Three Quick Points on Arizona and the Rights of Gays, Lesbians and Transgendered People vs. Religious Freedom
Dave has already done a great postmortem on SB 1026, but skimming through the threads there I feel like there are three important points that still need to be made.
Point #1
Dave already made this point (as did Burt), but it looks like people on both sides of the aisle still don’t understand and so I think it bears repeating:
AZ-SB1062 existed for no real reason other than social and political signaling. It granted no additional freedoms to anyone, nor did it take any away. In the state of Arizona (except for in a few municipalities), if you want to discriminate against a gay man or a lesbian couple it is your legal right. LGBTs have no legal protections in that state. If you find out a guy who works in your factory is gay and you want to fire him simply for being a “f***ot,” it is your right. You need not prove that a “sincere religious belief” is your reason for doing so.
For those who continue to say “who cares” when someone publicly admired comes out of the closet, this is yet another reason why they should. Likewise, anyone that thinks people working for LGBT rights are “extremists pushing their agenda onto others” should rightly consider, if they do indeed value religious freedom, how they would feel if it was legal to fire them for being Catholic, or Baptist, or whatever.
Point #2
I wanted to highlight this interview of Al Melvin by Anderson Cooper. Melvin is a populist Republican Arizona State Senator who has announced that he will be running for governor; he was also one of most visible and vocal champions of AZ-SB 1062.
I don’t care what political stripe you are, you need to watch this interview if you have not already.
To be fair, Cooper is openly gay himself and therefore cannot reasonably be assumed to be objective on the subject. Be that as it may, the interview is truly astounding, even to me.
And I want to highlight it because it dovetails with the subject matter I have been focusing on lately (and been getting a lot of pushback on): that if the concept of “governance” is to actually mean anything, then where you stand on any particular hot-button issue is not nearly as important as is being competent at what you do.
Further, that even though populist movements are both more fun and more seductive in their siren call than boring old wonky, policy-oriented, get-the-trains-moving-on-time “public officials” from either party, they inevitably lead to intellectual bankruptcy. Because if you decide that you want to vote for people that tell you that you’re always right and that the actual experts, academics, professionals are “serious people” who should be dismissed out of hand just for not agreeing with you, you elect people like this to be your Senator:
And because it’s too juicy not to throw in as well, I should also add that Sen. Melvin recently went on record to protect kids from learning that socialist-fascist gateway subject of algebra, because it “uses ‘fuzzy math,’substituting letters for numbers in some examples.” (I know already that some are gong to say that I need to give the Senator the benefit of the doubt; that it may simply be that he was trying to hide the fact that he hadn’t actually read up on the subject matter he was actively campaigning on and didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. To which I would respond, this make him look better how, exactly?)
Point #3
Despite the previous two points, make no mistake. The social conservatives who back AZ-SB 1062 are actually right. Granting freedom to LGBTs does hamper people’s religious freedom.
This is a point I have made before, but do not make often enough: There is no such thing as a choice between “freedom or tyranny” in a pluralistic democracy. Any freedom given to one person is, ultimately, a different freedom taken away from another. I can’t be free to play my music as loud in my backyard as I want without curbing my next door neighbor’s freedom to have a quiet evening in his own home. My community can’t have the freedom to decide as a group not to allow toxic waste to be dumped in our neighborhood without infringing on the freedom of the local factory to dump waste wherever he wants. I can’t protect myself against libel or slander without infringing upon your freedom of speech.
The lesson to be learned from AZ-SB 1062 isn’t that that we can grant freedoms to LGBTs without infringing on other people’s freedoms to not live in such a society; we can’t.
No, the lesson of AZ-SB 1062 is that when some politician comes around and asks for you to give him or her your power and your money because of they are “for freedom,” you should recognize that you are either dealing with a simpleton or a snake-oil salesman. And if you fall for it, you’re going to be represented by people like Al Melvin for your trouble.
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#1: True. I’ve not said it myself because others have pointed it out. All the states enacting this legislation do not have protections for LGBT people so the legislation is moot and is really about shaking your fist in defiance. Interestingly they ended up being more broad than intended to avoid looking like homophobia. I believe that Dan Savage pointed out that in theory Santanists could discriminate against Christians in the Arizonan law.
#2: I think you are partially right about populism but also partially giving it a bad wrap. Populism is necessary from time to time if only to keep wonks from getting too technocratic and reminding the wonks that people are people and not sets of data and human emotions and needs are valid. Here I am being biased towards my own economic liberalism/populism but social security basically came about because of some populism during the Great Depression. The Bonus Army helped pave the way for the New Deal. Populism is necessary for coming up with solutions to soften the blows of inevitable and painful changes like gentrification and globalization. It can lead to harmful demagory though.
#3: Again agreed. I think the right of minorities to fully participate in economic and civil life free of discrimination trumps the freedom to discriminate.Report
I think it depends. Would you endorse a law that forbade people to discriminate on the basis of, say, sexual orientation when it came to choosing a roommate?
I have in mind a scenario where someone needs a roommate, cannot for whatever reason find a friend in a position to be a roommate, and decides he/she doesn’t want a certain type of person and so needs to advertise for one. In this scenario, I’m talking about a bona fide roommate situation, not a situation in which the owner of 3-flat who lives on the first floor won’t rent to gay people.
I personally would have a hard time endorsing such a law, even though I really do believe such discrimination would be wrong.Report
“I think it depends. Would you endorse a law that forbade people to discriminate on the basis of, say, sexual orientation when it came to choosing a roommate?”
Yes. Officially people engage in all sorts of Fair Housing Act violations when searching for roommates on craigslist. Will anything be done about it? Probably not.Report
Is that a Fair Housing Violation for someone to refuse to take on a roommate for a prohibited reason?Report
If I am recalling my property class on the matter correctly, yes.
As a practical matter, I don’t think the government has the resources to go after roommate wanted ads on craigslist.Report
@pierre-corneille
http://www.craigslist.org/about/FHAReport
there is at least one case of lawsuit arising out of a roommate situationReport
Thanks, @newdealer . However, I think being forbidden to advertise the discriminatory intent is different from deciding, as a personal matter, that one bases one’s choices on certain factors.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a law forbidding people to advertise, say, “white roommates only.” I would have a problem with a law forbidding someone to make decisions on that basis, as long as it truly is a bona fide roommate situation. Again, I’m not endorsing the discrimination, just stating that I wouldn’t endorse making illegal a decision like that for such a personal situation.
There are, I imagine, marginal situations where it could be difficult. Like a boarding house situation, and in marginal cases, I might endorse the law favoring by default the less discriminatory standard. Even the case @dand cites, which was unfavorable to the discriminator, is (according to the link) based on a law that applies only to situations where the renting is done for profit. I don’t think I’d have a problem with that, either.Report
I’d be entirely opposed to such a law. If a woman’s not comfortable having a man as a roommate, that’s not illegitimate discrimination to my mind; there are situations where I’d have been uncomfortable with that. Someone not wanting a gay roommate of the same sex is no different.Report
I’m going off old memory, so I could be wrong, but I think there’s a line drawn where you’re renting to someone who’s going to be living in your own dwelling. That is, I couldn’t discriminate in renting apartments in an apartment building I own, but if I build an apartment in my house, I can be more selective in who I allow to live there. Extending from that, choosing roommates would follow the same logic.Report
let me add that after that case the city of Madison changed the law so it wouldn’t apply to roommates in the future.Report
James,
If that’s not the law, that’s how I think the law should be, and that’s all I’m asking for. And to be clear, I don’t think it’s a good state of affairs that people would discriminate in those ways. But I don’t think the state should interfere.Report
@katherinemw, @jm3z-aitch
At least according to Craigslist’s FHA instructions:
Shared Housing Exemption -- If you are advertising a shared housing unit, in which tenants will be sharing a bathroom, kitchen, or other common area, you may express a preference based upon sex only.ReportMore info on when there are exceptions:
So if it’s a house you own, you have more leeway than if you’re renting out a room in a house that you’re renting.Report
I’m not advocating for a full blown technocracy. I just don’t think it is unreasonable to say, “It makes sense to involve education people in education discussions and medical people in medical discussions.” I mean, at my school, we don’t ask the janitor what reading curriculum I should use and they don’t ask me how to best clean up an oil spill; that seems wiser than polling everyone about each decision.Report
I’m pretty comfortable with the federal laws as they stand now: It’s illegal to advertise descrimination, so you can’t say things like “straight roommates only” or “this is a christian home” in your ads, but unless you’re a bona-fide professional landlord and not just some schlub looking for a roommate, there are no restrictions on who you actually let rent.
Because frankly, if some dude is creeped out by the possibility of living in a house with me because of my sexuality, that’s probably a house I don’t want to live in. But I also don’t want to live in a world where I open up the room listings and half of them say “no queers”.Report
@alan-scott This is largely where I sit.Report
I also don’t want to live in a world where I open up the room listings and half of them say “no queers”.
It would reduce your search costs considerably.
I get why it would make a person uncomfortable, but good markets thrive on good information.Report
That must be a US thing, or else Canada doesn’t enforce it at all. When I was looking for rentals near my university, plenty of the listings had “female only” or “male only” or “female preferred” on them.
I’d rather have that than waste my time looking at a place where the tenants only want a male roommate.Report
@james-hanley , only if there’s no feedback from expressed preferences. I think back to my own high school experience. Maybe one male student in 10 used the term “fag” out of an actual distaste for gay people. But another 6 in 10 used it simply because that was the cultural norm, with very little thought to their actual beliefs or feelings about homosexuality.
I shudder to think how difficult it would be for me to get a place to live if such a norm existed in the rental market, or even a sub-set of it. Certainly it would dwarf whatever added search costs I experience under the current scheme.Report
@katherinemw
Notwithstanding some of what’s been said here, I think people can say in the US “female only” or “male only” or “looking for a female roommate,” etc. I suspect that’s more than just avoiding enforcement of the laws and is actually legally okay.
It’d be different story with race, ethnic, or religious discrimination from a landlord. I had a landlady once who told me she refused to rent to Asians because “they do a lot of stir fry and the oil will splatter on [what she believed to be her immaculate] kitchen.” (Never mind that I,a white boy, like bacon and when I cook some of the grease probably splatters.) That’s an example, in my opinion, of someone violating the law with no real fear that it would be enforced against her. And unfortunately, people get away with it.Report
@katherinemw @pierre-corneille , One of the exceptions in the US law is specifically for that situation. In the case of a shared dwelling, it’s totally okay for someone to advertise and require that a roommate be of a specific sex.Report
It would think there would be very different rules when it comes to sharing a home (a roommate or an apartment within what’s essentially built as a single-family home) and renting out housing that is, itself, intended as a home for someone else.
In the first, we’re looking at the privacy of someone’s existing home, (castle doctrine?) and the right to seek out compatible roommates would seem innate because the roommates sought will share living space.
General housing rentals should not discriminate, because each apartment (or house) is its own castle.Report
Pierre,
That’s an example, in my opinion, of someone violating the law with no real fear that it would be enforced against her. And unfortunately, people get away with it.
It may be a violation of the spirit of the law (since she singled out Asians specifically), but would it be discriminatory if she instead said “I won’t rent to stir-fryers” or “sitr-fryers need not apply”?
It seems like a stretch to conclude that such expressions derive from bigotry against Asians as a people. It’s certainly possible that it does, but it’s also possible that it doesn’t, no?Report
@stillwater
It’s definitely possible, and I suppose she could stipulate that her tenants not stir fry….but that’s a hard stipulation for someone to agree to. I mean, *never* fry anything that might splatter? But you’re right.
My own read on her statement is that she just assumed Asians were undesirable people to rent to. That comes from having known her and from a bias on my part that she was a bad landlady. She would do “inspections” of our apartment to make sure we were keeping it clean up to her standards. Not that she didn’t have some reason to be concerned, because we were students (but one of us–me–was 30, the other in his late 20s and the other in his early 20s. Ironically, the youngest was probably the cleanest of us all and it was us older ones who were messy.) She was probably acting in a way that was illegal, but I was just a student and didn’t have the resources to challenge her.Report
Populism is necessary from time to time if only to keep wonks from getting too technocratic
Like, not to start using letters instead of numbers.Report
This might be something deserving of a longer post, but what exactly is wrong with things being technocratic?Report
You start seeing people as exclusively numbers instead of people that the numbers are supposed to help.Report
@kazzy @north
In proper doses, there is nothing wrong with being technocratic but wonky types tend to forget about human emotions and subjective values often.
For example, Matt Y (I know but he is good as an example) once had a post talking about the benefits of gentrification and how it was marvelous progress that a fancy yuppie expensive supermarket replaced the working-class one that used to be on the site. I like fancy supermarkets as much as the next professional but I don’t think Whole Foods is necessarily and improvement. Plenty of still remaining working class people in said neighborhood could have preferred and needed the old supermarket because it was in their price range. Now they will have to travel further for groceries.
All improvement is change but not all change is improvement depending on the person’s background.
Wonks have a tendency of seeming to tell people “Shut up and trust us, we know what is good for you.” This denies people autonomy.Report
@north
Spot on with your observation.Report
So too technocratic might be a bad thing. But people often talk as if any amount of technocraticness is a horrible thing. I actually asked someone here to give me a nutshell description of it and they said something to the effect of experts in a given field are charged with making decisions in that area. Seemed to me like a pretty reasonable approach.Report
This is fascinating.
We get, once again, to the age old problem. In planning policy, we need to think in terms of sets of people; we need to use statistical models; from road rules to medical research, statistics matter.
But each individual person is not a set; instead that person is just a data point within that set; and we often respond to policies of technocrats, rooted in statistical model, as individuals; hence my ire at incandescent light bulb bans; fluorescent lights give me migraine.
So a technocrat is bad because he or she fails to see those people as individual people? Maybe. But I’m equally sure that, when the particular data set doesn’t hit too close to my particular points of data, I want those policies made based on greater good.
Right up to the point of basic civil liberties, and I’d argue marriage is a basic civil liberty.
Maybe Phill’s deaf; maybe Phill’s got a speech impediment because of his hearing; and people think he’s an imbecile because he talks funny and doesn’t respond in ways they consider appropriate because he can’t hear. I would not want a law that said deaf people can’t get married or vote or drive cars.
My father’s brother was deaf, he lost his hearing when he was three and had Scarlet Fever; he attended Maine’s school for the deaf, where he met and fell in love with another student. They wed in their early 20’s, a violation of state law. Two deaf people were, at that time, not allowed to marry; supposedly due to concerns of them being incapable of caring for their children. The state didn’t want to open the can of worms of ending a marriage; so my Aunt and Uncle, both deaf had frequent visits from social workers to make sure their children were learning to speak and well cared for.
(Uncle’s name was Phillman. Children were named Phillman Jr., Phillis, Phillipa, Phillbert, Philla, and Phillona. This came with it’s own obvious complications for teachers and the general public trying to discern which kid was whom. But they all spoke perfectly well, with their mouths and their hands, both.)Report
@kazzy
I agree that it’s reasonable, but there are at least two areas where it can get dicey. The first is how expert status is determined and what the area of expertise is. When it’s a question, for example, of building something that requires electrical wiring, is the electrical engineer or the journeyman electrician more of an expert? The answer is they probably both are (along with the people who will use the end product….they might not know about the construction process but they know how the end result works or doesn’t work for them). I suspect, though, that some “technocratic” solutions favor the engineer much more than they should.
I don’t understand anything about construction or what goes into planning such things (as my inability to name the “thing” being constructed attests) The problem can get potentially worse if someone is assumed to be an expert simply because of a credential that happens to be irrelevant to the proposed area of expertise. I wrote a history dissertation on antitrust policy, and in the very narrow confines of that dissertation I am indeed an expert. But one of my professors once suggested I try to sell myself as a consultant to businesses trying to grapple with antitrust policy. With all due respect to my professor, any business that would hire me for that purpose would be making a huge mistake. I have a working knowledge of antitrust law, but nothing like a lawyerly knowledge. And I seriously doubt if any of today’s businesses give a rat’s behind about how local-level antimonopoly politics differed in Chicago and Toronto in the early 1900s.
