But I don’t think that’s what you meant. You oppose welfare. Fine. But you ought to just say that.
That's fine, too, at least in terms of describing one of the main points where we part company with the left. Notice how that still sounds less incontrovertibly evil than what Erik originally said?
Speaking of strawmen, it'd be just swell if people would read my comments before responding to them.
I didn't say that no one will ever discriminate when there's an economic cost to doing so. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that some people would, but that fewer would do so under these circumstances than under circumstances where there's no personal cost associated with acting on bigotry, and that we therefore have good reason to believe (based on the tendency of people not to support racial discrimination even when they can do so costlessly) that the prevalence of discrimination would not be enough to cause serious hardship for racial minorities.
Turns out "smarmy" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. "Snide" would be better.
I'll add, also, that I have an Indian friend (immigrated at seven, no accent) who looks black enough that he's often mistaken for such, even by actual black people. And he's an even bigger skeptic of this stuff than I am.
Also, it would be just as convenient for me to be in favor of anti-discrimination laws. As someone who does not own a business and does not plan to, I have no personal exposure to unwarranted EEOC investigations or discrimination lawsuits. I have no personal stake in the issue either way.
I don't think you understood the comment. I don't mean that there aren't people who would discriminate if given a chance. I'm sure there are. What I mean is that it wouldn't be nearly common enough to create the sort of nightmare scenario posited where it would be extremely difficult for black people to find jobs, rent apartments, eat out, etc.
It seems to me that there's some bait-and-switch going on. I say that I oppose anti-discrimination law, and you guys say, "That's horrible! If we didn't have anti-discrimination laws, minorities wouldn't be able to find jobs or places to live!" I say I find that implausible---that it wouldn't be nearly that common---and you point to evidence that there would be some discrimination, which doesn't in any way contradict what I'm saying.
Consider homosexuals, who are not protected by laws against private discrimination. There's some discrimination against them, but not enough to create the nightmare scenario. In fact, their primary problems are not commercial discrimination, but rather government discrimination and social disapproval, neither of which laws against private discrimination will do anything to address.
This is predicted by the theory of rational irrationality. People are more strongly inclined to act on bigotry when they incur no personal cost for doing so. It's very easy to vote for bigoted policies, because it's anonymous and takes virtually no effort. It's much harder to act on your bigotry when it means passing up the opportunity to make money. The widespread popularity of anti-discrimination law is itself evidence against its necessity.
Yeah, but they don't really act like C pointers. You can't access their numerical values or assign arbitrary ones. They can never point to uninitialized memory, you can't increment them to iterate through an array, you can't substract them to find the offset of an element in an array, etc.
Java references are kind of like pointers, but safer, less powerful, and less confusing.
You really think people hire illegal “aliens” (nice turn of phrase there, tells me something about you) because they are anti-racists and anti-discrimination?
No, not at all. They do it because there's money in it. The point is that even if they are racist, they're not racist enough to pass up a chance to make money hiring people in the face of strong social disapproval.
And no, it really doesn't tell you anything about me. As long as people are coming to work and make a real contribution to our economy, I don't care whether they have the government's stamp of approval.
I think probably the better thing to do here would have been to post some counterargument, but if smarmy innuendo is the the best you can do, I guess that's cool, too.
My primary objection to antidiscrimination law is the collateral damage. It's not just about the right to be a bigot. It's about the right not to have your hiring, firing, and promotion decisions second-guessed by the federal government just because some disgruntled employee (or would-be employee) complains to the EEOC. Even if the employer wins the case, there's a real cost to this, and the less common actual discrimination is, the worse the cost-benefit analysis comes out.
The worst part is that the employee doesn't even have to be willfully misrepresenting the case for this to be a problem. I think at some point or another almost all of us have felt as though we've been treated unfairly by an actual or prospective employer, often for no obvious reason. As a white man, I have to chalk it up to one of the following:
1. I'm wrong.
2. The other guy's wrong, but really thinks he's right.
3. The other guy's a jerk.
But if you're a member of a protected class, discrimination becomes an appealing alternative, especially as compared to 1. Nobody wants to think it's his own fault he got fired. And if you've been told your whole life to expect to be discriminated against, you're naturally going to attribute people treating you unfairly for no apparent reason as discrimination.
