That is not something I would be proud of if I were you. What the fuck were you people thinking? You were the people whose models involved the housing market never going down, right?
The reason that Fannie and Freddie had lobbyists is that while they were government backed, they also acted like private banks in the sense that their management had incentives to get high returns. If the management refused the subprime loans, they would fall behind and the managers would lose out - just like the management of purely private banks. If they were purely private the government wouldn’t be on the hook for their losses, any more than the other banks, and if they were purely public there would be no reason to take excessive risks. However conservatives are all in favor of privatization where possible, because the market always makes things better. Except where it doesn’t.
I want to apologize to all Dopers and especially to John Mace, Emacknight and grude. John Mace’s posts are often excellent, making my singling out of him particularly wrong. As excuse I can offer only an excess of Holiday intoxication.
I’d be happy to be friends with any of you, in real life, or, more likely, you’d not want to be my friend since IRL I’m still an obnoxious asshole. 
The constitutionality of federal laws is challenged all the time, like DOMA is being challenged right now.
I’m not a libertarian, but the libertarian rejoinder might go as follows:
There is much disagreement about “values”, which is why the Constitution is so short. It only embodies the values (almost) everyone agrees on. Laws and regulations are just supposed to be applications of those values, not embodiments of new values. If you need additional “values” to support a law, they had better be consistent with the Constitution or you must be prepared to amend the Constitution.
Lind’s claim is one opinion. Another opinion is that of Jefferson, who said “That government is best which governs least.”
I think that this gets at the heart of the Libertarian idea against anti-discrimination laws in the private sphere.
You are right. It makes no sense to allow discrimination against a middle executive because of his sexual orientation. Let’s make that a protected class.
It also makes no sense to discriminate against that same executive because he might be overweight. Let’s add that. Suppose he smokes a little weed on the weekend? That’s a minor misdemeanor that shouldn’t be punished by a loss of his job and is income and family security. Another law. Rinse and repeat for anything you wish to name.
The argument is that by carving these classes and forcing them onto private actors in the scope of private employment/service, the government is substituting its value judgment for the property owner.
Once you start down that path, there is no logical stopping point. The only stopping point is where the majority thinks is “too much” infringement on private property rights.
As I said above, the one characteristic that makes property private is the ability to exclude those the owner wishes to exclude. What makes your home special to you relative to me? You can put your stuff there, sleep there, live there, and keep me the hell out. If you didn’t have the ability to keep me the hell out, and I could sleep, live, and keep my stuff there, what ownership do you have in your home that is greater than mine?
If you start making that a majority rules issue, you have no private property. Everything becomes communal property subject to entrance regulations set by the government. How is that any different than government property?
Are you aware of the fallacious nature of the slippery slope argument?
Do you really think that someone is seriously proposing that you cannot decide to exclude a particular person from your personal residence? If you seek a reasonable answer to your question, you have to ask a reasonable question. Saying that the government is seizing your home because the law does not allow for businesses to discriminate on the basis of race, age, or sex is a far-fetched and groundless assertion.
Sorry, I meant “state actions” as distinct from private, not as distinct from federal.
Yes, it is a logical fallacy in that the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. It doesn’t mean that it necessarily does not, either. Society is filled with very true slippery slope examples. In fact, in this example, we started with race and religion and moved into gender and disability and now sexual orientation is proposed. We keep adding classes and following down the slippery slope. The trip, by your own admission, stops only where a majority of people (through their representatives) decide where to allow property rights v. anti-discrimination laws.
I did not say that at all. I was merely illustrating the nature of the basic function of private property: the right of the OWNER to exclude those he chooses to. If it becomes a majority-rules scenario (like you endorse) this basic property right is in the hands of a beneficent majority that allows it. This is not what rights are; rights are personal in nature and irrelevant of majority belief.
It would be impossible to design a system where that would not be true. Property rights, anywhere, anytime, are meaningful only to the extent they are supported by social sanctions – that of the state, in societies where a state exists. (There are no such things as “natural rights,” BTW.)