The second area is the degree of authority given to experts to command the actions of other people. @zic ‘s example of the Maine law forbidding marriages of deaf people came about, I suspect, from an expert consensus that deaf people couldn’t raise children and, I also suspect, from a general feeling, ratified by “experts,” that deaf people were somehow intellectually impaired just by virtue of being deaf. In some cases, I imagine, the word of a mental health expert can go a long way to initiating the civil commitment of someone, and civil commitments have not always observed due process.
(I’m not accusing you of not knowing these points. I realize that you’re pretty knowledgeable about the ways power is used and claims to knowledge and expertise function. I’m just using your comment as an excuse to throw my two cents into the ring.)Report
Well, when I think of this, I sort of think of nutritionists being involved in food regulation policy. There would be some pluses, but this is the sort of thing that soda bans come from. Experts often tend to look at issues from a specific vantage point that disregards how other people approach various tradeoffs and whatnot.Report
A part of technocratism, in its pejorative sense, is when the experts go beyond telling people the most effective means to achieve their goals, or what the costs will be that offset the benefits desired, and start thinking they know better than the people what their goals should be. Because at that point we’re talking about values, not efficiency, or effectiveness of means.
And technocrats cannot logically claim their values are superior to others’ values. (Of course we all think our values are superior to others’, but their claims have no more solid basis than others’ claims–any strength to their claims do not rise from their technical abilities.)
This is no more than JamesK has sais, really. It’s a common theme in the science policy literature. Roger Pielke, Jr., for example, presents the argument well in his reasonably accessible book, “The Honest Broker.”Report
One of the great ironies here is that often, laws that discriminate (most particularly in the realm of marriage,) do so because of the state’s perceived interest in children. In my state, once, the marriages of two deaf people. Or people of two races. We see these arguments in the courts concerning gay marriage; CA was rife with this, it’s part of the argument the state of Michigan is currently using to defend laws banning gay adoption, which has been extended by the judge to include gay marriage, since Michigan also bans unmarried couples from adopting.
Yet nobody would seriously suggest heterosexual couples have to prove they’re capable of parenting. This, despite the fact that many children of heterosexual married couples are harmed and neglected. And any technocrat that put fourth an argument that people might have to pass some sort of parenting-fitness test before being allowed to have children would be laughed out of court; it’s a perceived right. Likewise, I cannot imagine a technocrat putting fourth an argument that a single woman should have her children removed from the home; a widowed or abandoned father must remarry or have his children removed.
What I’m suggesting here is that many technocrat arguments are really just the fodder of people who want to dictate to others and who are seeking authority to do that. If the good Christians of AZ, those who fear they might someday have to have an obvious gay family in their dining establishment, could find a good-sounding technocrat argument for that, they’d embrace it whole-heartedly.
And if you don’t believe me, go look at the State’s arguments in Michigan.
Source: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2014/02/26/michigan-marriage-ban-trial-starts.htmlReport
@pierre-corneille
I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said here. It just seems logical to me that if given the choice between allowing “experts” or “non-experts” on a given topic to inform decisions made on that topic, the former is the way to go. Now, you’d want to build all sorts of safeguards in and would need to address many of the questions you’ve risen. But it boggles my mind when people take the, “Who are we going to listen to? “The experts?”” approach. Yes. We should be listening to the experts. Not worshiping or kowtowing to them. But we should give their expertise greater weight than non-expertise.Report
@kazzy there’s a wealth of ‘expertise’ out there about the harms of same-sex parenting on children. (It was used on CA, it was supported in Russia as part of the ban on homosexual writing for children, and is being used in Michigan, see the above link; that’s what the Michigan AG is using to defend the state’s bans on gay marriage and gay couples adopting.)
But the expertise is, to some great extent, junk science.
Several states have passed bans on gay conversion therapy — that process supposedly used to turn gay children straight. A challenge to these bans would likely engage an expert or two, one that springs to mind would be Michelle Bachmann’s husband. Anyone who’s studied something, done some writing on something, can put themselves fourth as an expert. I’ll go dig up the history, but in the infamous Supreme Court case on creationism in the classroom, I’m sure the school district in the case had a creationism expert, too. There’s the small percentage of scientists who put themselves forward as experts that climate change is junk science.
There is no license to get called ‘expert.’ All it really requires is some body of work in the topic; and it still falls to the court (or the policy makers) to determine if that expert is, indeed, an expert or a fraud in some way.
And as Will pointed out above, the expert in nutrition might be recommending bad advice, like margarine is healthier then butter.
What’s of real concern here is academic research funding, and probing if there’s some reason, due to that funding, to suspect bias in the expertise. If the expert’s paycheck comes on behalf of Christian pro-family groups, for instance, is there bias in his or her research? What about the expert on water quality who’s research is funded by companies who do natural-gas extraction? The biologist who testifies that antibiotics are necessary or meat production who’s research was funded by industrial pig farmers?Report
@newdealer
Populism is useful for identifying problems and clarifying people’s preferences. But it fails when attempting to find a solution. It’s a good idea for people to make clear why they’re unsatisfied with the status quo, but I would no more expect an untrained person to be able to design a good solution to a policy problem than I would expect them to able to design a functioning car or watch or computer.
Conversely technocrats are good at designing solutions, but if left to their own devices can end up solving only the problems that they personally care about.
Basically, populists should stick to the “what” of policy problems and technocrats should focus on the “how”.Report
@newdealer
I will just pass you along to @james-k above, because I think this is a great answer.Report
@james-k @tod-kelly
I don’t think I said anything about not needing technocrats/wonks. We need technocrats/wonks but I just think they need to be checked as well.Report
@newdealer
My intent was to outline what I think is an optimal division of responsibilities.Report
Again agreed. I think the right of minorities to fully participate in economic and civil life free of discrimination trumps the freedom to discriminate.
Thing is, I don’t think that that’s what’s actually at stake here. Discrimination against homosexuals happens, but to the best of my knowledge it does not occur to an extent that it would prevent the rights of homosexuals to participate fully in economic and civil life.
Rather, it seems to me that the intent of these laws is to allow us to signal that we’re on the side of the angels and to punish people for being jerks and hurting gay people’s feelings.
You used to live in Tokyo, right? It’s legal to discriminate against foreigners there, and some business owners choose to avail themselves of that right. Did this prevent you from participating fully in economic and civil life?Report
You used to live in Tokyo, right? It’s legal to discriminate against foreigners there, and some business owners choose to avail themselves of that right. Did this prevent you from participating fully in economic and civil life?
the Korean community in Japan still very isolated and most of the Korean families have been residents of Japan for 100 years or longer. i doubt most westerners living in Japan have any desire to become fully integrated.Report
I live in Tokyo. I had to take time off work to house-hunt. Multiple times I would get to the lease-signing stage, only to learn that the apartment was no longer available. I eventually found a place to live, but I did feel that my full participation in economic and civil life was impinged somewhat by this legal discrimination.Report
I am starting the stopwatch to see who’s the first commenter to scold you about this (I might already be too late). How about, “To be sure, as a gay man, Cooper is hardly a disinterested observer”? Or, do you even need this line?Report
How is that statement any different from what Tod said? (I don’t have a problem with either phrasing.) The meaning sounds identical to me.Report
@katherinemw True enough. I was imagining a kerfuffle kicking up along the lines of “What, are you saying a gay journalist can’t be objective?!” misreading, and wondering whether it was necessary to note Cooper’s sexuality. My rephrasing wasn’t any improvement, in any case.Report
I think it’s noteworthy in that the proposed legislation has a greater impact on the gay community than the straight one. It’s one of the pro-SSM arguments: It is of great importance to gay people and doesn’t really affect heteros.Report
Well, now that you mention it, the comment presupposes there’s a pov on SB 1026 that is objective….Report
Only straight white able-bodied cis-male can be objective. Everyone else is hopelessly biased.Report
Re # 3 I agree with this post in general, but Freedom seems like a self-justifying concept that never has to measured against anything else. Not just by populists or Republicans either.Report
This seems to be more about a psychological limitation of being in a Democratic Republic perhaps.
The United States has never been a monarchy. We were explicitly anti-monarchy in our founding. As such, there has never been a viable monarchist-aristocratic party like many European nations had during the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Every political party in the US has needed to describe themselves as being the true allies of liberty and freedom and perhaps the most die in the wool partisans in all parties really do believe they are the true allies and defenders of liberty and freedom.
The difference being that there has always been substantial differences in how the left and right have defined liberty and freedom in various incarnations. The Puritans considered freedom the right to follow God’s Will and I think many on the social conservative right use this definition. The business community has always used freedom and liberty to go against regulations and oversight. Hence the right-wing opposition to the New Deal called themselves the Liberty League. The Left in the US has been a combination of civil libertarianism/individualism with economic equality balanced in.
Only cranks like Peter Thiel wonder about whether we need less liberty and democracy. Though there is a probably doomed to failure Tea Party cause to repeal the direct election of Senators.Report
@newdealer
I read Thiel as drawing a distinction between liberty and democracy. I understand his argument to be that democracy has become corrosive to liberty. Whether or not he is right on the substance of his arugment, this is not a facially absurd distinction to make.Report
@james-k
Again this depends on what he means by liberty. As a liberal, my issue with many libertarians and conservatives is that they seem to think of liberty in almost exclusively economic/business terms. There is the right to conduct one’s business as one pleases and the right for minorities not to be discriminated against. I will take the right of minorities not to be discriminated against any day. I don’t see how this can make me an enemy of liberty but in conservative-libertarian world it does.
What kind of government that is not a democracy can protect the liberty of minorities?
Also this is pure crank:
http://gawker.com/5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-couldnt-voteReport
Economic liberty is not only the right to conduct one’s own business as one sees fit. If that’s all it were, then I agree that other things should, and should often, trump it.
Economic liberty is also about being able to make choices about what type of voluntary exchange one enters into and about what jobs one chooses or refuses to do. Even under that definition (my preferred definition), economic liberty, unchecked, can get out of hand. And sometimes, as you’d point out, it can work against the interests of people who are already marginalized.
But keep in mind that some of the injustices minorities have faced have been denials of economic liberty. I’m thinking of criminal vagrancy laws or criminal breach of contract laws or red lining practices.
Not all injustices minorities have faced are reducible to economic liberty, but I think we make a mistake to assume it’s usually economic liberty OR other types of liberty. Sometimes several different definitions of liberty can be mutually reinforcing. And sometimes, of course, they aren’t.Report
@newdealer
What you say is true, the definition of liberty varies by ideology. And I agree that Thiels’ position on women is crankery.
However, democracy is far from ideal as a defender of individual rights. Democracies naturally flatter the interests of the median voter, and that only leads away from discrimination if the median voter wants it to. I note that in Egypt the military may be a better custodian of the rights of non-Muslims than a democratically-elected governmentReport
@newdealer
What kind of government that is not a democracy can protect the liberty of minorities?
A minority dominated authoritarian government.
More pragmatically, though, it depends what kind of democracy we’re talking about. If you mean the kind called a constitutional republic, yes, that can protect minority rights. But the more democracy trumps constitutionalism, the less minority rights are protected.
I can’t get you the cite right now, but there’s a good research article looking at initiatives and showing that those that impinged on minority rights were far more likely to pass than initiatives on average were. When the demos is dominated by the majority, why would you expect protection for the minority?Report
I lie, here’s the cite. “Putting Civil Rights to a Popular Vote,” Barbara S. Gamble.
From the conclusion:
(The one issue area that differed was initiatives targeting people with AIDS.)Report
Also this is pure crank
Speaking in positive terms, he’s quite obviously correct. It’s fairly well documented that women are more interventionist than men. Curiously enough, this may be true even for so-called “women’s issues” like abortion. Many polls show men as being more pro-choice than women, although the difference is always small and possibly just a statistical fluke.
Note that he did not say that we should restrict the franchise to men. He just observed that extending the franchise to women has resulted in more government intervention in the economy, which is pretty tough to dispute. Then he proposed some solutions, none of which had anything to do with restricting the franchise to men.Report
A minority dominated authoritarian government.
I can think of several examples where that was true, but they’re all pretty unsavory in other ways: Tito, Saddam Hussein, the Assads.Report
@mike-schilling
He only asked about minority rights, he didn’t say the governments had to be good on other dimensions. 😉Report
He just observed that extending the franchise to women has resulted in more government intervention in the economy, which is pretty tough to dispute.
The question here is if this is because women, in general, tend toward being more interventionist or if they’ve had enough experience with being treated as a minority to recognize the importance of intervention in creating more level playing fields.
Remember: we live in a nation where one of women’s prime health concerns — their reproductive health — is still controversial when it comes to insurance used to pay for health care.
From that perspective, ‘intervention,’ as a measure of a bad thing (which seems implied) might be viewed as a way of maintaining privilege, and for disadvantaged groups, an essential tool for gaining entry to the playing field.Report
. He just observed that extending the franchise to women has resulted in more government intervention in the economy, which is pretty tough to dispute
There’s a causal claim hiding in there. Does he provide real evidence for that or just rely on the correlation?Report
Obviously a historical counterfactual can’t be proven or disproven. But would you seriously argue otherwise?Report
Brandon,
I think there are enough other factors involved, sufficient social change since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that the claim is probably over-simplistic.
I teach my methods students to be wary of this kind of claim. It sounds so obvious that it’s very seductive, but what seems so obvious that it can’t be seriously questioned is not necessarily true.Report
@brandon-berg, calls for government intervention in the economy have existed decades before women received the right to vote in both the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and elsewhere.
In the United States, the government intervened in the economy to help businessmen during the Gilded Age through protective tariffs and union busting. The Progressive Era saw the government intervene to regulate business on behalf of the people. Both occurred before women received the right to vote. The era after women received the right to vote saw little government action in the economy except Prohibition.Report
James:
I guess. We can always posit that some sort of butterfly effect Changes Everything, but given the information that we have, the smart money’s on Thiel being correct. There’s also been some research on the topic. If you search for “government spending women’s suffrage” (no quotes) it should turn up a couple of papers on the first page.
And really, let’s be honest: Thiel didn’t draw the ire of the left for attributing the growth of the welfare state to women’s suffrage, but for blaming the growth of the welfare state on women’s suffrage. If he had framed this as a good thing, most of those very same people would either be yawning or loudly agreeing with him.
See Zic’s response above, for example.Report
Lee:
It’s not a binary choice between Libertopia and Sweden. The fact that there was government intervention in the economy before women could vote is beside the point and cannot be considered evidence against the proposition that women’s suffrage resulted in more government intervention in the economy. Obviously there were some kinds of intervention that were popular enough with men that they didn’t need any additional support from women. And there were some that were not.
Also, keep in mind that women’s suffrage wasn’t just magically switched on. In the US, most states allowed women to vote by the time the 19th Amendment was ratified, and then there was a ramp-up period afterwards.Report
Brandon,
I’m satisfied by the citations.Report
@brandon-berg
I think we are at a divide and one that might not have comrpomise. You see intervention as something that impedes liberty and I disagree. In my mind, intervention is necessary to ensure or expand liberty especially civil rights and social liberty. Our concept of free speech was expanded by people willing to go to courts and fight for a more expansive interpretation of free speech or risk arrest and prison.
The civil rights of minorities have been expanded through intervention and activism. See the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act. If someone thinks such acts were anti-liberty, I am not sure what to say.Report
Seriously, Brandon? I’m lmfao.
Until after the Civil War, we didn’t really have an economy to interfere with. After, we spurted along with building railroads (govt. helped build that) and then had two world wars wipe out the economic centers in Europe. Then, we had a real economy, or what you call an economy, big enough that problems in it might trigger intervention. And you blame women voting? (Or do you just mean to imply that without, you know, actually saying it?)
A little more recently, I can think of three women who wanted to intervene in the economy.
First would be Brooksley Born, who wanted to regulate the black-box finance of synthetic derivatives.
Then there was Elizabeth Warren, who wanted better financial protection for middle class families from the financial system.
And there was Janet Yellen.
Had we listened to those three women, had we intervened on their recommendations, we would have saved a world full of pain and stagnation, we might even suffering through McCain and Palin’s second term.
