From: pas@kepler.unh.edu (Paul A Sand)
Subject: Re: Outgrowing Libertarianism
Organization: University of New Hampshire
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 02:02:11 GMT

vy: Victor Yodaiken
ps: Paul Sand

vy: [...] let's examine the "libertarian" position that one has the
    "right" to refuse service in a public place of business on the basis
    of racial bigotry. [...]

ps: Translation: libertarians believe that market transactions should be
    mutually voluntary.

vy: That is not a translation, it is a sugar-coating.

ps: On the contrary, it's an accurate description of the underlying
    principle.

vy: Hate to break this to you, but most people do not volunteer to be
    discriminated against any more than they volunteer to be victims of
    fraud.

One can only wonder how Victor imagines this has anything to do with
the point under discussion. (If, that is, he is really interested in
the point under discussion at all. Evidence is slim.) The libertarian
principle that economic transactions should be mutually voluntary
doesn't imply that *failure* to engage in such transactions should be
(or, indeed, can be) mutually voluntary. Victor doesn't like the
principle, I gather; fine, who cares, my only purpose is to get it on
the record accurately.

vy: The "libertarians" argue that it is moral to impose taxes for the
    purpose of paying for a police force which will enforce the racial
    prejudices of property owners by forcibly ejecting blacks, jews, or
    whatever from hotels, restaurants, banks, or any other "privately
    owned" place of business. [...]

ps: Translation: libertarians believe that A's presence on B's property
    should be agreeable to both A and B.

vy: You may word this how you like, but it would be nice if you could
    confront the reality of the situation.

ps: The reality being what? That, under a system of liberty, some folks
    will use that liberty in stupid and vile ways, and yet be perfectly
    within their rights to do so? This is uncontested.

vy: Again, if A calls the cops to enforce his prejudices by violently
    ejecting B from his property, this will likely not be agreeable to
    B. To insist on viewing police enforced denial of serice on
    racialgrounds as "mutually agreeable" is nutty.

As above, Victor foregoes precision as to what libertarian principles
concerning mutual agreement say, apparently preferring this low-rent
namecalling. Mutual agreement does *not* exist in this case; given the
hypothesized circumstances, there's no way to *make* it exist.

vy: Thus, the "libertarians" find it perfectly moral to forcibly extract
    taxes from minority groups in order to violently oppress them. [...]

ps: Untranslatable, because false. Some (maybe most, by no means all)
    libertarians find taxation acceptable to adequately protect the
    rights of all individuals; to claim that the actual motive is "in
    order to violently oppress" minorities is baseless slander.

vy: Only if one accepts willingly confuses propaganda with reality.
    Those libertarians who accept the need for taxation (e.g. in
    accordance with the platform the the Libertarian party) [...]

ps: A factual aside: the LP's 1992 platform calls for `the eventual
    repeal of all taxation.' Whether this shows Victor's confusion with
    propaganda, reality, or just reading comprehension is an exercise
    left to those who care.

vy: And the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called for "eventual"
    withering away of the state. The LP admits the current necessity of
    taxation.

I hope any interested observers will note (a) that I posted a direct
quote from the LP 1992 platform to contradict Victor; (b) Victor's
assertion continues to be evidence-free; and (c) this is ... um ...
interesting behavior from someone who apparently enjoys smearing
libertarians with terms like `intellectually dishonest.'