So you end up with a system where even well-meaning people can cause problems, to say nothing of what a genuinely malicious person could do.
If racial discrimination is a major problem that seriously impedes racial minorities' ability to live normal lives, then maybe it's worth the cost. But it's hard to buy that in the face of, e.g., widespread hiring of illegal aliens in violation of federal law. And the fact that anti-discrimination laws are so popular that "Libertarians oppose anti-discrimination laws!" full stop, is actually an effective rhetorical move.
I really do believe that nowadays anti-discrimination law is primarily symbolic. It's about making sure that no one is allowed to get away with discrimination, regardless of the magnitude of the impact.
You know, I never really got the logic here. First, there's no reason to believe that that's going to be the case in most places. And if it is the case in a few specific towns, why would anyone want to live in a town where nobody will do business with you unless compelled by law?
You're going to walk into a restaurant managed by someone who wouldn't serve you if the federal government didn't force him, order food, wait for him to go into the back room and prepare it out of your sight, and then you're going to eat it? On a regular basis?
Nobody needs the federal government to step in and force every firm in town to do business with him. Anyone who think he needs that really needs to move to a town that isn't full of bigots.
Does the intention matter? They're giving an in-kind discount that people with certain religious and/or ideological convictions can't take advantage of.
That's disparate impact, right? Same way employers can't use IQ testing, even if their intention is to hire smart people, because blacks and Hispanic test lower on average than whites and Asians on IQ tests.
It's also worth noting that libertarians aren't opposed to democratic decisionmaking when it comes to things that we regard as legitimately within the public sphere. No one individual can claim ownership rights over the army, for example, so what exactly we should do with the army can legitimately be considered a matter to be decided democratically. Ditto the police.
Oh. Wait. Those are controlled democratically, with pretty lousy results. Hey! I have an idea! Let's take the same decisionmaking process that produced those results, and apply it to other things. Things that don't have to be controlled democratically, because there are market alternatives.
Actually, scratch that. That's your idea, not mine.
Libertarian want to prevent people (via coercive state-sanctioned force) from using government to resolve pressing public policy issues which libertarians disagree with.
You're still talking in vague generalities. And in doing so you make libertarianism sound much more sinister than it would if you were to be more specific: Libertarians want to stop people from forcibly taking money from certain groups of people and redistributing it to other groups of people, even if they do so through a democratic decision process. There are others, of course, but that's the key point of contention with the left.
Now, you can argue that that's a bad thing, and that people should be allowed to do that. But when you start talking about coercively squelching democracy, you're letting emotion-laden buzzwords do the heavy lifting instead of actual arguments.
Whether that's just a rhetorical ploy, or actually representative of your thoughts on the matter, I decline to speculate.
I get that this is more of a burden for people who actually take a non-Christian religions seriously. I just don't think that the government should force other people to cater to their sensitivities.
By the way, what about giving away meat with an oil change? This isn't purely hypothetical; Les Schwab Tires actually does an annual promotion where they throw in some steaks with the purchase of four tires.
Clearly this discriminates against people who don't eat beef, like vegetarians and Hindus. Is there a lawsuit here? Should there be? What if it were pork?
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't go so far as it to say it's "okay," but I wouldn't go so far in the other direction as to say that it's any of the government's business.
The talking point for justifying antidiscrimination law is that without it racial minorities would be unable to find employment. Once you acknowledge that this is not the case---that it's more about symbolism and making sure that nobody gets away with discriminating---it becomes much harder to justify the collateral damage.
And yeah, I get that your preferred way of doing things doesn’t work as well if you can’t compel the golden geese to participate. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
This strikes me as deeply confused. You're trying to draw a false parallel between things like murder and robbery on the one hand, and the defense of individual rights on the other. Yes, technically if you announce plans to go out and murder somebody, and I forcibly restrain you, that's coercion. But do you really not get the distriction between initiatory coercion on the one hand, and coercion for the sake of preventing initiatory coercion on the other?