Man, you are going to have to put some serious effort into gaining my respect back.Report
Also, the fact that women are in general less bellicose and more likely to solve problems via negotiation is why the US has been involved in so few wars since 1920.Report
As someone who has worked in fairly close proximity to the likes of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Ann-Marie Slaughter, this gave me a bit of a chuckle.Report
As someone whom I would presume is familiar with Ayn Rand and Megan McArdle, what do you think about the argument that women favor increased government intervention in the economy?Report
@newdealer
I don’t see all intervention as liberty-impeding. Laws against theft and murder, for example, are government interventions, but I’m pretty keen on them. I just think that we have pretty much all the liberty-promoting ones covered, and at the margin most of the controversial ones are liberty-reducing.
Restrictions on free speech are an example of liberty-reducing government interventions. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make there. Maybe you mean that the Court striking down speech restrictions is an intervention by the courts? But that’s an intragovernmental intervention with the net result being the nullification of a liberty-restricting intervention.
The various civil rights acts were a mixed bag. The federal government absolutely should step in and smack down state governments that are creating unconstitutional, discriminatory laws. But I don’t think that you, or I, or anyone else has the right to tell people what to do with their own property.
That said, regulations prohibiting private discrimination are way, way down on my list of government abuses to be outraged about, because I can’t really see any way for them to do that much damage. I’m far more concerned about out-of-control spending, overregulation, price controls, taxes, perverse incentives, cronyism, the war on drugs, etc.
The one area of antidiscrimination law that I do think has the potential to be a real problem is employment. Businesses rarely have compelling economic reasons to turn customers away, so the potential for false positives when it comes to racially discriminating against customers is fairly low. But businesses make hiring, firing, and promotion decisions all the time, so the potential for false positives is huge. This problem is aggravated by the Dunning-Kruger effect: Underperforming employees often don’t know that they’re underperforming, and may in perfectly good faith attribute adverse employment outcomes to racial discrimination.
I really don’t want businesses getting dragged into court to defend perfectly legitimate personnel decisions, nor do I want them making personnel decisions based on how good they’ll look in a lawsuit rather than whether they’re the right business choice.Report
As someone who has worked in fairly close proximity to the likes of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Ann-Marie Slaughter
Wow. Cool.Report
It sounds so obvious that it’s very seductive
I wouldn’t even remotely grant this about the claim in question. Plausible? yes. Obvious – even that it sounds obvious? Only if correlation basically always obviously seems like causation.
If anything, I’d actually rate my considered estimation of the likelihood that women getting the franchise contributed significantly to a more interventionist economic policy as possibly slightly more likely than it even initially sounds like it would be by my reckoning. If that makes any sense. It doesn’t seem likely to be true to me, but it could well be. That’s my impression anyway.Report
Susan Rice needs a stage name. The other two have a lot more bellicosity potential in their surnames.Report
Haven’t you heard the stories about seagulls and the POWs in Vietnam, Glyph? That stuff’s scary.Report
@michael-drew
Putting aside the empirical work mentioned above, why, specifically, do you think it unlikely that this is true? Is it because you don’t believe that the median woman is more economically interventionist than the median man, because you reject even a weak version of the median voter theorem, or for some other reason?Report
My basic intuition is that when women started voting they in large measure voted the way their husbands and parents did, resulting in little net change to policy. That’s very subject to disconfirmation by data, but that’s my initial “seems likely” posture.
And then at some point along the way, it stops making sense to say that their getting the franchise “caused” anything, as it simply became status quo that they were voters. So if women today buttress the Democratic Party’s numbers resulting in somewhat more interventionist policy, to me it’s nonsensical to say that their getting the franchised is what “resulted in” that. Women are just voters now; it’s nonsensical to me to think of their votes today as being the “result” of suffrage.Report
It’s just nonsensical to me to think that intervention is bad.
It could be bad. It could be good. It’s as meaningless a measure of something as ‘big’ government.’ It has nothing of the context.Report
“It granted no additional freedoms to anyone, nor did it take any away”
I’m not sure you have it right either. First, SB 1062 doesn’t mention homosexuality or gay rights at all, so mentioning that Arizona doesn’t ban discrimination on gays is a non-sequitor.
IANL, but what the law actually seems to do is protect a person from laws that they disagree with if that disagreement is based substantially on religious belief. (relevant sections below). That seemingly allows discrimination based on race, sex or religion, as long as your objection is religiously based. And that is big change.
7 B. Except as provided in subsection C, government OF THIS SECTION,
8 STATE ACTION shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion
9 even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.
10 C. Government STATE ACTION may substantially burden a person's
11 exercise of religion only if it THE OPPOSING PARTY demonstrates that
12 application of the burden to the person PERSON'S EXERCISE OF RELIGION IN THIS
13 PARTICULAR INSTANCE is both:
14 1. In furtherance of a compelling governmental interest.
15 2. The least restrictive means of furthering that compelling
16 governmental interest
and defines “exercise of religion” as:
8 2. "Exercise of religion" means the PRACTICE OR OBSERVANCE OF
9 RELIGION, INCLUDING THE ability to act or refusal to act in a manner
10 substantially motivated by a religious belief, whether or not the exercise is
11 compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.
I am a lawyer and the problem with the Arizona statute as written is that everyone knew if the explicitly mentioned homosexuality, it would be bad optically and probably struck down. So this broad one leads to all sorts of insane but plausible hypotheticals like the Satanist who fires his Episcopalian employee.Report
Isn’t the mystery resolved by line 14 @ point 1? The claim there is that the party opposing any exercise of religion must demonstrate that restricting that free exercise must meet the burden of furthering a compelling state interest.
Isn’t non-discrimination of gays a compelling state interest?Report
OK, that was too quick. It begs the question against the view you proposed.
How bout this: As phrased, the law is formally non-discriminatory. Substantively, however, it’s entirely possible that certain types of religious practices which could cause harms to an “opposing party” (which is a really wonderful euphemism, btw) which satisfy the criteria for being a compelling state interest, ie, they’re discriminatory. That alone would mean the law as written is too broad since it would permit practices which might otherwise be prohibited. But as an empirical matter, there is evidence that certain types of religious practices actually are discriminatory, which is a compelling state interest.
It’s actually a pretty clever line of argument, it seems to me.Report
It’s not clear to me that this is a “compelling” interest on par with, say, protecting the country from invasion, or preservation of human life.
It might be, but I actually kind of doubt it. It is more likely an “important” state interest, triggering a different series of legal tests.Report
Ah Burt! Could you do me a favor and respond to this comment? Thanks!Report
@peter-moore
Two things:
1. Mentioning gay rights is hardly a non-sequitor; the law was written specifically to address gay people.
2. It doesn’t matter if AZ passes a law that says its OK to discriminate based on race, religion or sex — in the same way it doesn’t matter if Portland’s city council makes a city ordinance that you can own other people.
State and local laws don’t trump federal law, and they sure as hell don’t trump the US constitution or 200+ years of constitutional case law. So regardless of what AZ-SB 1062 says, it doesn’t actually grant the giving and/or taking away of those rights – it can’t, by definition.Report
I admit this is a small point, but I stand by my objections. (Its a quirk: one way to push me to one side of an argument is to make a bad argument for the other side)
1. Your opening assertion in Point 1 was:
AZ-SB1062 existed for no real reason other than social and political signaling. It granted no additional freedoms to anyone, nor did it take any away.
And then you proceeded to point out the current lack of protection to gays and lesbians, seemingly in support of that. But the law is not specific to gays, or any group. So in what way can that observation be relevant to that assertion? That is what makes it seem a non-sequitor. Especially since your argument actually supports a different: “It granted no additional freedoms to anyone to discriminate against gays and lesbians“. Which I suspect is really where you where coming from.
2. Really? It doesn’t matter at all? I have to suspect you were just indulging in a little “putting the lurker in his place” rhetoric with that comment. But I’ll bite. Even in your Portland hypothetical (assuming it wasn’t a piece of performance art), I would at least want everyone who voted on such a bill recalled and hopefully permanently shamed from further public office. Wouldn’t you?
And in general, you really arguing that there is no reason to be concerned if a local authority passes a egregious law that conflicts with Federal precedent? Especially if the local executive and judicial branches are ready and willing to enforce that law while the issue winds itself through the ever-so-quick appellate process? That is a more trusting attitude about the coercive powers of the state than I expect on a libertarian leaning blog.
Report
But the law is not specific to gays, or any group. So in what way can that observation be relevant to that assertion?
The people that argued for Proposition 8 asserted that it was a defense of marriage since gays weren’t mentioned either. The findings of fact in Perry v Schwarzenegger were more than conclusive in showing that proponents of Prop 8 used stereotypes of gays from mental illness to child molestation to being part of Satan’s grand plans.
Motive can’t be ignored.
Especially if the local executive and judicial branches are ready and willing to enforce that law while the issue winds itself through the ever-so-quick appellate process?
Can’t a federal judge block its enforcement? Didn’t that happen with Arizona’s immigration bill?Report
Dave (how you do add neat “@” citations?)
I have no reason to doubt that that motives are legally relevant to findings of discrimination. But I just arguing the much smaller (and less and less interesting) point that motive isn’t relevant to Tod’s stated Point #1. I.e. that the law didn’t grant any new rights. Manifestly it did.
And yes, I suspect appeals courts can work quickly if they so desire. But it would depend on the circuit court wouldn’t it? I’ve heard the 5th Circuit characterized as the most conservative of the current Circuit courts.
But I do grant that I think/hope that laws like this are so over the top that they wouldn’t last long enough to do much damage.Report
@peter-moore
Just type “@” as the first character of your comment, and you’ll get a list of names to choose from.Report
@peter-moore
I just arguing the much smaller (and less and less interesting) point
Stick around, you’re a natural for this joint!Report
@peter-moore
+1 to what James said. Great comments here by you.Report
Peter,
First, SB 1062 doesn’t mention homosexuality or gay rights at all, so mentioning that Arizona doesn’t ban discrimination on gays is a non-sequitor.
I don’t think it would take much digging to determine the intent of the bill especially since the bill addresses the failings in the defense Elaine Photography put forth in their case. No one will see this as a coincidence.
IANL, but what the law actually seems to do is protect a person from laws that they disagree with if that disagreement is based substantially on religious belief.
Yes and that’s what seems to be wrong with it. It treats the rights of conscience equally with the right of free exercise in the sense of practicing religion. A person can freely practice religion every which way imaginable and now a simple burden on those BELIEFS now violates free exercise?
If a law like this faced a federal anti-discrimination law with protection based on sexual orientation, it would not pass the Sherbert test since the Sherbert test seems to require a burden on the practice or religion.Report
We answered the question of “nullification” back in the civil war and again numerous times between 1940 and 1970. The wrong wing lost that argument then too.Report
We answered the question of “nullification” back in the civil war and again numerous times between 1940 and 1970.
The answer to the question of nullification is that the federal government will assert its supremacy over state law if and only if those in control choose to do so. Colorado and Washington are currently attempting nullification of federal laws against marijuana, and they seem to be succeeding.
The wrong wing lost that argument then too.
I can tell your clever wordplay that you’re an exceptionally thoughtful and intelligent person.Report
I agree with #1, but I thought of something as I read it, in particular when I read this passage:
I bolded the portion I did because that makes the AZ bill sound similar (not identical, but similar) to the one struck down in Romer v. Evans. That CO law (Amendment 2) specifically targeted local ordinances that banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And if I understand correctly (I never read the opinion), the notion that anti-gay animus was behind Amendment 2 was one reason the court struck it down.
In AZ, apparently, the scope of some local ordinances might have been limited by the bill (if it had been signed), as long as the discriminator could cite some good faith religious reason for their decision to discriminate. And it seems at least arguable that anti-gay animus was behind passage of the bill, regardless of whether the bill itself mentioned sexual orientation.
I’m not, by the way, saying that it would have been a slam dunk to prove animus, and I’m not even sure how courts go about determining animus in the first place. I’m saying only that the signalling Tod mentions is a signalling of at least a layperson’s definition of animus.Report
“Algebra” is a Muslim word.Report
So is sugar, but I bet he puts some in his coffee.Report
I don’t know…
He might like his coffee black like his men.Report
Ba dum dum!
Man, after today I know you like Ghostbusters and Airplane. That whole quality theater lover role you’ve been playing just won’t wash now 😉Report
When he read the blog, he knew what he was getting into. I say, let him troll!Report
(Not that he’s trolling. Just the only word I could think of that’d fit.)Report
@newdealer — I feel bad because that made me laugh.Report
Man, this is what “like” buttons were invented for.Report
Well, Arabic, but I take your point.
I just wish they’d cover up the ‘bra’ part of it; we don’t all need to see its T-functions.Report
I’m amused by Melvin’s insistence that nobody discriminates against anyone in Arizona, even to the point of saying he doesn’t think anyone would ever be fired for being gay.
So if nobody in AZ would ever do anything that would be protected by this bill, why is the bill so important to him.
Pro-tip for the “video is tl/dw” crowd. Just start at 9:50.Report
So if nobody in AZ would ever do anything that would be protected by this bill, why is the bill so important to him.
It’s protection from all those lawsuit-happy libruls just itchin to accuse conservatives of hating on gays.Report
Except according to Melvin, nobody would ever do those things that might trigger a lawsuit. Did you listen to the interview? No discrimination in AZ, it just would never happen.Report
No, James, I hadn’t listened to it. I will.
What I wrote may be wrong but it’s based on the rationale I’ve heard: that it’s intended to circumvent the types of lawsuits that occurred in New Mexico where a wedding photographer was sued for refusing to take photos of a gay couple.
Off to listen to the embed.Report
Wow. Devastating.
First, there’s something absolutely wonderful about knowing that Gay AC is the interviewer here. That added lots of spice. (I wonder if Melvin knew???)
Second, I love the incredibly long pause right after AC asks “if a person gets fired from their job in AZ for being gay, is that discrimination?” The long pause was the best part of his answer since everything he said after that did more harm to his argument than good.
Third, I don’t think Melvin actually knows what the purpose of the SB 1026 is, and how it’s (ostensibly) an antidote to discrimination complaints, and because of that he let AC pull him right into the discrimination side of the debate which he simply couldn’t win.
Very interesting exchange.Report
You could almost see his brain freezing up during that long pause.
I, too, got the impression he didn’t actually understand the bill.Report
You could almost see his brain freezing up during that long pause.
Oh absolutely. That “oh shit” moment when the red lights and sirens of imminent DOOM short circuiting normal mental functions. I’m just amazed that in his team didn’t prep him for probably the most obvious question he might have to respond to. Incredible.Report
Well, the guy doesn’t discriminate against people. If he became governor, he would never choose one person over another for his chief of staff or for any appointed position.Report
I’m embarrassed for Anderson Cooper. Melvin comes off badly, but Cooper looks like an idiot. And I’ve always liked him.Report
How does Cooper come off badly here? And how could Melvin have come off any better?Report
Cooper does say a couple of questionable things. First, that the New Mexico situation doesn’t apply because there are no same-sex weddings in Arizona. There are none that have the force of law, but I’m sure there are still religious or ceremonial ones, complete with photographs and cakes. Second, he hypothesizes that this law would allow a bank officer to refuse to lend money to a divorced woman. So far as I know, that’s already legal, since divorced people are not a protected class.Report
Nah, I’m wrong. Cooper did a great job. Just, the first time I watched it, I thought it was an interview. I didn’t realize that Cooper was running for office against Melvin. And that Melvin was on trial, and Cooper was the prosecutor. And Melvin had just shot Cooper’s dog. Cooper was totally appropriate, now that I understand the context.Report
I liked the part where Cooper called him a pinhead and told him to shut up.Report
Melvin comes off badly,
Yeah, he does. I’m always amazed when people in positions of power willingly confront the nation to argue a bill or policy that they are simply incapable of articulating and defending. Whether it’s out of ignorance, laziness or stupidity, I of course don’t know. But it never ceases to amaze.Report
in what way is Al Melvin a populist; he seems like a typical conservative to me.Report
Yeah, the definition of populist matters.