Look, I'll make it real simple: The platform, such as it is, is
available for anonymous FTP from think.com in the `pub/libernet/LP'
directory. The filename is `libertarian-platform-1992'.  I assume
Victor can use this information to do the Intellectually Honest thing:
either support his assertion about the LP platform with a direct
citation or disavow it.

vy: do so on the basis of government protection of "private property".
    If police, hired at public expense, are going to enforce the
    racial/religious bigotry property owners, then it follows that
    members of unpopular racial/religious groups will be forced to pay
    taxes to support their own oppression. If you want to call this
    process voluntary and freedom-enhancing it only illustrates the
    shallowness of your ideas.

ps: Taxation is only voluntary in the doublespeak of the IRS; if Victor
    is trying to claim that *I* said it was voluntary, he's (again)
    badly confused, [...]

vy: Let's get this straight: The LP calls for an "eventual" end to
    taxation, i.e. it supports the necessity of taxation for the time
    being. It also supports the "right" of property owners to run
    businesses which actively discriminate on racial or other grounds.
    Thus, it follows that the LP supports, until this "eventuality"
    appears, the right of property owners to have the cops actively
    enforce racial barriers while supporting the right of the state to
    extract the salaries of those cops from the victims of
    discrimination. Yet, your characterization of the whole process is
    "A's presence on B's property should be agreeable to both parties".
    Did I miss something?

Yes. In addition to the major problems I've mentioned above--I won't
repeat here--Victor should pay more careful attention to the
distinction between (a) the LP, (b) libertarians in general, and (c)
Paul Sand in particular. Specifically, my only interest in the LP
platform is to get Victor to stop misrepresenting it.

ps: [...] and I shall therefore discount accordingly the usual
    Yodaikenian bushwa about `shallowness.' I note he failed to respond
    to the actual point I made, which was (once again): his charge that
    the actual motive of libertarians is to "violently oppress"
    minorities is baseless slander.

vy: I don't give a damn what the motives of "propertarians" are and have
    not made any such charges.

Quite untrue. This is from the article I originally responded to:

vy: Thus, the "libertarians" find it perfectly moral to forcibly extract
    taxes from minority groups in order to violently oppress them. [...]

In English, the phrase `in order to' is used to ascribe motivation.
Perhaps Victor would now like to deny he meant what he said (that would
be nice, as would an apology); he can hardly pretend he didn't say it.

vy: In actual US history, the civil and economic rights of the newly
    freed slaves were systematically and violently stolen from them as
    soon as the Federal government removed its protection by withdrawing
    federal troops. If you would take the trouble to learn a little
    history, you would see that the JimCrow laws were imposed *after*
    non-governmental terrorism had deprived black Americans of their
    liberties. [...]

ps: If Victor took the trouble to learn a little English, he might see
    that I used Jim Crow laws as just one example of how the state (and
    *not* the "free-market system") failed to adequately protect the
    rights of individuals. Victor has not refuted this; he has merely
    supplied

vy: Yes the state supported racial discrimination. But, no, the state
    was not the only bulwark of racial discrimination and market forces
    acted to reinforce discrimination, not to weaken it.

This point remains the sole, slim, justification for continuation of
this thread in sci.econ.  So evidence would be nice, instead of
mantra-like repetition of the assertion. The following, for example,
just doesn't cut it:

vy: You might also see that racism had an economic effectiveness which
    far transcended the Jim Crow laws. For example, as late as 1954 the
    television networks cut away from the Rebublican convention as
    Eisenhower's nominating speech was about to start -- because a black
    man was making the speech and the TV networks did not want to offend
    southern affiliates. 

ps: Certainly the date's two years off--1954 wasn't a Presidential
    election year--and I wonder what else is inaccurate in this story?
    [...]

vy: Sorry for the innacuracy and the date typo. The actual event in
    question was 1960 when Eisenhower's assistant E. Frederick Morrow
    spoke at the republican convention which nominated Nixon. The
    networks refused to televise any negro speakers at either convention
    that year (source: Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch, page 323). And
    the point of the story is simply to show that offending the
    lucrative white segregationist marketplace was much more of a
    concern to even national corporations, than was the chance of
    missing out on the low-income black marketplace.

OK, not 1954 but 1960, not Eisenhower but Nixon. At least now there's
something to check. And upon checking it turns out my skepticism was
deserved; the evidence turns out to be far less solid than Victor
claims.

