to explain this and I have every belief you will disagree, but you’ve fundamentally misstated the premises here.
Freedom is controlling your own actions. Power is controlling the actions of others. I think this may be a difficult concept for you given the other thread and your response here. Take it as a given that in the libertarian ideal, an individual does not enjoy the right to the service of others. If a person is unable to eat at a restaurant, their liberty is not being infringed because it never existed in the first place. I understand and accept you may disagree with that - but that is the position that is being taken.
Therefore there is no balancing as you say in the second paragraph because there is nothing to balance against. All interaction and association is voluntary - either party can reject it and there is no infringement on liberty.
If it is easier to get a handle on, think of all those businesses with the sign up that says “they reserve the right to refuse service…”. That would be the exact same in the libertarian ideal, except there would be no protected classes. Right now it is perfectly legal to refuse service to people with red hair. If you just didn’t like gingers, you could ban them all and not run afoul of the law. This is because red heads are not a protected class. This would apply to everyone.
That is correct. It is completely legal in the U.S. today. What is the alternative? Just let those businesses live or thrive on their own (they will not if they engage in that behavior) or set up a major and probably perpetual government agency to ensure that no remotely red-headed person is ever treated in a way that they perceive to be unfair in any of the 50 states at a cost of billions of dollars in total? Those are the realistic and pragmatic choices.
My personal opinion is we wouldn’t go back to the Jim Crow era. There would be some people who would discriminate against ethnic groups they don’t like. But overall, several decades of enforced anti-racism has reduced the amount of inner racism people feel. Most people now accept people who are different from them in a way that they didn’t a couple of generations ago.
To some, this might suggest that we don’t need to enforce anti-discrimination standards anymore. But to me, it’s evidence that enforcing anti-discrimination standards is working and we should keep doing it for that very reason. Why stop if we’re moving in the right direction?
‘Realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ sound like good ideas until you realize that is the precise ideal that generated our current, unworkable tax code in the U.S. plus a few iterations before it. You just put patch on top of other patches to make things work and that is no way to build a garden shed led alone a nation.
Congress is completely dysfunctional. Many of the social programs are the same way. None of them have much philosophy or overarching principles standing behind them. It is all just hundreds of fingers in a dike combined with a clusterfuck and a hopeless complication of reach-arounds. You have to back those band-aids with some real substance. The original U.S. Constitution was and is the only thing holding it all together and it contains most of the core libertarian principles.
Because I have a lot of respect for you as a poster… You know what? I’m being bombarded with questions from 15 different sides, and I’m doing my best to answer questions with the time I have. If someone has a problem with the way I’m doing it, they can open a Pit thread.
Big picture, I’m trying to create a framework where we can have a reasoned discussion of Libertarian ideas. If someone thinks he can do a better job, then they are welcome to try.
I feel you’ve created an artificial definition of freedom that defies the common sense meaning of the word.
I want to go eat in that restaurant. But the owner tells me I can’t. So I’m not free to go eat there. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?
You speak of individual liberty but how is it my liberty when somebody else is making the choice for me? If somebody else can tell me what I can and can’t do, I obviously have lost the freedom to make my own choices. Libertarians can see this clearly when it’s the government telling an individual he can’t do something. But libertarians have a blind spot when it’s somebody else telling an individual he can’t do something.
My politics are based on the real world not on theories. I support laws against racial discrimination because racial discrimination is a real thing. Discrimination against red-headed people is not. But if at some point, people did start discriminating against red-headed people, I’d support laws against that as well.
So, I’m gay. There’s a lot of people out there who want to discriminate against me on that basis. As it happens, there are laws in California that protect me from that. Libertarians believe that those laws shouldn’t exist. Why should I support that idea? Eliminating those laws is just going to make things marginally more difficult in my life, and I’m not seeing an upside for me out of it. I mean, I guess I’d then have the freedom to discriminate against people for their sexuality, but I don’t want that freedom, and would never use it if I had it.
So, why should I be libertarian on civil rights issues? How is that a remotely rational decision for me?
Do you really want to eat in a restaurant where the chef is going to spit in your food before the server brings it to you? Better to put private pressure on businesses to realize that it is in their interest to want you as a customer, and better for you if you know the ones who are NOT going to want your business even if the government makes them pretend to.
Miller makes a valid point though. The only people who come out ahead on this deal would be the people who want to discriminate but are now prevented from doing so by law.
Do we really want to adopt a new system for these people?
No it isn’t. You are almost starting to get it. Bone has most of it correct. Freedom in libertarian terms (and even in my intuitive terms) means the ability to control your own actions and property without outside interference from others as long as your actions fall within your sphere of control and do not directly harm others. That also includes your right to fail and suffer the consequences for your own actions. Others controlling your behavior or property within those rights is coercion and strictly forbidden under most circumstances under libertarian philosophy.
The part where you are breaking down in this line of thought is that you never had the right to go into that restaurant if the owner did not want you there so you lost no freedom. It never existed existed in the first place.
I don’t expect you to agree with that argument but it would be helpful if you could try to understand it.
Taxpayers also benefit, in that they no longer have to pay agencies to enforce these laws. That’s why anti-discrimination laws should be tailored as narrowly as possible to address actual discrimination.
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?
Let’s put it another way. Suppose we repealed Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and randomly assigned 50% of the restaurants in the US to post “We Don’t Serve Blacks” signs and the other 50% posts signs that say “Everyone Welcome”.
You seem fixated on restauants for some reason. What about an apartment complex that never seemed to have vacancies for minorities? Do you think they’d lose business?
No, but I don’t see how your system works to protect me from that any better than the one we have now. The libertarian position, if I understand it correctly, is that the market itself will prevent widespread discrimination, by creating an economic backlash against businesses that discriminate. If this works as described, business owners will have the exact same impetus to hide their bigotry - it’s just that instead of being worried about a government crackdown, they’re worried about a Facebook campaign. Either way, I’m still at risk of a bigot welcoming me into his restaurant with a smile, and spitting in my burger when no one’s looking.
See, I really don’t want to have to keep a running list in my head of businesses I can go into or not. And I really don’t want to go through the process of learning which ones are prejudiced over and over and over. If I have the option between going into a store and being called a faggot by the owner, and going into a store where the owner adheres to the minimum standard of courtesy he can get away with by law, I will take the later option a hundred thousand times over before I took the former.