Melvin is against the expansion of Medicaid in AZ because it violates free market principles. If “populist” means helping the people matters more than other principles, he ain’t close to populist in the same sense that left wing (and some centrist D’s) are populist.
If “populist” means unwilling to accept or even listen to basic consensus from academics, scientists, and mainstream journalists about their various expertises, then Melvin is definitely that. But a better word than “populist” here would be ignoramus or fool. But that would be biased.
Both sides do the bad populism thing, you see.Report
populist means someone who does what the masses want.Report
Argh!:
“Further, that even though populist movements are both more fun and more seductive in their siren call than boring old wonky, policy-oriented, get-the-trains-moving-on-time “public officials” from either party, they inevitably lead to intellectual bankruptcy.
If you’re going to say this, you need a non-vacuous and broad definition of populism (you didn’t provide it) and you need to have a very good reason for not distingushing different types of populist, some of which might not be guilty of “inevitably” (pretty strong claim of necessity here, even if I accept you are being a bit hyperboliv) leading to intellectually bankruptcy.
For example, are academic, analytic Marxists -who are against the wealthy elites- populists? I’d say yes. Are anti-monarchist movements populist? Again, yes. Are pro democratic uprisings in the Arab world populist? Sometimes yes.
If your claim is just that anti-technocrat, anti-academic types (a small subset of populists) eventually end up intellectually bankrupt, I’d agree. Indeed, they define themselves and start off as intellectually bankrupt.
But don’t try to smear left-leaning populists who want to elevate the power of technocrats, academics, artists, and the like while minimizing the wealth and power gap between the oligarchic elites and the plain old people, i.e. the 1% and the 99%.
A lefty in favor of egalitarianism is populist, but not anti-intellectual and his movement will not end up intellectually bankrupt. A reactionary righty -who hates “egg heads” and east cost intellectuals and thinks professors are part of a massive conspiracy to pass of global warming as no a myth- started off and will end up intellectually bankrupt.Report
In other words don’t mix in anti-rich with anti-intellectual. They ain’t the same, even though both sometimes get called “populist.”Report
Is it possible, though, that you might be wrong? That the danger is indeed inherent in the left-of-center populism you endorse? I’m not saying you have to cede the roost, but do left-wing populist movements never go wrong? That there is no possibility that even a movement with the best intentions might descend into the intellectual bankruptcy Tod is warning against?
For me, someone who does not acknowledge that possibility is someone very difficult to speak with. They are so sure of their rightness that any disagreement becomes not just disagreement, but treason to justice.Report
Pierre,
It is possible that Big Bird is the one who killed OJ’s ex wife. Sure it is possible that left wing populist movements will lead to intellectual bankruptcy.
But the burden of proof is on the person who said that it is inevitable that populist movement’s will do so while only sighting one example of one type of such movement. And that type is avowedly anti-intellectual, while the other type is often composed of intellectuals and valorizes them.Report
I partially agree with you, at least when it comes to ascertaining probative burdens in respect to assertions about inevitability. So fine, the burden is on the one who’s claiming inevitability. But I do think focusing too much on that one word throws out the hyperbolous baby with the bathwater of, “there but for the praxis of Marx go any of us.”
For the record, I’m not sure I’d say populist movements “inevitably” lead to intellectual bankruptcy, although one way to read Tod’s statement is that he’s saying they do. If it’s not inevitable, however, I do suggest that populists movements are pulled in that direction and that their leaders and membership have to work mighty hard against that. I do at any rate think my question deserves a little better than the big bird quip.Report
For example, are academic, analytic Marxists -who are against the wealthy elites- populists? I’d say yes.
in order to be a populist you need to have popular support, Marxist have never had popular support; what’s more marxist hate the masses and believe that they a suffering from “false consciousness”
A reactionary righty -who hates “egg heads” and east cost intellectuals and thinks professors are part of a massive conspiracy to pass of global warming as no a myth- started off and will end up intellectually bankrupt.
funny how you oppose that but support people who hate nerds enough to throw rocks at them when they move into the neighborhood.Report
Pro left, soak the rich, movements have had lots of public support. See the Nordic counties.Report
Shaz, personally, I don’t think anyone in those countries would phrase their policy the way you just did. The rich pay more in taxes, yes, but the purpose of implementing that policy isn’t to soak the rich. I mean, if you think that, you’re waaaay out on the leftward side of things, it seems to me.Report
Pro left, soak the rich, movements have had lots of public support. See the Nordic counties.
those movement weren’t marxistReport
And what’s the claim here, to soak the rich full stop? Like, out of spite or something? Or to soak the rich to achieve some goal, like the dissolution of economic classes, or private ownership of the wassnames? Or is it to progressively tax people to fund the necessary functions of government?Report
i.e. the 1% and the 99%.
yesterday you said you didn’t believe in this distinction and that computer programmers making 80K were evil and a legitimate target for protest; today you’re saying it’s the 1% vs. the 99%. did you change your mind in the last 36 hoursReport
Yes, that is what I said. You are so charitable that I am done talking to you. Bravo.Report
There is a distinction between the two, if the inequality movement is in fact about reducing the incomes the super rich 1% and increasing everyone else’s pay then I support it. If its hipsters complain about computer nerds making a cool neighborhood boring then I want nothing to do with. When people talk 99% one day and side with hipsters against nerds the next it makes me want nothing to do with the entire thing.Report
Shaz, I’d go a different direction here. Why is intellectual bankruptcy a bad thing? People want what they want, no? The policy wonks want a technocratic elite to determine policy; the pure populist wants his coalition to determine policy. There’s a place for both, it seems to me, since without the two of ’em governance either wouldn’t be democratic or it wouldn’t make any fucking sense. As it is, it’s an easily criticizable mix but still the least worst option out there.Report
For example, are academic, analytic Marxists -who are against the wealthy elites- populists?
Strange choice to defend against the charge of intellectual vacuacy.
But don’t try to smear left-leaning populists
False equivalency again?
Boy, this past week at the OT has just been a whole smorgasbord of left/liberal defensiveness. Apparently there aren’t any legitimate critiques of any kind against that side of the political spectrum. It must feel awful good to be so ideal.Report
It is not defensiveness. It is an argument, which is what we do here.
Analytic Marxists are very intellectual. Gerry Cohen was an egg head par excellence. To say otherwise is a baseless attack on him and others.Report
Apparently there aren’t any legitimate critiques of any kind against that side of the political spectrum. It must feel awful good to be so ideal.
Sure there are. Lots of lefty policies can be criticized. Lefty populism can surely be criticized if the motivation is something like “soak the rich”. Hell, I’ll be in the front of the line.Report
Lighten up, Francis.Report
Don’t be so defensive, James.Report
As a member of the revolutionary collective known as “liberals”, we need to keep our institutionally determined motivations secret as best we can, James. We’re awaiting a signal from Leader to implement Operation Full Takeover of Everything That Matters at any moment.Report
Shazbot,
Spoken like a true analytical Marxist.Report
Still,
You’re no Schilling.Report
“Apparently there aren’t any legitimate critiques of any kind against that side of the political spectrum.”
I believe that the criticism “not REALLY liberal/leftist” is gaining traction these days.Report
So when you defend libertarianism, you’re just being defensive and not accepting that there are legitimate criticisms. Got it.Report
“Further, even though libertarianism is more fun and more exciting to teenage boys and those stuck in mental adolescence than boring old wonky, policy-oriented, realism, libertarianism inevitably leads to intellectual bankruptcy of the sort displayed by gold bugs, conspiracy theorists, and racist readers of ron Paul’s newsletter.”
That wouldn’t make you defensive at all.Report
You’re no Schilling.
I’m no Mike Schilling, nor was meant to be. It’s a farthing to even suggest as much.Report
I believe that the criticism “not REALLY liberal/leftist” is gaining traction these days.
Not that I’ve seen. People are pretty happy to call themselves liberals. I think the problem (I’ll include the now obligatory “- and I don’t mean this defensively” clarification which only confirms my inherent defensiveness) is when some who’s not a liberal – someone like yourself, for example – says “Jane Hamsher said the most outrageous fucking thing. Liberals are exactly the same as the Tea Party.”
Here, I’ll ask you a question: if someone were to do this, what would be the criteria for determining that Jane Hamsher’s beliefs and practices inform you in anyway about my beliefs and practices?Report
Remember Shazbot, I’m a liberal myself, not a libertarian. You’re the guy who told me that repeatedly.
Anyway, you fished up the quote. Tod didn’t say liberalism led to intellectual bankruptcy, so your analogy fails with a bang. There is populist libertarianism, and guess what I think that leads to?
And with that, I’ll give you the last word.Report
In my observation, sometimes he gets defensive when people try to play the FYIGM card or some such. In my experience, however, as well as other observations, I find that he engages substantive criticisms, concedes when concession is called for, and even goes out of his way to praise and defend what he sees as well-made arguments from people with whom he has in the past disagreed vehemently. (See the recent “parody” post.)
However, none of that really matters. Even if he were a hyperdefensive SOB who insists only on his own righteousness, that doesn’t mean liberals never do that. I doesn’t mean you never do that. It doesn’t mean I never do that. If the argument is about what x does, then to say that y does it too is no counterargument.Report
False equivalency, Pierre!Report
A lefty in favor of egalitarianism is populist, but not anti-intellectual and his movement will not end up intellectually bankrupt.
To give an example, I think Elizabeth Warren’s shtick is a good example of intellectually bankrupt left-wing populism.Report
To give an example, I think Elizabeth Warren’s shtick is a good example of intellectually bankrupt left-wing populism.
how is Warren’s populism intellectually bankrupt? Her positions seem to have some thought behind them even if i sometimes disagree with them.Report
You might be right, but the word “shtick” in quotations is relevant. She might be populistically pandering to the proles, but she’s also smart enough to argue her views if she has to. And maybe politically smart enough not to.Report
To give an example, several months back, some video with her comparing the Federal Reserve discount rate to student loan rates went viral, complaining that proposed student loans rates were ten times higher. What she either didn’t know or disingenuously omitted—neither of which is remotely defensible—is that:
1. The discount window is rarely used because it charges an above-market rate. At the time it was 0.75% compared to the 0.25% that banks charged each other for overnight loans.
2. Discount-window loans are very well collateralized and very short-term, and thus have essentially no risk of default. Loans made through the discount window are profitable, contrary to Warren’s claims that they were a giveaway to banks.
3. Short-term rates are not comparable to long-term rates, especially when short-term rates are at extremely low levels. At the time, one-month US treasury notes were yielding 0.03%—1/25th of the discount rate, and as little as 1/100th of the yield on 10-year treasury notes.
And her “you didn’t build that” rant was even worse than Obama’s. (She didn’t actually say “you didn’t build that,” but it was the same basic idea).
Whether she actually believes her own demagoguery is unclear. But it definitely is intellectually bankrupt populism.Report
but she’s also smart enough to argue her views if she has to. And maybe politically smart enough not to.
If she’s smart enough not to, how would you know?Report
i viewed her statement about the discount rate as rhetorical device not a serious proposal .
i’m not sure what was wrong about her “you didn’t build that speech” the reaction to it demonstrates how clueless conservative born between 1930 and 1970 are; they benefited from the extensive cold war era welfare state then act like they’re self made.Report
If she’s smart enough not to, how would you know?
Cuz I’ve heard her argue her views…?….Report
Stillwater: Do you have a link? I’d like to see Warren saying something intelligent just for the novelty factor.
dand: I’ll have to look it up to refresh my memory of the details, off the top of my head the major fallacies were:
1. Conflation of welfare spending and infrastructure spending.
2. Pretending like the benefits of infrastructure spending accrue solely to the rich (e.g., roads are a giveaway to owners of businesses who use them, but not to their employees or customers)
3. Accusing the rich of not appreciating the infrastructure “we” provide when the rich are in fact the ones who pay the taxes to fund it.Report
Stillwater: Do you have a link?
Actually, no. I watched some of her arguments re: the consumer protection bureau and TARP and the mortgage crisis but none of those show her expressing the wonky intellectualism you’re accusing her of lacking. So I’ll concede that you’re correct on that score.Report
Yeah, Warren is intellectually bankrupt. Her publication list is longer than your arm. Lot’s of blind, peer reviewed stuff there. 5 awards for college teaching excellence. Some pretty decent grants won.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/ewarren/Warren%20CV%20062508.pdf
Yeah, she’s just like Michelle Bachman.Report
I agree Warren’s demonstrated her smarts, but most of those publications aren’t blind peer review ones. Law journals don’t work like real academic journals do.Report
Shaz, Don’t get me wrong. I think she’s really smart. I’m just not gonna spend any real effort trying to disabuse Brandon of his views that she’s not she’s not smart in the particular way he’s focusing on.Report
@james-hanley I might go so far as to suggest that, amongst certain crowds, law journals would be suspect in general, particularly since a our president once edited one.
Publishing in one would be evidence of that certain something that helps define the negative space of not-Obama.Report
I think Stillwater’s earlier touched on it correctly. Warren isn’t dumb and isn’t intellectually bankrupt, but she does have a shtick that appeals to emotion and intuition but at least sometimes doesn’t stand up to thoughtful scrutinyReport
You mean she’s not one of those politicians that always sticks to rigorously correct arguments, like … um, like …. You know, like the ones that do.Report
Some seek more mileage out of those arguments than others, though.Report
I think Stillwater’s earlier touched on it correctly. Warren isn’t dumb and isn’t intellectually bankrupt, but she does have a shtick that appeals to emotion and intuition but at least sometimes doesn’t stand up to thoughtful scrutiny…
I don’t know. I read that she was supportive of the idea that the Post Office can get into the payday lending business. On that note alone, I tend to side with Brandon.Report
Yes, Warren’s yet-to-be-cited “schtick” that apparently slightly simplifies of liberal and leftist economic philosophy is just like Palin, Bachman, Bush, Perry, etcetera.
I seriously think you’re joking.
Both sides have anti-intellectuals! Think about that before you talk. One side has a respected, well published anti-intellectual from Harvard, whose R opponent tried to belittle her by calling her “professor,” and the other side has a homophobe from AZ who may or may not be demonstrating signs of oxygen deprivation during interviews.Report
@shazbot3 Here’s Fresh Air, with Neil deGrasse-Tyson. Toward the end, he talks about communicating, and how he works at how to do it well. He gets that part of it is the timing. Toward the end, he talks about preparing to be on The Daily Show; he timed Stewart, found out the frequency of you-get-to-talk, and then Stewart interrupts with a funny comeback and a question, and then he practices putting the things he wants to say into a rhythm that matches the frequency of Stewart’s cycleing.
The whole segment of the interview is worth listening to; communicating complex ideas well takes a tremendous amount of effort, and about cultural biases in acknowledging how different people get recognized for the effort they put in (Jordan = talent/Bird = effort).
Warren’s spent her life studying middle class issues, she’s put in the effort; she has mastery of her subject matter. This quite frightens people who’ve been hard at work redistributing wealth up away from the middle class. Discredit they, dismiss they will, for the best defense is a good offense.
Warren’s got her work cut out for her; she’s playing point guard on communicating income inequality. I hope she follows deGrasse-Tyson’s advice, and studies Stewart for some cues on timing and sizing her bites of information.Report
Dave, here’s Warren’s picture of how and why the post office could get involved. I don’t think it’s crazy or stupid. In fact, I think the presupposition that merely mentioning this sort of thing counts as evidence of stoopidity seems a bit … uh …. well… you know.Report
@dave
And it isn’t like we haven’t discussed postal banking as an alternative to payday lending here at the League.
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2013/04/17/payday-lending-some-thoughts#comment-533783Report
“3. Accusing the rich of not appreciating the infrastructure “we” provide when the rich are in fact the ones who pay the taxes to fund it.”
@brandon-berg Sincere question here: Is infrastructure funded entirely, or mainly, by income taxes? Do sales taxes, corporate taxes, etc., fund any infrastructure spending?Report
@shazbot3 I didn’t say she’s intellectually bankrupt. For all I know, she’s a genius. But her political rhetoric is intellectually bankrupt populist claptrap. And yes, Both Sides Do It. But I was specifically responding to your claim that this isn’t an issue on the left. And Warren is an example I find particularly annoying because of the grossly unwarranted adulation she receives for her inane rants, which inevitably make their way onto my Facebook feed, severely endumbening it.
