Ron Paul On The Civil Rights Act

your libertarianism actually forbids you from fully guaranteeing basic liberties

Because you’re calling for those liberties to be guaranteed by MEN WITH GUNS! From the GOVERNMENT! It’s consistent, as you say.

I wonder if he’s seen Mississippi Burning, and who he was cheering for.

I usually hear things in response like “people may do things I don’t like or which are wrong, but government can’t legislate morality,” or “it’s wrong and even evil for people to discriminate or do other things, but it’s wrong and going to end up worse when government tries to coerce people to think the way it wants.”

And so on and so forth.

That question (and it is a good one) would be more pertinently addressed to someone like the late Barry Goldwater, who seemed truly to abhor bigotry, but whose principles of limited government drew a bright line he was unwilling to cross. Ron Paul gives no evidence of any such abhorrence, and <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/88421/ron-pauls-racism"ample evidence of being comfortable with such bigotry.

That’s too many words

Stop right there, John. You’re right, of course; but if public discussion can only be carried on with sound bites, then goodbye, democracy.

The libertarian counter-claim on abortion is actually that, at some point, the fetus becomes a person, with rights of their own. Any moral theory for a species that doesn’t spring into existence fully formed is going to have to accept that children are a special case.

I wouldn’t say it’s an original thought, but it does explain why there’s no necessary contradiction between libertarianism and opposition to (some) abortion.

As kth says (and provides a helpful link for), it’s well-documented that Ron Paul is a stone-cold racist. He fears and loathes black people. It’s fine to point out that his libertarian arguments fail on their own merits, but to allow that there is any meaningful sense in which “he hopes everyone will be free” is counter-productive.

As is often the case with libertarians, the ugly social attitudes drive the bad arguments, and it is perfectly possible to criticize the bad arguments on their merits without pretending otherwise. The pretense turns a contemptible racist into a mere bad political philosopher, and thus plays into the “Newt is an idea man” style of political discourse that makes all of us suckers.

First of all, kth is absolutely right. Ron Paul has demonstrated racist beliefs and rhetoric, he’s associated with white supremacist organizations – this isn’t a Barry Goldwater situation of someone’s beliefs barring them from pursuing the antiracism they so devoutly espouse.

Secondly, I don’t think libertarianism or federalism should be a shield against the real political consequences of one’s actions. Goldwater voted against the CRA because, he says, he opposed government intervention in private businesses or state’s rights – but that doesn’t excuse the fact that when he ran for president, he toured the South with Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, denouncing “forced integration” in front of all-white crowds singing “Dixie.” (New York Times, Nov 1, 1964) Goldwater knew exactly what he was doing, and it didn’t have anything to do with individual freedom.

Thirdly, I think it points to the genuinely cramped libertarian vision of economic liberty and state intervention. To begin with, private discrimination was frequently used to achieve public discrimination – black people who tried to register to vote, or vote, or engaged in civil rights protests, or harbored civil rights activists were targeted for firing, their debts were called in, they were evicted, and denied access to basic necessities like groceries. At the same time, these private discriminating agents were receiving resources from black taxpayers – roads, utilities, police protection to enforce the removal of black taxpayers from their otherwise publicly available premises, and so on. As Risa L. Goluboff has pointed out (and by the way, her book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights is a book that every progressive/citizen should read), throughout the rural south, there also were private regimes of labor in the South that resembled quasi-slavery – during WWII, black men were hired by U.S Sugar to work in Florida, then charged an impossible debt for transportation and living expenses, then held to service on the basis of their debt, with the threat of jail if they attempted to leave. These regimes could not have existed without the support of black taxpayer-funded police departments.
http://realignmentproject.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/industrial-democracy-vs-economic-liberty/
http://realignmentproject.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/rethinking-economic-liberty-pt-2-equality-and-progress/

That’s right, business owners were being coerced. They’re being coerced now. We never paused, in between, to see what they’d do if they were freed from the coercion.

Unless the economy is expanding, any social progress by one group can only be purchased by regress on the part of some other.

Such a zero sum game ultimately is nothing more than interest group politics and has no basis in social justice, however defined.

Accordingly, it is not enough for one to assert some interest in advancing “civil rights” or some other such agenda. Rather, one must combine that objective with a credible program to expand the economy as a whole.

As for calling people “racist” who oppose various liberal programs, that is a tired tactic typically deployed by individuals who are at least as hate filled as those whom they would denounce. So not only to such “liberals” fail to state a claim, but they also give rise to serious questions about their own motives.

Of course we do know what business people do when not coerced. Some of them establish sane and sensible policies of equal treatment, recognition of minority situations as worthy of coverage in insurance and the like. Some work with the government on standards of fair lending and don’t lose a lot in big crashes; others try to do the required minimum or less, and lose much more, loaning to wealthy customers who turn out to be less reliable in repayment than poor minority borrowers. Some redline neighborhoods of people in the wrong skin colors, and some establish MERS and destroy trillions of dollars of wealth in a variety of ways. Some companies try to recruit widely, and some discriminate on the basis of black-sounding names.