Taylor Branch's sole cited reference to this incident is E. Frederic
Morrow's book _Black Man in the White House_ (Coward McCann, 1963).
Here's what's there: Morrow was scheduled to give a two-minute speech
on the 1960 GOP convention's `Salute-to-Eisenhower night'. (Not a
nominating speech.) Morrow reports that then-President Eisenhower was
`furious' when the station on which he was watching the proceedings cut
Morrow out for `a commercial and some chit-chat by the commentators.'
He also alleges that the `same commentators and this same network had
cut out the Negro speakers at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles
a week before. It hardly seemed like an accident.' Morrow notes that a
black woman (Mrs. Jewel Rogers) was to give one of the nominating
speeches for Henry Cabot Lodge, but if her speech was treated
similarly, Morrow doesn't mention it.

Branch embellishes this account quite a bit. He alleges (without any
cited evidence) that `networks had blacked out Negro speakers at
both conventions for fear of offending Southern stations.' Clearly,
this differs from what Morrow claims: his charges are against a
single (unnamed) network and their (unnamed) commentators. It's pretty
clear that Morrow has suspicions about the motives for that
network cutting away from his two-minute speech; Branch transforms
these suspicions into fact, and extends them to the other two
networks. And Victor adds his own interpretation onto this already
strained tale.

ps: In any case, if Victor's best evidence of the perfidy of the free
    market is the FCC-regulated (read: protected) broadcast industry of
    the 50's, ho hum.

vy: It's a simple example of how prejudice was reinforced by market
    conditions.

It's a darn poor example, both in its basic credibility and (even if
true) its applicability to free markets.

vy: Note, not only were there no Jim Crow laws governing the New York
    City based networks or the federally regulated TV stations, but the
    Federal government was clearly interested in having the speech
    televised. The fact is,that popular prejudice was a powerful
    economic force which had the effect of stripping a large
    sub-population of the right to enter the economy on any where near
    an equal footing. Blaming the Jim Crow laws for this is simple
    nonsense.

ps: Victor, as usual, makes Herculean efforts to avoid defending his
    original assertion: that the shameful history of US race relations
    was somehow an example of libertarian economic and legal ideals
    given free rein.

vy: As usual, your charcterization of my argument is completely off
    base. I am arguing that there is no evidence that discrimination is
    economically non-competitive in an environment of widespread
    prejudice, and that claims otherwise are not supported by the
    historical record.

Victor's original assertion (which he's deleted) concerned
(specifically) libertarian claims about free-market systems, and their
alleged refutation by the history of US race relations.  If he now
wants to back off and make this significantly weaker claim, that's
fine. But this significantly weaker claim is also false. For example,
Thomas Sowell, in his book _Preferential Policies_, describes how
private streetcar companies in many southern cities spent years
ignoring and resisting laws mandating segregation, not out of the
goodness of their hearts, but because those laws imposed unwanted
costs.  As another example, black southern labor was successfully
competing against largely white unionized labor on government
construction contracts; stopping this competition was a motivation of
the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act's `prevailing wage' feature.

ps: The Jim Crow laws are but one simple piece of disconfirming
    evidence; yet, despite all his bluster, Victor has not dealt with
    the interesting question of why such laws were considered necessary,
    if the allegedly overwhelming `economic force' of prejudice alone
    was doing such a swell job of keeping blacks subjugated.

vy: One simply notes that even where the laws left a theoretically open
    space for non-racial business practices, there is no evidence that
    the market acted to make racism unprofitable or to create
    non-racially segregated markets.

Does this answer my question? No.  Is it true that there `is no
evidence that the market acted to make racism unprofitable'? No, see
above. Victor's claim of `no evidence' merely displays his apparent
unwillingness to read anything that might contain such evidence.
-- 
-- Paul A. Sand           | [S]erious people flinch from being associated
-- Univ. of New Hampshire | with the intellectual slum that is the Bush
-- pas@kepler.unh.edu     | campaign, with its riffraff of liars and
                          | aspiring ayatollahs. (George F. Will)