Oh, look! Here she is demonstrating (or feigning) ignorance of the distinction between average and marginal productivity. Not that the guys she’s grilling come off looking any better.
@mike-schilling
So we’re clear, then, that Both Sides do in fact Do It?
@krogerfoot
Taxes generally aren’t earmarked for specific programs (other than FICA taxes, kind of), so I guess basically what you’re asking is what percentage of total revenues come from each kind of taxes. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. At the federal level it’s mostly FICA and personal income taxes, with corporate income taxes being about 10-15%. At the state level it’s some combination of income, sales, and property taxes, although several states lack at least one of those taxes.
I should correct myself. I said that the rich are “the ones” who pay the taxes to fund infrastructure, but obviously they don’t pay for all of it. What I meant was that they pay taxes disproportionate to their use of infrastructure and government services, i.e., they’re subsidizing lower- and middle-class taxpayers, not the other way around.Report
I don’t have a strong opinion on postal banking, but I’m very skeptical of the simultaneous assertion that:
1. Banks don’t want to service the low-income segment of the population because it’s not profitable, and
2. This is going to be profitable for the Post Office.
I guess you can tell a story where the Post Office has some efficiency gains because they already have offices in those locations, but I would not bet on it being profitable.Report
@stillwater
In fact, I think the presupposition that merely mentioning this sort of thing counts as evidence of stoopidity seems a bit … uh …. well… you know.
Stupid. Yes, of course, but seeing as I don’t have a track record of making these kinds of comments and am well aware that people like you would call me out if I did, do you think I’d say that without at least having the ability to back myself up? C’mon. Give me some credit.
To be fair, the reason I won’t do it now (at least extensively) is because I have a half-written post on this very issue. I read the USPS white paper. On the issue of credit services, it was more than underwhelming. The idea is stupid for a number of reason and Senator Warren talking about how the banks can partner with the USPS almost made me spit coffee.
Not only can the banks do banking themselves but the presumption that banks can partner with a partner that adds absolutely no value (sorry, the USPS doesn’t) is the epitome of stupid to someone that works in a business where we do capital raises for joint ventures. Both sides have to bring value to the table.
(edited by me – sorry if you saw the unedited version – it was as you would say – stoooooooopid)Report
I guess you can tell a story where the Post Office has some efficiency gains because they already have offices in those locations, but I would not bet on it being profitable.
It’s not a good story. It’s not like the banks couldn’t re-open closed branches (assuming they own the real estate) or set up a small payday lending operation in a 3,000 square foot or less space in a strip center or commercial property. Under-served markets should have pretty high vacancy rates so finding space won’t be an issue.
As it is, one of the things that the Post Office will have to do is look at these spaces and see if they’re large enough and appropriately built out to handle both mail and lending services. I’ll go back through the white paper when I complete my post but it seemed as if this plan was being sold on the basis that the existing locations could keep overhead costs for this down. I’m not so sure this is the case. I don’t know what the numbers would be but there will be capital costs and probably additional overhead to the extent the Post Office needs to expand into more space to do this.
In theory, the best thing it could do, if it is allowed to do it, is acquire an existing payday lender. In practice, this probably won’t work since they’ll end up overpaying relative to the interest rates they would end up charging. They’d lose their ass.Report
@creon-critic
Wait…I think I know the author of that post. 😉
I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that sub-thread before, but I’ll be covering it as soon as I can complete my post. As I told @stillwater , I’ve been through the USPS white paper and have a half-written draft. Given some personal things on this end, I haven’t been able to finish.Report
This is an interesting comment in that it does a lot of work to try and insulate Warren, in advance, of any possible criticisms that someone might have of her work.
“You have a criticism of Elizabeth Warren? Oh, you must bee one of those frightened oligarchs trying to oppress the middle class.”
This is also an interesting thread in that @brandon-berg raised a concrete example of Warren engaging in a particular brand of left-wing populism and laid out a thorough case as to why it is fairly vacuous to compare student loan rates to the Fed discount window rate. It’s the kind of thing that makes for very share-able Facebook posts, but for terrible lawmaking. If we cannot call that populism, then I guess the word doesn’t have any meaning at all. And it may not be entirely precise to call Warren and her corner of the progressive world anti-intellectual, as this sort of thing is more pseudo-intellectual, but the results are the same.
At this point, I have to ask those arguing against Brandon, what would sway you? How high is the bar to get over before you admit that progressives like Warren do, in fact, engage in a form of not-very-intellectual populism, that is primarily meant to appeal to people’s innate lefty sensibilities as opposed to swaying with sound arguments? It seems an awful lot like there is no bar and, rather, you are defending a tautological worldview in which the left can never be criticized for being populist, because… “well, because we are right!”Report
In the context of a proposal to double (allow the doubling) of student loan rates, I don’t think it’s intellectually bankrupt to set the context for that by pointing out other kinds of rates that institutions pay. Not to talk about the reason they are different is certainly less than full payment on an intellectual promise, but I wouldn’t call it bankruptcy. Intellectual default, maybe. But that’s a purely interpretive question regarding an imprecise term.
So, to @j-r’s question, the issue is that the criticism as initially lodged centered around 1) a meaningless charge because based on an undefinable term, and 2) an implausible one. What’s intellectual bankruptcy? Never saying an intellectual defensible thing? I would actually say yes, but someone else might say, no, indeed when you’ve said one egregiously indefensible thing, you’ve arrived at intellectual bankruptcy. Who’s to say who’s correct? And is every populist movement inevitably headed there? Who’s to say? If it’s the first definition, unlikely, as surely some populists movements will manage to continue to make some defensible claims. If the latter.. of course, because every political movement of any kind will eventually make some. If something in between… well, inevitability seems unlikely.
The point is that policy advocates of all stripes should respond to criticisms like, “progressives like Warren do, in fact, engage in a form of not-very-intellectual populism, that is primarily meant to appeal to people’s innate lefty sensibilities as opposed to swaying with sound arguments.” But for them to do that, such criticisms need to be well-formed like that one was from the outset, not backfilled as such when the initial claim is something like, “even though populist movements are both more fun and more seductive[…] they inevitably lead to intellectual bankruptcy,” with its claim about an outcome that is both inevitable and undefinable. Poorly formed critiques like that invite and justify simple rejection, ridicule, or just inattention.
All sides should be responsive to well-formed criticism – it’s useful for everyone. Therefore, people inclined to criticize should do it in well-formed terms that allow and compel thoughtful response (and possibly concession of the point).Report
…Shorter me:
Everyone should admit that, at least at times, “progressives like Warren do, in fact, engage in a form of not-very-intellectual populism, that is primarily meant to appeal to people’s innate lefty sensibilities as opposed to swaying with sound arguments.” Absolutely.
As @stillwater alluded to, of course, whether they should say that this is some kind of first- or even second-order sin in political argumentation [Edit: or whether it amounts to intellectual bankruptcy] is another matter entirely.Report
@zic,
(Jordan = talent/Bird = effort).
I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, of all people, but that is a racist trope that relies on the stereotype of the smart white guy who overcomes his physical limitations and the lazy dumb negro who gets by on his physical talent. In fact Bird was tremendously talented and Jordan was plenty smart and one of the hardest working guys in basketball.Report
@james-hanley, I thought that was obvious; it was certainly how deGrasse-Tyson used it in the show, and I was simply indicating the other stuff included in that segment — a discussion on how much effort he puts in to communicating complex ideas; that he doesn’t just have this natural talent for it.
To me, it mattered because much the talk about here of Warren isn’t about her actual heft, it’s about equating a couple of failures at communicating complex ideas about how the economy functions with regards to middle/lower-middle income families. She’s not given credit as an intellectual who’s put in effort, she’s presumed to be a populist without that effort based on a few analogies in an attempt to explain complex economic ideas.
It’s really easy to cherry-pick a couple of poorer examples and use them to discredit everything she says. It’s not so easy to see a broader context that what she’s attempting — point guard on communicating income inequality — is something that requires enormous effort. I’m suggesting that she needs to work on her timing as deGrasse-Tyson worked on his; there’s a form and rhythm to conveying complex information successfully.Report
@james-hanley – I could be wrong, but I think that is exactly what zic is saying, that the difference is one of perception based in cultural stereotype, not in fact.Report
Maybe I shouldn’t read before I have my coffee.Report
I’m on cup #2 and still sluggish. Work harder, caffeine!Report
@james-hanley what I’m trying to get at is Tod’s point #3 — that in the SSM debate, social conservatives are being asked to give up freedoms. This is an idea that deserves serious consideration. Brandon took it to women voting as a form of giving up economic freedom. Framed so, it becomes a question of does the expansion of freedoms to some groups serve seriously limit the freedoms of others, and is that a good or a bad thing?
Brandon’s point seemed to be that women voting = more economic intervention, and this was bad. First, I’m not convinced that the correlation works, there were too many other complex things happening in the economy of the US. But even if what he’s suggesting is true, women are more interventionist, I don’t necessarily agree that this is a bad thing, and viewing it as simply a bad thing is simply a way of maintaining entrenched power, something that should be pushed on and challenged; that pushing and challenging entrenched power is a hallmark of a free market and economic freedom, in fact.
Bringing it back to SSM, there’s Douthat’s column in the NYT today, much of it bemoaning the wolves at the gates of marriage. But then we get this:
Report
Brandon’s statement had two parts, one as a statement of fact (or something close to it) and the other as more of a statement of perspective.
I find it difficult to argue against the notion that giving women the right to vote did involve a more interventionist government. I haven’t read the big study on the subject, but it does at least purport to look at state suffrage over time rather than just national suffrage. To be perfectly honest, I doubt that if it had been brought up in another context – or by somebody else – that many liberals would actually disagree all that much and would, as Brandon says, cite it as a good thing.
Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing – that we have a more interventionist economy, I mean, as I don’t think Brandon seeks to deny women that right – is a matter of perspective and ideology. But it’s a different question than whether women affected the electoral landscape in an economy with more government intervention.Report
An important question is “how much of your offense puts a moral obligation on me?”
If we agree that offense is, in itself, important (and I’ve had conversations with folks (ON BOTH SIDES SO BOTH SIDES DO IT) that argue that it is, in itself, harm), then we’re stuck trying to address issues of how to best deal with others being offended.
It’s pretty easy for me to say “your being offended is a ‘you problem'” but, then, it would be, wouldn’t it?
But I really can’t think of a better response to a guy complaining about two gay guys getting married in a Unitarian Church somewhere.Report
@jaybird — When someone offends me, I tell them and explain why. Then it is up to them if they want to continue to offend me that way. Perhaps they are fine with offending me. Perhaps they are not.Report
Veronica,
Have you read about the Fox News walk-back on gender identity issues? Seems like Clayton Morris was listening.Report
@stillwater — No. But on the other hand, intersex conditions are a different sort of thing from transgender identities. The trans and intersex political communities have some overlap, but in the end we are very different have different interests.
It does not surprise me that a Fox announcer would be totally ignorant of intersex issues. It also does not surprise me they would walk their comments back once it was explained. This has little to do with me, however. I am not intersexed.Report
I’m not either!!Report
The social conservatives who back AZ-SB 1062 are actually right. Granting freedom to LGBTs does hamper people’s religious freedom.
The more I read up on this, especially the actual text of the bill, the more I’m inclined to think it’s getting closer to attaining a balance between freedom of religious exercise and non-discrimination. It seems to me the purpose of the bill is to reverse the normal burden of proof in resolving these types of conflicts such that the presumption is that religious liberty must be defeated by arguments meeting two pretty tough conditions (compelling state interest and least restrictive means) before restrictions on that liberty can generally apply. So in that sense, I don’t agree with Burt and Dave that the law had no purpose above signalling. I think it was an attempt to establish religious liberty as being a primary liberty which could only be defeated by meeting a burden of proof.Report
I should add, I could be wrong about that. 🙂 The bill strikes me as trying to entrench a really broad conception of religious liberty which in practice would permit lots of actions which might otherwise be viewed as discriminatory full stop.Report
To me the “compelling state interest” and “least restrictive means” is simply a statutory declaration of judicial precedent that says impositions on the free exercise of religion have to survive strict scrutiny.
Or maybe. Again, I’m no lawyer. Are laws that somehow restrict the free exercise of religion in the same class as, say, laws that restrict political speech? I just assumed so, but maybe I’m off here?Report
Yes. I don’t disagree with that part. What I think they were trying to do is establish that the normal protections accorded to other protected classes don’t automatically extend to gays without that burden being met for specific practices, irrespective of the current state of affairs in AZ or given any particular type of SC ruling on gay marriage etc. It was an attempt to shift the burden of proof in favor of … religious freedom (don’t want to beg any questions here!). And actually, my sympathetic side understands the motivations behind the law, to cut out a path where religious expression isn’t completely trampled by non-discrimination policies.Report
The use of the “fundamental right” language comes from the (quite mistaken) notion the religious freedom suffers an appreciable diminishment when private enterprise is regulated in a way distasteful to the religious merchant.
Ex.: Kevin attends the Tuscon Church of the Very Very Heterosexual God. Kevin also owns and operated Kevin’s Christian Camera Shop right there in downtown Tuscon. (How a camera can be Christian is a different question, but one which causes Kevin no intellectual heartburn.) Louise wants to buy one of Kevin’s Christian cameras. But Louise comes shopping with her life partner and they act all lesbian-like. If Kevin is compelled to sell Louise the camera the same way he’d have sold the camera to Harriet the Heterosexual, is Kevin any less a member of the Tuscon Church of the Very Very Heterosexual God?
Of course not. Kevin’s beliefs and patterns of worship and moral disapproval of Louise’s lifestyle “choice” remain the same. Hence, there is no substantial impairment of Kevin’s religious rights. No more than, say, Kevin having to pay taxes, some money of which may go to support things Kevin finds religiously distasteful, like, paying Louise’s salary since she is also a pilot for the Navy. No one would say that a law of general applicability (like paying taxes) is subject to a religious exemption absent a specific showing of actual impairment. And so too is treating customers alike in a business purportedly open to the general public not a religious impairment at all.Report
Burt, thanks.
Is there a scenario in which non-discrimination laws could take effect in AZ and protect certain types of religious practices as a result (say, if the legislature adopts anti-discrimination legislation down the road or somesuch)?Report
Had 1062 been enacted, of course.Report
How a camera can be Christian is a different question
Its integrated circuits are cut from the right sort of wafers.Report
We could concoct such a scenario, of course. Perhaps Moishe is very orthodox and wants to close his business on Saturday because he doesn’t roll on the Shabbat. But a hypothetical law requires him to be open then at the expense of forfeiting his business license, and Moishe’s personal service is needed — so it’s not practical for the circumstances of the particular business for him to hire a Gentile to run things on Saturday. We’d use the Sherbert test in that case to see if the Saturday opening law were valid. (Not at a full computer right now so looking up the links or filling in the facts for the scenario is a bit impractical for me at the moment. But that’s the skeleton. Seems to me the facts and the law are going to get pretty far-fetched to sculpt a situation in which Moishe wins; I’ve never heard of a mandatory Saturday-opening law anywhere.)Report
No more than, say, Kevin having to pay taxes, some money of which may go to support things Kevin finds religiously distasteful, like, paying Louise’s salary since she is also a pilot for the Navy.
Actually, I think this may be some of the legal push behind these laws; some weird sort of way to get out of paying taxes that go to things you don’t like, such as pension/health-care benefits for gay spouses.
Were that true, I should be able to get out of the portion of my federal tax bills that go to things like wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, no?
But I do suspect this sits at the bottom of the well of thought; in part, because of the ongoing efforts to defund any health-care organization that also provides abortion services.
/and I have no evidence for this suspicion.Report
Regarding the defining of populism, in the US I’d probably define it with something like “The channeling of popular emotional and/or moral energy towards unpopular segments of society” (That last part includes the wealthy, when the wealthy are unpopular.)
