From: pas@kepler.unh.edu (Paul A Sand)
Subject: Re: Outgrowing Libertarianism...
Organization: University of New Hampshire
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 03:42:35 GMT

vy: victor yodaiken

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. [...]

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

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. [...]

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

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

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: I find this repugnant and intellectually dishonest, but not "wrong",
    since it is a moral position, not a falsifiable one. [...]

Certainly if Mr. Yodaiken was doing anything other than slapping
together phrases from his cliche pile, he would have stopped to wonder
if coherent moral positions can arise from intellectual dishonesty.

vy: On the other hand, the "Libertarian" claim, which has been oft
    repeated in this forum, that under a free-market system such
    discrimination would be unprofitable and would render the racist
    business vulnerable to competition *is* wrong as anyone familiar
    with the history of race relations in the United States can confirm.
    That is, we see from US history that discrimination on the basis of
    race, religion, gender, or whatever, has been quite compatible with
    profitability, and that widespread racial or religious prejudice has
    worked to deprive certain segments of the population of a meaningful
    chance to compete on equal terms with the majority.

Clearly, libertarian claims about what would happen under a free-market
system have zero applicibility to (for example) an era in which the
state enforced Jim Crow laws. Conversely, that era doesn't refute such
libertarian claims. If anything, it should lead one to wonder why such
laws were necessary: to force racists to practice racism?

If Mr. Yodaiken thinks that *any* period in the history of US racial
relations was marked by a legal and economic system that libertarians
would find worthy of defending, he should specify the time and place.
Otherwise, as he should know, his alleged refutation is nonsense.
-- 
-- Paul A. Sand           | If I said that I was looking to buy a graphical
-- Univ. of New Hampshire | user interface system which exhibits an 
-- pas@kepler.unh.edu     | object-oriented-like behavior, does that mean I 
                          | want an OOy GUI? (Barry Warsaw, gnu.g++.help)