From: fritzs@microsoft.com (Fritz Sands)
Subject: Re: If you haven't sent your checks to no-on-hate yet, do it!
Date: 27 Sep 92 23:16:00 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corporation

In article <1992Sep25.173122.15439@spdcc.com> rdonahue@spdcc.com (Bob Donahue) writes:
| fritzs@microsoft.com (Fritz Sands) writes:
| >h431@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
| >| This is why I don't like libertarians.
| >Ah, come on... some of us are nice.
| 	Yes, but largely oversimplistic.  

And libertarians would tend to argue that people who expect large 
improvements from government orders and programs to be simplistic.

Everybody simplifies in order to fit the world into hir worldview.

| >I know of no libertarians who make such a claim.  Libertarians will claim
| >that a market imposes costs on discrimination... for example, a bus company
| >that forces blacks to sit on the back of the bus will lose ridership
| >unless the government requires all bus companies to do likewise.
| 
| 	Ah!  And now the example.
| 
| 	Query:  Where do all the people who opt not to ride the
| bus go?  What if the bus is their only mode of available xportation?
| What if all the bus companies have the same policy?  (This was
| of course common in the 1950's and before, so there is *ample*
| "real life" examples to back this up.)

Actually, you are wrong.  A bus company tried the "back of the bus"
bit in, I believe, South Carolina.  They lost revenue until they got
the city council to pass a law requiring *all* bus companies to
do the same thing.

My point was *not* that companies are, by and large, run by tolerant
folks.  My point was that discrimination has real costs, unless that
discrimination is mandated by government, so that competitors cannot
expoint those costs.

| 	By its passive approach to freedom, libertarianism
| empowers bigots, because it allows them free rein to continue their
| advantage, while the disadvantaged are at the mercy of those who
| oppress them.  Sure the oppressed are free to form their own  
| sub-society, *if* they have the means to do so (for which they'd
| already have to have some sort of sub-society so the argument
| is circular from the start), but that's not the case.  Were
| it so, wouldn't they/we have already done it?  

In many places, gayfolk have already done so.

Are you stipulating that democracy does not empower bigots?  Want to
ask Oregon gayfolk about that?

| >Of course, and this is rather unpleasant to contemplate, the market also
| >rewards discrimination if most people favor that discrimination.  On
| >the other hand, in that rather nasty scenario, government actions are
| >not likely to favor the dumped-on group either.
| 
| 	This is also a mind-boggling statement.  By elminating
| discrimination, people are allowed to reach their potential, to
| give themselves more choices.  Once that is achieved, then 
| and only then are people able to have the liberty they want (free clue:
| libertarianism comes from the word "liberty".  Right now, to claim
| that this "equality" already exists is fallacious.

Why do you think that government is more likely to reduce discrimination
than to enhance it?  I also never used the word equality, so I do not
know what you are responding to.

| 	You're dealing with a second derivative.   By definition
| as equality is reached it slows.  You're own statement admits
| that at this time, things are not equal.  Yet you would have us start
| a society that assumes blindly that everything is equal.  Knowingly.
| Sorry, that doesn't really make me want to trust libertarians.

I have never assumed in anything that everything is equal.  You must have
me confused with someone else.

| 	I've talked to libertarians...  I've heard the wildest things.
| 
| "Well, we're for equal rights for gays."
| "But what about anti-discrimination?"
| "Well, that would be a private matter."

That is a standard public/private question.  I have heard more than
one woman state that discrimination should be illegal, but that
women's bars should be able to forcibly eject men for no reason.

| "But what about the tacit widespread public homophobia?  Certainly
| people being assaulted on the street is not a private matter!"
| "Well, if most people don't like gays then that has to be respected.
| The government shouldn't get involved."

I have never heard a libertarian say that assault is a private matter.
Either you are grotesquely misrepresenting a conversation, or you
qwere speaking to a crazy.

| "But these people aren't doing anything wrong!"
| "Yeah, but if they dind't act gay in the open, no one would know...
| It's a private thing."
| 
| 	Gack.

Again -- I think you were talking to a Republican.

| 
| 	Libertarianism *is* anti-equality.  Politics at a 4-year-old
| level.

Politics *is* a 4-year-old game.

Equality is not, for most libertarians, high on the list of priorities.
Freedom from naked coercion is.  Now, you may not like those priorities,
and that is fine.  But, please don't misrepresent libertarians as
loose-cannon bigots... it annoys us and doesn't do you any good, anyways.

   Fritz

Xref: sparky alt.politics.homosexuality:6339 alt.discrimination:4512 soc.motss:41647