Yet for all that, the antipathy to democracy – which goes well beyond Hayek’s preferred “liberal dictatorship” – reveals the fundamental internal conflict within libertarianism: in order for it to exist as a model for society, democracy must be snuffed out through coercion.
Only in the same sense in which murder and theft are snuffed out through coercion.
I think you're confusing things here through ambiguous language. "Democracy" is a vague, nebulous term that doesn't really refer to any specific actions. To say that democracy must be snuffed out through coercion is well-nigh meaningless. Be more specific. What exactly is it that you think that libertarians want to force people to do?
And while libertarians may say they don’t want to live in my welfare state either, at least I can say “Then go vote against it.” In Libertopia no such option would exist.
This just isn't true. If you wanted to set up a voluntary welfare state, you could. People would sign up, and you'd collect a monthly fee based on income or consumption, or whatever you want, and you'd pay out benefits.
But under the current system, those of us who oppose the welfare state don't have the ability to opt out. Which is why the excerpt above is not only wrong, but completely backwards. You want to compel everyone to participate in your schemes, whereas we're happy to let people opt in or out as they see fit.
And yeah, I get that your preferred way of doing things doesn't work as well if you can't compel the golden geese to participate. But that's kind of the point, isn't it?
But if he's not paying union wages with double overtime and offering first-dollar medical and dental coverage, he might as well be locking you in a cage.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The case for democracy”
But I don’t think that’s what you meant. You oppose welfare. Fine. But you ought to just say that.
That's fine, too, at least in terms of describing one of the main points where we part company with the left. Notice how that still sounds less incontrovertibly evil than what Erik originally said?
On “For God So Loveth Ye That His Servant In Plano, Texas Doth Giveth Ye An Affordable Oil Change”
Speaking of strawmen, it'd be just swell if people would read my comments before responding to them.
I didn't say that no one will ever discriminate when there's an economic cost to doing so. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that some people would, but that fewer would do so under these circumstances than under circumstances where there's no personal cost associated with acting on bigotry, and that we therefore have good reason to believe (based on the tendency of people not to support racial discrimination even when they can do so costlessly) that the prevalence of discrimination would not be enough to cause serious hardship for racial minorities.
"
Turns out "smarmy" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. "Snide" would be better.
I'll add, also, that I have an Indian friend (immigrated at seven, no accent) who looks black enough that he's often mistaken for such, even by actual black people. And he's an even bigger skeptic of this stuff than I am.
Also, it would be just as convenient for me to be in favor of anti-discrimination laws. As someone who does not own a business and does not plan to, I have no personal exposure to unwarranted EEOC investigations or discrimination lawsuits. I have no personal stake in the issue either way.
"
I don't think you understood the comment. I don't mean that there aren't people who would discriminate if given a chance. I'm sure there are. What I mean is that it wouldn't be nearly common enough to create the sort of nightmare scenario posited where it would be extremely difficult for black people to find jobs, rent apartments, eat out, etc.
It seems to me that there's some bait-and-switch going on. I say that I oppose anti-discrimination law, and you guys say, "That's horrible! If we didn't have anti-discrimination laws, minorities wouldn't be able to find jobs or places to live!" I say I find that implausible---that it wouldn't be nearly that common---and you point to evidence that there would be some discrimination, which doesn't in any way contradict what I'm saying.
Consider homosexuals, who are not protected by laws against private discrimination. There's some discrimination against them, but not enough to create the nightmare scenario. In fact, their primary problems are not commercial discrimination, but rather government discrimination and social disapproval, neither of which laws against private discrimination will do anything to address.
This is predicted by the theory of rational irrationality. People are more strongly inclined to act on bigotry when they incur no personal cost for doing so. It's very easy to vote for bigoted policies, because it's anonymous and takes virtually no effort. It's much harder to act on your bigotry when it means passing up the opportunity to make money. The widespread popularity of anti-discrimination law is itself evidence against its necessity.