But these are things it’d be very inconvenient for libertarians to know, so generally they don’t.

Does Brett Bellmore get furloughed from prison every few months, and chooses to spend his free time here?

I have lived in the South all my life and I am not young. With apologies Mr. Bellmore, I don’t know any other way to put this: You are out of your mind. So is Ron Paul, and so is anyone else who believes the “free market” would have eliminated de facto Jim Crow.

Assuming the commerce clause parts of the CRA had not been enacted, for how many generations would libertarians have been willing to allow the market to operate to end the racial discrimination you disapprove of, before throwing in the towel? I fear that doctrine dictates the answer, “As long as it takes.” And the injustice, not to mention the inhumanity, of that borders on the absurd.

Brett Bellmore says in #3:

A key distinction between libertarians and liberals is that the former are rather more careful with their use of the word “right”.

Brett then specifies a more “careful” use of the word, and points out that there is an asymmetry in the application of the word thus understood to the case of the shop keeper and the customer.

But what the word “right” means in the language (or really in this case, in a particular person’s chosen idiolect) of course has no implications for which social policies are just. With respect to the example at issue it is open to liberals to cede this term and coin another. The question is then whether the appropriate social policy is to be framed in terms of the one term or the other, and here the meanings of words cannot help you in the slightest.

This might seem like uncharitable nit-picking. But I think it’s a good example of the fundamental hollowness of much libertarian argument. Libertarians lack any compelling justifications for their principles, and so they make sophistical points about unclear word meanings (or supposed logical contradictions) or whatever to fill air-time.

Bruce Baugh’s right – we shouldn’t overstate the coercion. Jim Crow wasn’t just individual merchants being oppressed by local whites; it was big business. Farmers used Jim Crow to keep their workforce in place and limit competition from other employers; factory owners used it to keep unions out and wages down. The National Association of Realtors used racial covenants nationwide because they could extract a premium for white-only housing, then extract extra profit from blacks locked into segregated housing.

Jim Crow was profitable.

It occurs to me (and any libertarian can criticise me here, possibly legitimately, I’m not an expert) that the real trouble for libertarians is not how the US treated African Americans but how the US treated (and treats) native Americans. It is much harder to see how the ‘free market’ could solve issues relating to imperialism, colonialism and ethnic cleansing/genocide, because to the best of my knowledge libertarians have no coherent theories about these issues.*

(*Yes, FWIW I know some of the Austrian school condemned (European) Empire building, although, again, AFAIK, they shied away from the fact that the ‘success’ of the US** was mainly built on ethnic cleansing and Empire building. But AFAIK none of them developed coherent theories about why the Europeans engaged in some activities).

**And yes I know RP is an isolationist. But again, he seems to have no real theory about why the US decided to ditch isolationism, and why business elites continue to oppose isolationism.

No. A key distinction between libertarians and liberals is that the former are rather more careful with their use of the word “right”. (Because being sloppy with the word leads to contradiction, to two people having ‘rights’ that directly conflict.) And private discrimination, while properly subject to disapproval, is not a violation of anybody’s rights, because you don’t have a right to have other people engage in transactions with you.

I don’t think “more careful” is accurate. They do, certainly, use the terms differently. The main issue (as you describe) is that libertarianism does not recognize “positive rights” (more properly called responsibilities in my view). The libertarian view requires only that you avoid infringing upon others liberty, not that you take any positive actions to help another. Most people, however, recognize that moral rule go both ways requiring you to refrain from certain things, and to take certain positive actions as well. This difference is the key to the disagreement, it seems to me.

CRA! CRA! CRA! Woo! Wait – this was nearly fifty years ago? And liberals are still patting themselves on the back? And holding Ron Paul responsible? Really, it’s time to move on.

Libertarianism, and Pacifism have always seemed very alike to me. Both represent unachievable ideal societies. In either case, the ideal society (if it could exist at all) is completely defenseless against organized groups who don’t share their goals. They are quite simply unstable ideals, and the instability leads to an end few would consider attractive.

And what is government anyway? Isn’t government an association of people (we would like to think of all the people, more or less equally represented), that is given certain powers in order to protect social norms. Organized subgroups of course do this all the time. Think of the KKK, or the Cosa Nostra. Those are simply associations of some subset of the people, which have formed to advance their interests. So I claim the boundary between legitimate government, and nonrepresentative organizations (thuggish or not) is actually a fuzzy thing. In one (anti-libertarian) sense, we need the broadest possible based association to protect against the worst abuses of narrowly based associations.

“two people having ‘rights’ that directly conflict”

Thus, there is no libertarian solution to the question of what side of the road to drive on.

I’d like to trade in that first “think” for a “thing” please.