Or put another way, it’s William Jennings Bryan supporting prohibition and railing against the banks, the railroad, and the teaching of evolution.Report
So the American Revolution was populism, too. There was an unpopular group involved.
Inevitably intellectually bankrupt movement?Report
I do think there were components of the American Revolution that could be called “populist.” And in my opinion, that’s no defense of the revolution. I’m not a big fan of taking property away from people, threatening them, and sometimes tar-and-feathering and killing them, because they refuse to sign on to an unjust war against a luxury tax.Report
It gets more complicated when you’re talking about revolutions. I wouldn’t call the American Revolution pure populism, because there were other significant things. I do think that some of the arguments for it were quite populist in nature, though. I tend to think of the (original) Tea Party was quite populist in nature.
I don’t personally view populism in and of itself bad. It depends on what, aside from populism, is involved. Populism does have the ability to suck the oxygen out of the brain, which is what I think Tod is worried about, though I don’t think it’s inevitable.
And sometimes it is, as New Dealer says, an antidote to excessive technocratism. Anti-populists would presumably argue that if the state of affairs is bad enough to justify a populist response then you can demolish it with reason and logic. That’s the avenue I tend to prefer, but my faith in it is far from absolute.Report
Also, I wouldn’t say the American Revolution was intellectually bankrupt.
But the supporters of the revolution did have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to square some difficult intellectual circles, e.g.:
“All men are created equal” (except Slaves, Indians, and Tories).
One of the grievances was that the king and parliament had the temerity to accommodate the religion of the recently conquered Quebeckers.
One of the grievances was that the UK wanted to enforce the 1763 Proclamation line. That line was more a statement of power politics than humanitarianism, but it’s function was to protect Indians from the colonists.Report
Nothing screams populism like businessmen complaining about somebody else’s monopoly.Report
a more recent example of a populist candidate would be Pat BuchananReport
Yes. Also Mike Huckabee.
Both exemplify intellectual bankruptcy.Report
Excellent examples, though they’re trying to appeal to different segments of the population. With Huckabee, it’s blue-collar evangelicals, especially from the south and the midwest, who feel oppressed by the 21st-century economy. With Buchanan, it’s people who think things went off-track when we fought on the wrong side in WWII.Report
and a more positive(and successful) example would be Truman in 1948.Report
With Buchanan, it’s people who think things went off-track when we fought on the wrong side in WWII.
not sure if you’re joking but Buchanan didn’t want his feeling on WWII publicized i’d say he was going after the same people as Huckabee plue Reagan Democrats.Report
I was partly joking. Buchanan didn’t go full-on Lindbergh until after his political career was over, though he’s been defending accused Nazi war criminals and claiming the Holocaust was exaggerated since the 80s.Report
@will-truman
“The channeling of popular emotional and/or moral energy towards unpopular segments of society”
I have written and deleted a lot of comments here (well, two) trying to define “populism” because I’m having a devil of a time thinking up one that works. I think yours is a pretty good working definition of populism, and I think it can take us pretty far.
I do think an element of populism, or at least a comorbid element often found with populism, is the perception that the “popular” is somehow betrayed, undermined, or marginalized by the unpopular segments of society. Your example of WJB is pretty good here. Farmers were betrayed by goldbugs and by venal robber barons on the railroads who charged discriminatory prices and did all other shenanigans.
Here are some other examples I can think of, and I admit I’m using broad brushstrokes:
George Wallace’s appeal to people who believed that liberal elitists in D.C. were violating our civil liberties. (The target = the southern whites and eventually all whites in the US who were working class and who believed themselves left behind by the class of people who could afford to go to college and who were now their bosses.)
Perot’s 1992 appeal to people who believed that special interests were driving our deficit and making us therefore more and more financially insecure. (The target = middle-class people who believed that taxes and government spending and the accompanying deficits–done on behalf of “special interests”–endangered the health of the US economy and was responsible for the then current but receding recession.)
The Naderite appeal in 2000 to the anti-corporation crowd. (The target = people like me who had come to believe, at the time, that corporations controlled all or most of our political economy and were denying the 1990s prosperity to everyday workers with their insistence on freer trade and corporate welfare.)
The pro-Obamacare argument that evil insurance companies are plotting to rob people of access to health care. (The target = people who have had their health care needs cut off by insurance companies, who couldn’t get insurance on their own, and people who lived in fear that they might get sick one day.)
The anti-Obamacare argument that Obama is Hitler. (The target (in addition to the to me obvious racist signalling, others’ mileage varies) = people who fear that the federal government is making more and more arrogations of power and is denying liberty more and more, and this trend is personified in the champion and sponsor of a program that is forcing individuals to buy a private corporation’s product.)
A recent union demonstration I witnessed at a local university whose participants shouted things like “chop from the top” and passed out flyers purporting to show that the university hired more administrators than faculty and had amassed a huge profit which would enable the university in question to pay faculty much more. (The target = people who believe that administrators at universities continually connive to rob students and professors, who *really* make the university work, of money and who arrogate to themselves ever increasing amounts of wealth and power.)
I personally think that each of these movements, even Wallace’s and the tea party’s, whose racism I hope it’s clear I disavow completely, identified some real problems. College educated liberals are sometimes very quick to look down on the Lumpen in whose name they claim to do so much. Massive government spending can be harmful because it can create obligations to pay (with corresponding increases in taxation) and if those obligations aren’t honored, that means default and higher interest rates (I think….I’m no expert here). Corporations often have a very cozy relationship and seek rent quite successfully. Health care provision pre-Obamacare was a mess (it might be a mess post-Obamacare, but I support the policy), and the actions of insurance companies, while understandable if one accepts that they are for profit companies, were one visible instance of these problems. As @jm3z-aitch has shown in his presidency posts, the power of the executive has been growing at least since Wilson, and it’s hard to deny that civil liberties are continually being challenged and have been at least since the PATRIOT Act, and Obama has continued these trends just as much as the other guys. The costs of higher ed. are increasing, and it seems to me some of the spending priorities are out of whack, even if I don’t believe it’s as easy as firing a few deans and redistributing alleged surpluses.
I finally want to make two points. One, at times in my life, e.g., Nader in 2000, I bought into the populist form of the argument. Two, these populist movements weren’t all the same. Wallace’s populism, as seductive as it might sometimes have been to white people like me (I wasn’t born yet, but I imagine I might have found some appeal in it had I been alive then), played to and tried to legitimate some of the most racist elements of society. Obamacare, however one assesses its worth, is at least a stab to solve the problem, and in the short and medium terms, it might prove helpful (at least I hope it does….others disagree) in blunting the sharper instances of sticker shock and denials of coverage that were always in the background pre-Obamacare.
[/rambling]Report
On the original New Mexico event. The photographer explicitly said they don’t do same sex marriages, rather than a little white lie saying they were busy or some other excuse. It appears the photographers wanted to make a point. If you just say you are busy, going to be out of town, or doing something else at the time requested then the burden of proof is off you in any case.
Etiquette would say to tell a little white lie to avoid inflaming folks. Why make someone mad when you don’t have to?Report
Why make someone mad when you don’t have to?
You’re new to the blogosphere, aren’t you? 😉Report
I don’t know the circumstance. Did they visit the photographer as a couple, or had the photographer already accepted the job when the client first said “husband”?Report
In the Elane photography case, the couple e-mailed the company indicating that they were planning a same-sex ceremony, and the company said no.
That said, I believe at least one of the other cases on the issue involves a wedding vendor that backed out after agreeing to offer a service.Report
A quibble on point three — it is eminently plausible that some questions put to a democratic vote will indeed result in overt tyranny. Avoiding the two most obvious 20th century example I will instead point to the immense popularity of Napoleon crowning himself Emperor — an event which occurred within a generation of the Estates-General of 1789 and less than half a generation since Louis XVI Valois’ head was lopped off for the crime of having once borne a crown.Report
Louis XVI was a Bourbon, not a Valois, so your entire argument is invalid!Report
Meh…..they were all Capetians anyway.Report
It’s true. Since France stuck to the Salic Law, all of them down to Louis-Phillipe were direct male-line descendants of Hugh Capet.Report
“the Fourteenth Amendment– [including] the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause [found within]was ratified by the American people and made law.
That is a protection that was voted upon. And a citizen in the United States does not have to go to the ballot box to secure equal protection of the laws.”Report
42 U.S.C. §2000a (a)All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
No, Arizona businesses have no right to say “my religion says no gays allowed.” You may not discriminate on the ground of religion.Report
Lawyers here can clarify, but I tend to read “my religion says no gays allowed” is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation rather than religion.Report
“My religion says no irish allowed.” (Protestantism vs Catholics)
“My religion says no blacks allowed.” (Mormons)
“My religion says no gays allowed” (Pick your backwards christian sect)
“My religion says modern medicine is an abomination, so nobody in a wheelchair allowed in my bookstore” (Christian Science)
Pick your poison. It’s all on the basis of religion. If my religion says one thing, and you’re not a member of my religion and I discriminate against you claiming “deeply held religious belief” protection – I lose, just as those using religion as a shield did during the civil rights era. The term religion was put in there because the KKK were using bible quotations to justify Jim Crow in ‘private’ businesses.Report
I think the first one is discrimination on the basis of ethnicity.
The second one is discrimination on the basis of race.
The third one is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation
The fourth one is discrimination on the basis of disabilities.
Discrimination on the basis of religion would be “My religion says I can’t serve Catholics” (and I assume that religion was included because of discrimination against Jews and Catholics)
This is as I understand it. Legally speaking. Again, though, I wait for a lawyer to clarify.Report
The wording is “ground of” not “basis of” Mr. Truman.Report
@will-truman You are correct.
My experience with this issue is (of course) employment law. If an employee believes they have been discriminated against because they are (for example) a woman, and part or all of the employer’s alleged reason for that discrimination is due to their religious beliefs, that employee files a suit/EEO complaint of sexual discrimination, not religious discrimination.Report
“Ground of” vs “Basis of” is not a relevant distinction here. The pertinent grounds or basis is dependent on the person being descriminated against. Not why the discriminator is discriminating.
Bob’s Bus Tours can’t refuse to hire a black person whether the motivation is religious or not.
Bob’s Bus Tours can discriminate against people wearing hats, even if Bob has some religious thing against people wearing hats in buses and his motivation is religious in nature.
The issue is (generally) who you are discriminating against. Not whether or not you are motivated by religion to do so.
If it’s illegal to discriminate against gays, it’s illegal whether you are doing so because your religion tells you to or because they “give you the creeps”… and if it’s legal, it doesn’t suddenly become illegal if you’re doing so because your religion tells you.
Again, this is all my understanding of how it works. And Tod’s. If one of our house lawyers wants to come along and tell me otherwise, I’ll listen.Report
“The wording is “ground of” not “basis of” Mr. Truman.”
This is what is known as a difference without a distinction.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your info on discrimination/harassment law, @wrong but it isn’t correct. In fact if it was, a gay man who was terminated for being gay in Arizona would be able to successfully sue his employer, because protection against religious discrimination is federally mandated.Report
Ah, I see that @will-truman beat me to the punch there.Report
FWIW and just in case the lawyers never show, here is a listing of the EEOC recognized types of discrimination, what their definitions are, and how they are recognized by anti-discrimiatnion laws:
http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/Report
without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
On the grounds of refers to the target of the discriminatory act, not the person doing the discrimination, and sexual orientation is not listed.
So under the proper reading of that law, if I’m a Christian I cannot discriminate against a Muslim, not because I am religiously motivated, but because it targets the Muslim on the basis of his/her religion. I can target a gay person on the basis of my faith because the statute does not cover sexual orientation and the law does not constrain my motivation.Report
James,
On the grounds of refers to the target of the discriminatory act, not the person doing the discrimination, and sexual orientation is not listed.
Thanks clearly stating that. That’s my impression too.
I can target a gay person on the basis of my faith because the statute does not cover sexual orientation and the law does not constrain my motivation.
Yes. And this *gap* is exactly where SB 1026 enters the debate, yes? If I’m understanding the bill correctly, it would have forced a wedge between including sexual orientation as a protected target of discriminatory practices on analogy to skin color or ethnicity and so on. Which is why I think the bill was actually attempting to do something substantive. If passed, the normal protections against discrimination accorded to other individuals couldn’t automatically be applied to differences in sexual orientation unless a specific instance of purported discriminatory behavior met the stipulated burden of justification.
Is that how you understand the purpose of the bill? Am I wrong in this?Report
the law does not constrain my [religious] motivation.
That get’s to the heart of it; seeking an end-run around anything that might constrain religious motivation.Report
I think that was the purpose of the bill, but under the current law it appears you can already discriminate against a gay person, and you don’t even need to claim a religious motive.
So I think the purpose of the bill was to ensure you’re allowed to do something you’re already allowed to do. I think that’s the point of the ckaim that it doesn’t really do anything.Report
James,
Yes, for sure that’s true given the current state of play in AZ. But if the bill had passed it would have constrained a future legislature from including sexual orientation under the same umbrella of protections that established categories already enjoy. Imposing restrictions on expressions of religious conscience (and the correlated attribution of protections to gays) would therefore have to meet a burden in each particular instance a purported discriminatory act was committed. This would be no small victory for religious freedom, it seems to me. (Well, it would be a victory until and when the feds stepped in and included sexual orientation as a class of people covered by anti-discrimination laws, anyway.)Report
if the bill had passed it would have constrained a future legislature from including sexual orientation under the same umbrella of protections
Not really. No current statute can constrain a future statute, which can repeal or make an exception to the prior statute.
Imposing restrictions on expressions of religious conscience (and the correlated attribution of protections to gays) would therefore have to meet a burden in each particular instance a purported discriminatory act was committed. This would be no small victory for religious freedom, it seems to me.
I’m still chewing that over and don’t know where I stand. As a counterargument, its awfully unusual for a religion’s theology, or a sect’s doctrine, to say “don’t do business with sinners.”Report
@stillwater and @james-hanley
I would think the goals here were more rile the base and (had the law been signed) proffer counterweight to the numbers of laws dropping when, eventually, the rights of the LGBT community end up in the Supreme Court.Report
@james-hanley
Unless the theology is “buy local.”
(Sorry. I’m just feeling a little punchy today.)Report
zic,
Sure, inference to the best explanation and all. But the bill actually does something, it seems to me. It has substantive content (even if misguided) it seems to me. Further, it seems to me that inference to the best explanation would also attribute to conservatives a desire to pass laws which further their conceptions of religious liberty.
I’m not defending the bill here but I think I could provide a defense of it that contradicts the motivations you just mentioned.Report
Unless the theology is “buy local.”
Heh. I see an unanticipated new political alliance emerging under the slogan “Buy from non-sinning locals!”Report
Heh. I see an unanticipated new political alliance emerging under the slogan “Buy from non-sinning locals!”
Presto! You’ve got yourself a small town or hipster neighborhood!Report
@james-hanley
So I think the purpose of the bill was to ensure you’re allowed to do something you’re already allowed to do.
Somebody with more detailed knowledge of current AZ law please correct me, but I think you (or rather, your public accommodation) are (is) presently not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in the two largest cities in AZ (nor in Flagstaff). The bill would have trumped that.Report
@scott-the-mediocre
Others have mentioned that, so I think you’re right. I’d forgotten that wrinkle. So in most of the state it would do nothing new, but in those cities it would override local statutes.
Thanks for correcting me on that.Report
Not really. No current statute can constrain a future statute, which can repeal or make an exception to the prior statute.
Technically this appears right, but in the event that protection based on sexual orientation is included within anti-discrimination law, its reach will be limited because 1062 is written so broadly that a mere burden on one’s conscience constitutes a legally defined burden on free exercise.
You could say, “Dave, you’re basing this on your belief that discrimination based on sexual orientation is religiously motivated”. I’d say you’re absolutely correct. Given what I’ve seen over the past several years about the rights of Christians being “oppressed” and the fact that religious groups have pushed for this, Stillwater’s characterization of using current law to block future laws isn’t far off.