Not true. See Free Speech. See Fred Phelps. Probably 98% of the population wants to shut this guy up, but the Supreme Court allows him to protest at funerals.
And the SCOTUS gets its way. That is because the Constitution (especially the First Amendment, which is one of two or three parts of it everybody thinks they know) and the SCOTUS ultimately are backed up by social acceptance. Not because anybody has a “natural right” to free speech.
Uh, that’s more like a non sequitur. A slippery slope is an argument where A leads to B, leads to C, leads to D, etc while excluding the possibility that the thing (whatever it may be) could just stop at B. In other words, just because race, sex, and religion are A, and sexual orientation is B, doesn’t mean incest is C.
The Constitution already allows a majority-rules situation in that Congress, which is granted the legislative power, may make laws that directly relate to its enumerated powers; in this case, the commerce clause.
Courts have uniformly found that Title II of the Civil Rights Act is within the legislative power. If the Framers of the constitution did not want the government to regulate business, they should have not included that power in the Constitution. If you do not want the government to regulate business, then good luck in amending the Constitution to make the libertarian state you desire.
I shouldn’t have to. The Courts in the 1930s did it by judicial fiat. I want it the way it was originally understood. Congress cannot regulate business, only interstate business. If I walk into your restaurant located in Nebraska, you serve me food in that Nebraska restaurant, and I pay you at the counter located in Nebraska, all of the commerce is intrastate.
Just because the food or the patrons came from out of state doesn’t change the status of the commerce conducted. But I think that we’ve done this argument before.
And you are correct as to the slippery slope fallacy. I was arguing that all logical fallacies assume some form where the conclusion does not necessarily follow. It does not mean that A that lead to B definitely, guaranteed, cross my heart hope to die will NOT lead to C. And if you stop A in its tracks, you a guaranteed not to get to C.
Here’s the thing: if all three branches of government have an unambiguous record of interpreting the law in a certain way, and you don’t like the interpretation, the only reasonable response is to change the law – not simply wish that the whole of government and the majority of society just up and change their mind one day because they are suddenly told about how things ran in the early years of the country. If you think the commerce clause as it is implemented and used is morally wrong, the most responsible course of action is to eliminate or modify it.
Good luck on getting the consent of the governed for changing the Constitution to protect racist businesses.
That’s exactly why it is a fallacy. Not getting to C is not a valid argument on A. If you say you’d like a Big Mac for lunch, and I argue that if you are allowed to have meat for lunch, the next thing we know you will be killing little children on the street and eating their bones; my child-eating ploy is not actually a valid reason to oppose you having a Big Mac for lunch.
No argument there. Our side lost the power grab 75 years ago. It still doesn’t make it just.
If I want a Big Mac for lunch and you say that the next thing you know we will be killing pigs for ham sandwiches, you would have a better argument. Neither yours or my examples are logically sound and neither will win us Harvard debate points.
But you can look at surrounding circumstances and historical examples and see why eating pigs is a better comparison that eating children.
That’s about the size of it.
There’s no perfectly logical way to function as a democratic society. We decide what rules we’re going to have everyone live by, not all will be popular and some will get reversed when they overreach and/or prove unworkable (i.e. Prohibition).
Having a libertarian strain in politics is reasonable. Having it as a dogmatic principle to the point where civil rights legislation is anathema, is not.
Someone in a thread in the Elections forum was wistfully hoping for a “milder” form of Ron Paul without the bad trappings. Maybe a disease analogy would be appropriate. Full-blown Ron Paul is too virulent to infect society. We need to attenuate him dramatically for vaccination purposes.*
*Ron would hate this analogy, if only because he is fervently against mandatory vaccination, despite being an M.D. and knowing (or should know) that it has been a wildly successful public health measure.
So would you be comfortable if we just left it to the legislature (majority) to decide what was “too much” of a restriction on speech, religion, or the press?
That’s a power with which the British Parliament can, nowadays, usually, be trusted, without a written constitution to restrain it. Perhaps the really essential thing here is the country’s political culture.
:rolleyes: The New Deal now?!!