"
Yeah, but they don't really act like C pointers. You can't access their numerical values or assign arbitrary ones. They can never point to uninitialized memory, you can't increment them to iterate through an array, you can't substract them to find the offset of an element in an array, etc.
Java references are kind of like pointers, but safer, less powerful, and less confusing.
"
You really think people hire illegal “aliens” (nice turn of phrase there, tells me something about you) because they are anti-racists and anti-discrimination?
No, not at all. They do it because there's money in it. The point is that even if they are racist, they're not racist enough to pass up a chance to make money hiring people in the face of strong social disapproval.
And no, it really doesn't tell you anything about me. As long as people are coming to work and make a real contribution to our economy, I don't care whether they have the government's stamp of approval.
"
I think probably the better thing to do here would have been to post some counterargument, but if smarmy innuendo is the the best you can do, I guess that's cool, too.
"
My primary objection to antidiscrimination law is the collateral damage. It's not just about the right to be a bigot. It's about the right not to have your hiring, firing, and promotion decisions second-guessed by the federal government just because some disgruntled employee (or would-be employee) complains to the EEOC. Even if the employer wins the case, there's a real cost to this, and the less common actual discrimination is, the worse the cost-benefit analysis comes out.
The worst part is that the employee doesn't even have to be willfully misrepresenting the case for this to be a problem. I think at some point or another almost all of us have felt as though we've been treated unfairly by an actual or prospective employer, often for no obvious reason. As a white man, I have to chalk it up to one of the following:
1. I'm wrong.
2. The other guy's wrong, but really thinks he's right.
3. The other guy's a jerk.
But if you're a member of a protected class, discrimination becomes an appealing alternative, especially as compared to 1. Nobody wants to think it's his own fault he got fired. And if you've been told your whole life to expect to be discriminated against, you're naturally going to attribute people treating you unfairly for no apparent reason as discrimination.
So you end up with a system where even well-meaning people can cause problems, to say nothing of what a genuinely malicious person could do.
If racial discrimination is a major problem that seriously impedes racial minorities' ability to live normal lives, then maybe it's worth the cost. But it's hard to buy that in the face of, e.g., widespread hiring of illegal aliens in violation of federal law. And the fact that anti-discrimination laws are so popular that "Libertarians oppose anti-discrimination laws!" full stop, is actually an effective rhetorical move.
I really do believe that nowadays anti-discrimination law is primarily symbolic. It's about making sure that no one is allowed to get away with discrimination, regardless of the magnitude of the impact.
"
The less you have, the less it costs to move. Vagabonds being the extreme example.
"
You know, I never really got the logic here. First, there's no reason to believe that that's going to be the case in most places. And if it is the case in a few specific towns, why would anyone want to live in a town where nobody will do business with you unless compelled by law?
You're going to walk into a restaurant managed by someone who wouldn't serve you if the federal government didn't force him, order food, wait for him to go into the back room and prepare it out of your sight, and then you're going to eat it? On a regular basis?
Nobody needs the federal government to step in and force every firm in town to do business with him. Anyone who think he needs that really needs to move to a town that isn't full of bigots.
"
It's not a trivia question if you have ample time to look it up.
"
Tell me why Java doesn’t have pointers
Because grad students got tired of trying to explain them to incoming freshmen?
"
One way you can tell is that no hotel in the world contains a Bible that translates “Taft was really fat” into 117 languages.
If you've never been to the Capitalist Pig Inn in Beijing, you're really missing out. They make a great ham and cheese omelette.
"
Does the intention matter? They're giving an in-kind discount that people with certain religious and/or ideological convictions can't take advantage of.
That's disparate impact, right? Same way employers can't use IQ testing, even if their intention is to hire smart people, because blacks and Hispanic test lower on average than whites and Asians on IQ tests.
On “The case for democracy”
It's also worth noting that libertarians aren't opposed to democratic decisionmaking when it comes to things that we regard as legitimately within the public sphere. No one individual can claim ownership rights over the army, for example, so what exactly we should do with the army can legitimately be considered a matter to be decided democratically. Ditto the police.