Even if it is technically incorrect based on your response to him, the broad definition of free exercise in 1062 and the push for a bill like this NOW when there’s no need tells me that the intent of 1062 was to implement the religious defenses in order to effectively be exempt from any sexual orientation requirements under future anti-discrimination law.
We can debate the technical points but this is my view of the big picture.Report
Wrong,
From here on out, please use another name. I don’t quite care for yours and the email you used for your comment has “I’m an asshole” written all over it. I prefer to be the only asshole around here. Thanks.Report
@stillwater I meant these were ‘in additonal’ motivations, not ‘instead of.’
So yeah.
@pierre-corneille
Funny thing about buy local; has roots in ‘organic.’ Which, after it’s not-so-attractive hippie-commune start, was maintained through the dark-food ages of the 1980’s and early 1990’s by religious groups, particularly Seventh Day Adventists, who kept organic and health-food stores open despite their (at the time) economic failures.Report
Interesting to know. I also imagine that it might have some roots–or at least contemporary correlatives that dovetail nicely with the organic movement–in religious diets like kosher.
That’s just a guess. I’m not a food historian.Report
@james-hanley
@alan-scott
Re: Market thrives on information. I am moving this downthread obviously.
I think this is another example of a divide in how liberals and libertarians might look at a situation and how the world works and come to completely different conclusions. James, please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that a libertarian thinks that full information would allow people to act on that information and this will create justice. So a landlord or business owner can put up a bigoted and discriminatory sign that says “No Muslims”, “No Jews”, “No Homosexuals”, etc and then people will react accordingly. Muslims, and Jews, and homosexuals will know that this is not someone to rent from and people who care about social justice will do the same. Eventually the landlord will discover that his premises are vacant and change his tune. Or the apartment will just rent out to hard and soft supporters of bigotry and those supporters will be judge accordingly in the court of popular opinion. A guy gets rejected by a cute girl for living in the notorious apartment building in town, etc.
I am skeptical that this would work. I admit that fair housing law is an imperfect vehicle and that it has not completely solved the problem of housing discrimination. This American Life ran a story on non-profits that go to landlords to test for discrimination and they found a lot of it. Almost every area has a non-profit housing fairness org that combats this kind of discrimination and their resources are often too small to fight the problem. But it seems to me that the purpose of fair housing law is to prevent landlords from acting on their bigotries.
Also James, I suspect that since you a in the majority by American characteristics you are being a bit naive on the psychological effects that a person in the minority would feel by experiencing everyday racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. I completely sympathize with Alan’s desire and think it is a noble and reasonable goal of law to prevent minorities from seeing example after example of how they are unwelcome in some to many areas/businesses.
This is potentially another example of a liberal doubting the power of the free market.Report
Pierre,
Yes, many libertarians would make that argument. Whether landlords change their tune due to empty units is a function of numbers, though, and I doubt there are sufficient numbers of gay people, even in a San Francisco, to have much effect.
But I wasn’t making that argument myself. I was just thinking of whether it’s worse to see lots of ads saying “no gays allowed” or to get repeatedly denied apartments after interviewing for them, and/or getting kicked out when the landlord belatedly realized the tenant’s homosexuality.
But I’m just speculating.Report
Neither was I. That was NewDealer’s post 🙂Report
“I was just thinking of whether it’s worse to see lots of ads saying “no gays allowed” or to get repeatedly denied apartments after interviewing for them, and/or getting kicked out when the landlord belatedly realized the tenant’s homosexuality.”
I have two quick responses to this:
1. I think most people would find each option you give here either equally great or equally horrible, which is why the choice normally discussed is that a business owner is either allowed to refuse service to someone on basis of X or it’s against the law to do so.
2. These kinds arguments appeal to me more in a city the size of Portland than they do in a smaller rural town that might have, say, two apartment buildings that rent out rooms. Then it seems that you only need two people to say “no gays,” “no muslims,” “no divorcees” or whatever to completely disenfranchise an entire segment of that town.Report
Housing is a constant problem for visible queers, even in Boston. And it is especially difficult for trans women. We try to build our own support networks, housing lists and the like, but they don’t really seem to quite meet the need.
When you are living on the margin to begin with, just a small shift in your odds can lead to a huge difference in outcomes.
Many of you folks think about how hard it was for you to find an apartment. Then you image it being a little bit harder, an extra week searching, and think, “That ain’t so bad.” But for us it is more than a difference in degree. Many of us can barely afford housing as it is. Any shift in difficulty pushes into the “effectively homeless” space quite fast.Report
Neither was I. That was NewDealer’s post 🙂
Two bone-headed mistakes in one day. Who’da thought I’d …. make so few?Report
@veronica-dire, @tod-kelly
I’m not talking about whether to allow housing discrimination or not. I’m asking whether–when housing discrimination is allowed, or happens even if it officially is not allowed–it’s better/worse/same to learn about the landlord’s bigotry in the ad or face-to-face.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that being able to skip over the “No Xs need apply” ads, and focus one’s search on just those that don’t say that–offensive as it would be to see a bunch of those–would actually make it easier to find an apartment than going to check some out and only then finding out the owner’s a bigot.
This is not an argument in favor of allowing discrimination.Report
@james-hanley — I guess one way of taking your question is this: should I prefer people be openly bigoted, so at least I can deal with their bigotry head on, rather than people who are quietly bigoted, who smile to my face while they work against me out of view?
And yes, the former is preferable, since we can see them. That latter is far worse.
I need the law to address both forms of bigotry.Report
@james-hanley
Doesn’t bigotry itself distorts the market? With bigotry/discrimination, wouldn’t we have imperfect information, since voices who might participate in the market are filtered out?Report
zic,
wouldn’t we have imperfect information,
Not to speak for James but I think he’s saying that allowing (tolerating?) people’s pubic expressions of bigotry in (eg) housing practices is closer to the ideal of perfect information than driving that expression underground. He’s not making any normative claims about practices or even idealized conceptions of markets, it seems to me.
I think he’s just pointing out that if one consideration in play here is efficiency in navigating the rental market, then landlord’s expressing their criteria publicly could be viewed as a beneficial practice. (I think it’s a valid point, myself.)Report
@zic,
No. Bigotry is a form of discrimination in its broad sense. We’re all discriminating in some ways in our market choices. That’s not a distortion of the market; it is the market. And minority voices get filtered out all the time because there’s not either not enough demand for what they are supplying or not enough supply for what they are demanding.
That’s not a big deal when it means Dole stops selling the orange-banana juice I liked so much, but it is a big deal when it means someone who’s black, gay, Muslim, etc. can’t rent an apartment. But it is still what the market is, not a distorton of the market.Report
@veronica-dire
Yes, that’s a fair way of putting my question. I was focusing purely on search efficiency, but obviously it’s not fully separable from the question of how one feels/is affected by the different ways bigotry gets expressed.Report
It also seems to me that if I am considering leasing out my room so that people can rent it (but wanting only People of a Certain Type) and finding out that, no, I will have to rent it out to any/everybody without discriminating that it’s as likely (if not more likely) to result in me saying “you know what, I don’t need the hassle” (and taking the room off the market) as me having a moment of clarity and saying “you know what, I could handle some Mormons living in there.”
Or, I suppose, just renting it out vaguely under the table to my sister’s husband’s friend’s nephew who needs a place and I know that he’s not a Mormon so I won’t have to worry about Mormon crap going on in my spare apartment.Report
@stillwater and @james-hanley
I understand that; landlord’s who prefer not to rent to families with children, for instance, would save time-strapped parents looking for an apartment a lot of time if they could so advertise.
But that the supply side of the market, too; and only part of the information that needs to be revealed for the market to function freely. The other side is that families with children are looking for places to rent; and their preferences when it comes to those rental properties.
Another way of understanding my point would be Brandon’s suggestion that women are more likely to support intervening in the economy in someway; suggesting that women prefer economic stability over perfect economic freedom. That it’s perceived as outside the market only stems from the fact that women were excluded from fully participating in the economy; it’s not, in fact, a distortion of the market, it’s a revelation of market preferences when both men and women are allowed to fully engage.
An astute market watcher would, then, see that as an opportunity. Are there insurances or other products that could help smooth out market bounces that women would prefer to purchase? And would offering women these products diminish their preference to intervene?
Viewing this from any other perspective smacks of looking at the market as entrenched privilege for those already in the market, not as an economic freedom for all people to participate in the market.
And I don’t think availability for a specific product is a good analogy in any way. You have know way of knowing if the product’s no longer produced by one company, unavailable because a specific supplier dropped the product, or if there were other problems with getting the product to market. This is a demand problem, presuming all potential customers of that product have been revealed. It in now way compares to excluding groups from participating in the market; this hides their market choices from the market.Report
zic,
You wrote about Brandon’s comments about women’s suffrage upthread:
That it’s perceived as outside the market only stems from the fact that women were excluded from fully participating in the economy; it’s not, in fact, a distortion of the market, it’s a revelation of market preferences when both men and women are allowed to fully engage.
I don’t think that’s what Brandon was suggesting up there. He was arguing that extending the franchise to women led to in increase in government intervention into the economy. Granted, your argument may be (and I think is) that government intervention into the economy was warranted to fully incorporate women into the economy.
Those are pretty deep issues, I think, so deep that where one stands on it sorta defines whether that person identifies as a Liberal or as a Libertarian (or some squishy hybrid). But I agree with James that discrimination (in the non-political sense of that term) is a constitutive part of our conception of markets and market activities. Recognizing that fact (supposing we do) doesn’t entail any normative claims about the role of government one way or the other, it seems to me. Those normative claims will rely on all the standard considerations: efficacy, goals, consequentialism, etc.Report
@james-hanley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States
If true, 15.4 percent of SF was LGBT in 2006Report
@stillwater
First, I don’t think you have ‘free markets’ unless you have freedom to participate in markets. That this might require government intervention is part of the second point; you don’t have free markets in the absence of governments to help establish a set of functional rules for those markets; government can both distort markets and be the check on the vendor with a thumb on the scale; but in general, government is the way we create a structure for enforceable contracts, it’s where the rule of law that’s the foundation of free markets stems.
So no, that’s not what I’m suggesting at all; though I agree with it.
What I’m suggesting is exactly what I said: excluding people from the markets is itself a market distortion and a method of hiding information that should be revealed to the market from the market.
This very thing is being demonstrated in my home state right now with health insurance. Maine didn’t have many companies offer insurance; the perception is that we’re too old, too sick to be a good market. Yet there are so many people who have been excluded from the health-insurance market that there was (believe it or not) a market completely hidden from the insurers: there’s so much demand for insurance that the companies who offer it are having to scramble to get the infrastructure together to meet the demand; the insurers do not have enough staff to handle customer enrollment, questions, or to process people into their systems. And this is purely because before ACA, large numbers of people were priced out of the system; they don’t have year-round work, they have seasonal work, and move from job to job through the year (often the same jobs year after year, however). They could not afford the individual premiums, and so went without insurance; effectively the bigotry against seasonal/self employment within the system hid this information from the marketplace.Report
But I wasn’t making that argument myself. I was just thinking of whether it’s worse to see lots of ads saying “no gays allowed” or to get repeatedly denied apartments after interviewing for them, and/or getting kicked out when the landlord belatedly realized the tenant’s homosexuality.
Well if you added sexual orientation and gender non-comfority to civil rights law, this would not be an issue.
I think it is better to have the fair housing law and then after discrimination that you can legally go after. A sword and shield is better than being without armor.Report
@zic,
Nothing’s stopping the demand side from expressing their preferences. You’re not actually talking about that information bring out there; yiu’re talking about their demand being met. Demand not being met is not necessarily about lack of information, nor is it necessarily a distortion of the market.
And I don’t think availability for a specific product is a good analogy in any way.
It’s a perfect analogy, as long as we’re being descriptive of the market, which is what your comment about infirmation was. But I think you’re actually mixing up a normative issue with a purely descriptive one. You’re caring about the person who can’t get an apartment, which is fine but has no bearing on whether the market is working efficiently.Report
You’re caring about the person who can’t get an apartment, which is fine but has no bearing on whether the market is working efficiently.
That’s absolutely the silliest thing I’ve read today, and it’s absolutely not what I’m saying or caring about. I’m am suggesting that a market that excludes participants hides market information from itself. That has nothing to do with the preferences of a person within the market. I’ve given several examples of actual failures of markets to perceive opportunities because potential customers were hidden from the marketplace.
Again, I challenge the notion that you can have a free market if you do not have free participation in the market. That’s not difficult; and to suggest excluding people from participating in the market is part of a free market. . . I don’t know. It means the dudes with the keys get to decide; and that is not a free market.Report
First, I don’t think you have ‘free markets’ unless you have freedom to participate in markets.
Well, now we’re playing word games. “Free” markets has traditionally meant minimal legal constraints on what can be bought and sold, at what price, and by whom. (It allows for legal constraints on fraud, theft, and force.). And “freedom to participate” has meant no legal restriction on your participation. It has not meant that other market participants have to agree to transact with you, whether their refusal is because you lack money or are just despised for some reason. It’s a negative liberty, not a positive one.
So Jim Crow laws that, say, prohibited a business from treating black customers the same as whites is not a free market situation.
Racist business owners refusing to deal with black customers? That’s free market.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, nor does it mean that we can’t make a rule against it. It means we have a clash of values and have to choose which value trumps the other.
But redefining “free market” for the convenience of obscuring that clash of values? I’d rather we just be more bluntly honest that free markets–while an awesome thing we should value highly–don’t achieve all our values. I really think the way you’re using the term is politically expedient, and I have to push back hard.Report
I’m am suggesting that a market that excludes participants hides market information from itself.
You really think there are landlords who don’t know that there are gays, blacks, single-parents, etc. who want to rent apartments, eat in their restaurants, teach in their schools, etc? The problem is actually quite different: they know all too well that the demand/ supply is there, and they’re saying “I’ll forgoe that source of demand/supply even if it costs me.”
The idea that someone might run an ad saying “no queers” and that shows a lack of information about queer demand for apartments because it keeps the queer person from applying for that apartment makes no sense.Report
@zic, @james-hanley :
Bigotry shapes the market (I hesitate to use “distorts” because that’s a loaded word), but it doesn’t shape the market in the way zic describes.
The market caters to the preferences expressed by market actors. But those preferences are in no way fixed. The expression of a certain preference in some actors can create or refine that presence in other actors.
So, for example, the fact that my mother watches Downton Abbey and expresses her enjoyment of same increases the likelihood that my Aunts watch Downton Abbey and express their enjoyment as well.
Of course, Downton Abbey is a benign example. It’s a lot more worrisome when we’re talking about the fact that my neighbor makes it known he won’t rent his room to an Arab, and what effect that might have on a neighborhood.Report
@alan-scott,
Agreed. Unfortunately not all preferences are as benign as (I presume) Downton Abbey (to be).Report
@james-hanley
I don’t know if you’ve been reading Russell’s and Rose’s Downton posts, but they’re a great read, but you probably have to watch the show in order to get the jokes.
One reason–for me, the main reason–their posts are a great read is because they touch on something fundamental about the show: it’s so bad, it’s good. It’s got the plot contrivances of a soap opera, the cliches of a historical drama written for a modern audience, and the prestige of a PBS show where the actors all speak with British accents.
I know that’s a tangent no one wants to get into so late in the thread. But there you go.Report
Well, I expect you to push back hard. I cannot learn anything if you don’t, (and neither can you.)
But what you’re saying simple doesn’t make sense to me. At all. And I’m not trying to play word games.
First: “Free” markets has traditionally meant minimal legal constraints on what can be bought and sold, at what price, and by whom.
is totally at odds with this:
“freedom to participate” has meant no legal restriction on your participation.
Because what I’m talking about here is actual social/legal constraints that fetter people from participating. We don’t even get to this; when we say, for instance, people with green hair cannot rent houses on the south side of the street, we’ve essentially demolished the market for people with red hair who want to rent on the south side of the street. We never get to if a specific landlord wants to rent to a specific person with red hair. We never get here:
It has not meant that other market participants have to agree to transact with you, whether their refusal is because you lack money or are just despised for some reason.
It’s a negative liberty, not a positive one? It’s a market distortion.Report
/mangled that due to hunger; but I think (hope) what I meant shows; there’s a difference between an individual person not wanting to do business with a minority group then sanctioned discrimination of that group that fetters members access to the markets. If that access is fettered, it is not a free market.Report
First: “Free” markets has traditionally meant minimal legal constraints on what can be bought and sold, at what price, and by whom.
is totally at odds with this:
“freedom to participate” has meant no legal restriction on your participation.
Those are actually the same thing, not even remotely att odds.
what I’m talking about here is actual social/legal constraints that fetter people from participating.
Then you shouldn’t be debating with me because I’ve been clear that I’m not talking about legal restrictions, but individual free choice in markets. Period.
“It has not meant that other market participants have to agree to transact with you, whether their refusal is because you lack money or are just despised for some reason.”
It’s a negative liberty, not a positive one? It’s a market distortion.
No, you are flatly dead wrong. Markets are about individual choice–only if the choices of the seller and the purchaser coordinate is there a transaction. Failures to transact because we don’t agree on the terms are normal market outcomes, not distortions.
Turn this around. You, as a consumer looking for a place to eat, see a restaurant that serves good food but is called “Proud Bigot’s BBQ.” If you choose not to eat there because you despise bigots, is that a market distortion? By what you said in the quoted section it would be. But that’s nonsense–it’s just you expressing your preferences.Report
@james-hanley — I’ve seen this discussed before, and the problem is not the isolated case of John the Bigot running his restaurant poorly. Instead, it is when John the Bigot is the face of a general community, and in fact Sally the Open Minded cannot run her shop because most everyone with money is shopping with John.
Not every social force is encoded into law. And this is often downplayed by libertarians, who want to see everything as free exchange by decent, courageous individuals.
I know most libertarian types (at least on this site) are smart enough to know that is false. But the narrative still underlies much of their thinking, as far as I can see. Using the force of law to force John the Bigot to compete on the same field as Sally the Open Minded, even if the local community would rather keep out the blacks and queers.
This is not a new conversation.Report
@veronica-dire
the problem is not the isolated case of John the Bigot running his restaurant poorly. Instead, it is when John the Bigot is the face of a general community, and in fact Sally the Open Minded cannot run her shop because most everyone with money is shopping with John.
I didn’t say it’s not a problem. I said it is a free market, and not a distorted one. If nobody likes Sally enough to shop at her store, whetherit’s because she never bathed, or barks like a dog at every customer who comed in, or is too open-minded, it’s just the market at work. I’m not saying it’s good, just that it’s incorrect to call it a distortion of the market.
libertarians, who want to see everything as free exchange by decent, courageous individuals.
There’s that old liberal mythology about libertarians. In fact libertarians tend to think people aren’t so nice and trustworthy, and that’s why we don’t want to give them the type of government power liberals would give them. I can walk away from a business that screws me over and not do business with them again; it’s a lot harder to walk away from your government if it screws you over.
As long as you persist in seeing libertarians as having a naively optimistic view of human nature, you’ll not understand where we’re coming from.
Using the force of law to force John the Bigot to compete on the same field as Sally the Open Minded, even if the local community would rather keep out the blacks and queers.
Given your example, how would you make this happen? Force people to spend a dollar at Sally’s for every dollar they spend at the bigot’s? It’s a lot easier to mandate non-discrimination among sellers than it is to mandate it among buyers.Report
@james-hanley — I think political positions are built from narratives, and on top of that people layer rationalization. So I do understand that (the better) libertarians can articulate human nature. I just don’t think they’ve fully baked these ideas into their political pie.
I also build my politics from sub-rational narratives. And thus, having lived a different life, I arrive at different conclusions. (Which is why I so often tell stories.)
We require John the Bigot to serve people he does not like. If his store is hostile to minorities or queers, we fine him, even shut him down. Then folks will have to shop with Sally. Or do without.
Whatever it takes to give me and mine and equal shake.Report
I know most libertarian types (at least on this site) are smart enough to know that is false. But the narrative still underlies much of their thinking, as far as I can see.
You don’t see very far.Report
There’s a leap being made that I don’t understand how or why.
We are granting that the community is bigoted and that’s why we need intervention… why are we assuming that the government is not equally bigoted (if not more so)?Report
We are granting that the community is bigoted and that’s why we need intervention… why are we assuming that the government is not equally bigoted (if not more so)?
Because the government doesn’t represent bigots…oh, wait.
Against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, we need to keep in mind that Congress ran a segregated public school system in D.C., funded studies that purposely denied treatments to African-Americans with syphilis, systematically discriminated against African-American farmers by denying them agricultural loans, and for many decades stole Native-American children from their homes to be fostered with white parents.Report
@jaybird — Well, this drifts into big “theories of government” issues. Which is important, but can also distract.
That said, we can look to actual formation of anti-bigotry laws, how they interact with our constitution, the courts, the states, the Federal government, on and on.
We have good examples from the civil rights struggle, what strategies worked, where they succeeded, where they fell short. It’s messy, but there is a template. And do not forget the “fierce urgency of now.” There is a trans woman in Alabama (or wherever), who for many reasons cannot change location, and who deserves her freedom. She deserves it today, not when the bigots get around to opening their hearts.
One thing I notice, bigots tend to cluster, but the oppressed people who live in those areas deserve their freedom the same as I. So we can look at democratic changes in broad culture to help those unfortunate enough to live in bigoted areas. See The Civil Rights Act. Watch the national guard desegregate schools.
Yes, it is ugly. But who are the ugly ones?
Also, people can sometimes follow their better angels when voting — sometimes! — as can our representatives. They can vote for the better even if they are not quite convinced in the day to day.
And we can hope the constitution and courts make up for the slack.Report
But who are the ugly ones?
The government social workers who followed government policy and stole Native-American kids away from their families.Report
If the dispute here has devolved to “Who is the bad guy and who is the good guy: government vs. the masses” the answer is neither or both. Each do some good and some bad while going against the power of the other, and an attempt to keep score will fail.
The problem that SB1062 and pieces of legislation like it presents for libertarianism is clear. Libertarian philosophy implies that the government should not stop bigots from not hiring or not serving people on the basis of sexual orientation, skin color, etc.
One way to put this is in the language of positive and negative rights. I have a negative right to hire whom I will or serve whom I will without being coerced (read enslaved) by the government. But employees and customers do not have a positive right to be served or equally considered for employment by me (or by anyone).
Thus, a libertarian should say, on pain of contradiction of her own principles of justice, that laws like SB1062 are fine in principle, because the right to discriminate is a right that should be enshrined in law. However, SB1062 is oddly written and perhaps unnecessary in AZ, so it can be nitpicked on various grounds, even by those who believe in the right to discriminate and who deny the right to equal treatment by private employers across race, sexual orientation, and gender.Report
If the dispute here has devolved to “Who is the bad guy and who is the good guy: government vs. the masses” the answer is neither or both. Each do some good and some bad while going against the power of the other, and an attempt to keep score will fail.
Exactly. Which is why knee-jerk liberal responses that assume the goodness of government are as foolish as knee-jerk libertarian responses that assume markets never fail.Report
Thus, a libertarian should say, on pain of contradiction of her own principles of justice, that laws like SB1062 are fine in principle, because the right to discriminate is a right that should be enshrined in law.
Wrong. A libertarian can say that, but there is no “should” in it. You once again depend on the concept that libertarians necessarily have a strictly inflexible set of principles that do not allow for the possibility of conflicts among them. As always, you are imposing your own beliefs about what libertarianism must be, while ignoring the variety within the set of people who call themselves libertarian.Report
@james-hanley — If your point is that government sometimes gets it wrong, I will surely agree. I do not argue for the purity of “government,” not even close. We are not perfectible.
I say this: anti-bigotry laws are good, because they diminish the effects of bigotry. I want the government to pass anti-bigotry laws. I do not want them to pass pro-bigotry laws. I want the courts to step in when the legislature gets it wrong. I think the Civil Rights Act was a positive good. I think much of what happened regarding Native Americans was a terrible injustice, as was the internment of Japanese Americans. On and on.
Queer people need to rent apartments the same as everyone else, likewise we use restaurants, public restrooms, play sports. In a civil society, I am fine requiring landlords and others who provide public accommodation to treat queers equally. And Native Americans. And blacks. On and on.
Government is location of struggle, one that I will use to my full ability to help the lives of the oppressed.
And yes, I know that others are trying to do the opposite.Report
James,
So a libertarian can believe in a right to free healthcare paid for by progressive taxation, a right to a paid-for retirement, a right not to be discriminated against by private employers, a right to a free post-secondary education paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy, a right to a basic income, a right to receive a minimum wage, on and on.
Thus, on your account, libertarian principles of justice are consistent with the most left wing, redistributionist policies. Sign me up for that libertarianism. Sadly, I think it doesn’t exist. Rather, when libertarian principles conflict with clear ethical intuition (like the wrongness of private employer discrimination) libertarians like to say that the strong principles that they use to rule redistribution as unjust actually aren’t so strong. But if they weren’t so strong, then redistribution couldn’t be shown to be unjust.
If it is okay to coerce people into different hiring practices, what other kinds of coercion are justifiable?Report
Also, I don’t expect a friendly answer or a conversation on this from you.Report
Thus, a libertarian should say, on pain of contradiction of her own principles of justice, that laws like SB1062 are fine in principle, because the right to discriminate is a right that should be enshrined in law. However, SB1062 is oddly written and perhaps unnecessary in AZ, so it can be nitpicked on various grounds, even by those who believe in the right to discriminate and who deny the right to equal treatment by private employers across race, sexual orientation, and gender.
I know several libertarians, myself included, that opposed SB 1062 on the basis that if we’re going to have anti-discrimination laws on the books, they should apply as equally to sexual orientation as they do to race, gender, religion, etc.
SB 1062 wasn’t about libertarian principles and watching people that have spent the last 10 years or so in the SSM fight using the state to impose their morality in law only to turn around here and claim they were invoking “live and let live” made me sick like you wouldn’t believe.
To be fair, I slugged it out with some libertarians on this issue, but it didn’t impugn libertarianism as much as it did the crude and vulgar way in which some libertarians approached this issue.
If you want to call that the pain of contradiction, so be it. I’m already considered a faux-libertarian so it’s not like there’s anything you can say that hasn’t already been said. 😉Report
Also, I don’t expect a friendly answer or a conversation on this from you.
That’s because he calls you on it every time you put words into other people’s mouths.
My advice – if you don’t expect something, don’t engage and back off. I’m less patient about this kind of stuff than he is. FYI.Report
Veronica,
I favor anti over pro bigotry laws, too. But there are some real problems with your arguments when we dig below the surface.
The first is that looking to government is neither necessarily the first place we should look or the most effective. Sometimes it is, but not reliably. Large corporations gave gay partner benefits lbefore most states did. In AZ it was the business community that probably tipped the balance against SB 1062. Sometimes–nit akways–the market actually is better for minorities.
Second, your example about the bigoted shop owner is deeply flawed. The government won’t just shut him down so that customers have no choice but to shop ar open-minded Sally’s. They’ll make laws saying he can’t discriminate against minorities. But that can’t stop him from acting hostiley toward minorities in ways that are hard to proveas a matter of law. And if people in the town ate all bigots, they’ll still shop at his store because they like the bigot more than the open-minded person.
I’m not arguing against an anti-bigotry law here, understand. I’m arguing against over-assuming the effectiveness of such a law. Anytime someone is tempted to think a particular law will solve a big problem, they should ponder the 55 mph speed limit and prohibition.
In the long run, the most important factor is social change, not legal change. And while laws play some role in changing cultural beliefs, those beliefs play a far larger role in shaping the laws.Report
So a libertarian can believe in a right to free healthcare paid for by progressive taxation, a right to a paid-for retirement, a right not to be discriminated against by private employers, a right to a free post-secondary education paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy, a right to a basic income, a right to receive a minimum wage, on and on.
Yeah, and they can believe in full socialization of the means of production. It’s almost as though a guy as well-read in philosophy as you had never heard of the fallacy of the excluded middle, the way you posit an all-or-none choice.
Thus, on your account, libertarian principles of justice are consistent with the most left wing, redistributionist policies.
As Dave said, you have a ridiculous habit of putting words in other people’s mouths. Of course you don’t expect a friendly response–I suspect you know exactly how dishonest your interpretation is,
when libertarian principles conflict with clear ethical intuition (like the wrongness of private employer discrimination) libertarians like to say that the strong principles that they use to rule redistribution as unjust actually aren’t so strong. But if they weren’t so strong, then redistribution couldn’t be shown to be unjust.
There you go again with your all or nothing assumptions; no room for a middle ground, one principle either always trumps or us always trumped, right? Do you not think a line can be drawn at least somewhere between not allowing private discrimination that locks some people out of markets and redistributing to the point that able bodied people opt out of working?
Do you really think that?
But you favor redustribution, so why don’t you favor it absolutely, so that each person is precisely as well off as every other? Or do you only allow some flexibility to your own camp?
If it is okay to coerce people into different hiring practices, what other kinds of coercion are justifiable?
I could ask a left/liberal guy like you the same question?
Look, in a nutshell, you’re making a couple of basic errors. First, you’re making what is effectively a slippery-slope argument (if you allow laws against private discrimination you end up with a right to free healthcare!), which produces the all-or-nothing false dichotomy you keep coming back to. Second, you seem persuaded that you can properly analyze libertarianism without having to listen seriously to what actual self-identified libertarians actually say, or else you engage in confirmation bias by only listening to the extremist ones who reinforce your pre-conceived beliefs.Report
@jaybird , the scenario you describe would fall under the Mrs. Murphy exceptions. You’d be free to rent the room using whatever discriminatory method you want. You just aren’t allowed to put “No Mormons” in the advertisement.Report
True enough… but it seems to me that there is an undercurrent of “it’s bad that such bigotry is allowed to stand” and while, of course, bigotry is *BAD*, it also seems to me that the unintended consequences of not allowing such bigotry to stand would result in more people competing for apartments rather than fewer (and even a black/grey market when demand is high enough) and that’s going to end up with women/minorities hardest hit again.Report
whoops, that was supposed to be threaded into the above discussion.
In any case, when you discuss renting under the table to your sister’s husband’s whatever who you know is not a Mormon, that sounds like a market success. You’ve prioritized sharing a room with someone you have a connection to over the risk of letting a stranger into your home. Someone else might decide that they could get more money (or simply see less of their brother in law) by renting to a stranger, and choose that option instead.Report
@james-hanley — (Down here; it is getting to be a free-for-all up there.)
Here is the thing, life is lived on the margins. And yes, we will never completely fix the bigot. But I don’t care about the bigot, and if it is slightly more difficult for that person to hurt some trans woman — for example if he is legally required to serve her, and thus she spends an hour in a warm restaurant rather than outside, and gets a meal in her belly when the next restaurant is five blocks away, walked through a bad area where just last week her friend Shelly got knifed — this is her world — then I want her to get that meal.
In her neighborhood there are three buildings she could afford to move into. All are large, multi-tenant apartment buildings. (This isn’t a “share the kitchen” situation.) In one of them her rapist lives. This is her world! Another is far from the subway she depends on. The last, and her best choice, won’t rent to queers.
She decides to live in the building with her rapist. That walk to and from the subway each day is worth more than her peace of mind. Until it gets too much.
She is poor, has little understanding of the system. But a social worker becomes aware. He informs others. Advocates for the queer community get a sniff. A lawyer reviews the case.
Reality: it is very unlikely that landlord will ever have to face his deeds. The system has too much inertia. The poor have too little power. Lawyers who advocate for social justice are overworked.
But maybe. Sometimes. And when a lawyer does step up, I want the law on their side.Report
Again, I was not advocating against such laws. In fact this discussion began with me not talking about kaw at all, just about whether private discrimination is a free market outcome or a market distortion. At every step of our conversation you’ve appeared to argue against something I wasn’t talking about. It’s not that what you’re saying os wrong: it’s that you keep rebutting points points I haven’t made.Report