Oh. Wait. Those are controlled democratically, with pretty lousy results. Hey! I have an idea! Let's take the same decisionmaking process that produced those results, and apply it to other things. Things that don't have to be controlled democratically, because there are market alternatives.
Actually, scratch that. That's your idea, not mine.
"
Libertarian want to prevent people (via coercive state-sanctioned force) from using government to resolve pressing public policy issues which libertarians disagree with.
You're still talking in vague generalities. And in doing so you make libertarianism sound much more sinister than it would if you were to be more specific: Libertarians want to stop people from forcibly taking money from certain groups of people and redistributing it to other groups of people, even if they do so through a democratic decision process. There are others, of course, but that's the key point of contention with the left.
Now, you can argue that that's a bad thing, and that people should be allowed to do that. But when you start talking about coercively squelching democracy, you're letting emotion-laden buzzwords do the heavy lifting instead of actual arguments.
Whether that's just a rhetorical ploy, or actually representative of your thoughts on the matter, I decline to speculate.
On “For God So Loveth Ye That His Servant In Plano, Texas Doth Giveth Ye An Affordable Oil Change”
I get that this is more of a burden for people who actually take a non-Christian religions seriously. I just don't think that the government should force other people to cater to their sensitivities.
"
By the way, what about giving away meat with an oil change? This isn't purely hypothetical; Les Schwab Tires actually does an annual promotion where they throw in some steaks with the purchase of four tires.
Clearly this discriminates against people who don't eat beef, like vegetarians and Hindus. Is there a lawsuit here? Should there be? What if it were pork?
"
What about disparate impact?
"
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't go so far as it to say it's "okay," but I wouldn't go so far in the other direction as to say that it's any of the government's business.
The talking point for justifying antidiscrimination law is that without it racial minorities would be unable to find employment. Once you acknowledge that this is not the case---that it's more about symbolism and making sure that nobody gets away with discriminating---it becomes much harder to justify the collateral damage.
"
I think religion is silly.
I will happily recite any verse from the Bible for $26.
Bulk rates available on full chapters.
On “The case for democracy”
And yeah, I get that your preferred way of doing things doesn’t work as well if you can’t compel the golden geese to participate. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
"
This strikes me as deeply confused. You're trying to draw a false parallel between things like murder and robbery on the one hand, and the defense of individual rights on the other. Yes, technically if you announce plans to go out and murder somebody, and I forcibly restrain you, that's coercion. But do you really not get the distriction between initiatory coercion on the one hand, and coercion for the sake of preventing initiatory coercion on the other?
Yet for all that, the antipathy to democracy – which goes well beyond Hayek’s preferred “liberal dictatorship” – reveals the fundamental internal conflict within libertarianism: in order for it to exist as a model for society, democracy must be snuffed out through coercion.
Only in the same sense in which murder and theft are snuffed out through coercion.
I think you're confusing things here through ambiguous language. "Democracy" is a vague, nebulous term that doesn't really refer to any specific actions. To say that democracy must be snuffed out through coercion is well-nigh meaningless. Be more specific. What exactly is it that you think that libertarians want to force people to do?
And while libertarians may say they don’t want to live in my welfare state either, at least I can say “Then go vote against it.” In Libertopia no such option would exist.
This just isn't true. If you wanted to set up a voluntary welfare state, you could. People would sign up, and you'd collect a monthly fee based on income or consumption, or whatever you want, and you'd pay out benefits.
But under the current system, those of us who oppose the welfare state don't have the ability to opt out. Which is why the excerpt above is not only wrong, but completely backwards. You want to compel everyone to participate in your schemes, whereas we're happy to let people opt in or out as they see fit.
And yeah, I get that your preferred way of doing things doesn't work as well if you can't compel the golden geese to participate. But that's kind of the point, isn't it?
On “Something to Go Galt About”
But I just don’t see every factory manager as a fulfillment of the Enlightenment project.
She's not talking about factory managers.
Also, you don't have to admire them. You just have to respect their property rights.
"
But if he's not paying union wages with double overtime and offering first-dollar medical and dental coverage, he might as well be locking you in a cage.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.