Omega Centauri –

Um, no. The “the KKK, or the Cosa Nostra” are not “simply associations of some subset of the people, which have formed to advance their interests.” They are associations of a subset of people which have formed to restrict the rights of other people; black people have a right not to be attacked or to be denied their right to acquire property, register to vote, serve on juries/testify in court, etc. through threats of violence. In the case of the Cosa Nostra, protection rackets, fraud, etc. all impinge on the rights of businesses, consumers, and workers to conduct business without being extorted by stealth or threat of violence.

The boundary between that and government is pretty clear – consent, social compact, bounded majoritarianism in a context of constitutional rights and independent judiciary, etc.

The major divergence between liberals and libertarians, I would argue, is that post the 14th amendment, liberals recognized that state and local governments, along with private actors could pose a risk to individual rights (both in the case of Jim Crow and monopoly/corporate capitalism) – and thus a new role for the state in affirmatively guaranteeing protection against infringement was born. Libertarians essentially deny that there is any threat to individual rights outside of a central state or that the state has any role in protecting people from those threats, unless the people in question are propertied or corporations.

“That’s right, business owners were being coerced. They’re being coerced now. We never paused, in between, to see what they’d do if they were freed from the coercion.

But one kind of coercion (white customers refusing to eat at a lunch counter that serves blacks) is perfectly legitimate, and indeed not coercion at all, according to the libertarian.

It’s only when a “government” coerces that the market fails and blood is spilled and a bad time is had by all.

Jim, that’s the question that ended up pulling me away from libertarianism, pretty much. If it comes down to liberty as defined that way or the realities of reliable health care, safety, prospects for improved quality of living, dignity, the safety to express one’s loves in public, etc. etc. etc…then yeah, I’ll let liberty slide. Because I’m more interested in how people are actually doing than the abstract realm of things they might do if they were the luckiest, wealthiest, best-connected people in the society.

As a classical liberal, I just want to point out how much I resent the word “liberal” being appropriated by people who basically are social democrats.

The great Liberal Party of Gladstone did not, overnight, become the Labour Party of Attlee, or the Democratic Party of the Great Society.

@Myles, maybe you should take it up with JS Mill, or Lloyd George.

StevenAtwell at 33, I think that definition of property was only settled on by libertarians in order to define away the problem of the unjust acquisition of native lands. It still flounders even then, being grounded in a wilfull ignorance of the historical situation of Indigenous people.

In order for libertarians to defend “property rights” over all others they need to hand-wave away historically unjust acquisition of land. Hence they need some serious rhetorical sleight of hand to deal with colonialism.

Libertarian “thought” is completely contradictory. I have a chap on my blog using this definition of property to deny the importance of legal land titles, in order to avoid the inevitable conclusion that Shrek was an illegal squatter and the King a righteous land owner. There is no escaping the intellectual boondoggles libertarianism leads one to.

Are the liberals in Canada basically social democrats too? And what about Lloyd George?

Hidari makes my point very well. Thanks.

As for StevenAttewell’s “counterpoint,” i would suggest that the history of the Pueblo nations strikes that. It is shocking how easily ‘property rights’ can leap history to suit the needs of the selfish.

A couple things:
1. Myles, you need to sit down and read Robert Kelley’s Transatlantic Persuasion, or Nancy Cohen’s Reconstruction of Liberalism, or Sklar’s Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, or anything by Mary Furner, or really anything about Lloyd George, Beveridge, and Keynes. There was something called New Liberalism, it was not the same thing as social democracy, and it was tremendously influential in shaping American liberalism 1900-1945.
2. sg – except that it wasn’t just an after-the-fact justification; it was a key dilemma of classical liberalism. It’s all wrapped up in the problem of starting from a position of the individual natural right to one’s own labor and reconciling that with the theft of the commons, ownership of property beyond the individual smallholdership, and the use of wage labor. “The turfs my servant has cut” had already been developed before the Pilgrims hit the rock.
3. spyder – sorry, not sure what you’re saying at 57. Clarify please?
4. Bloix – you’re quite right, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the inherent private-ness of a gang of Klansmen burning your house down because you tried to register to vote, and that in the face of that, Goldwater and his acolytes arguing that the Federal government doing something about that was the greater violation of individual rights.

Contemporary propertarians are often ignorant about classical liberals.

Some British 19th century liberals often advocated a strong central government and weak local government. The idea is that duplication of effort among municipalities could be avoided. All governments might have limited powers, but those powers would be exercised more efficiently if they centralized. As a consequence, taxes could be kept low. (I don’t say the argument for supporting diverse experimentation among localities isn’t also a liberal argument.)

Karl Popper is often taken to be a defender of liberalism. Karl Popper would not have accepted some “principled” arguments that lead to bad consequences. His idea was that we need a system of government in which we can learn from our mistakes. And people suffering unnecessary pain is a mistake that should be corrected.

Nor do propertarians need to be as stupid about property rights as some here insist. (“Stupid” is not spelled “Rather more careful”.) My name links to some quotes by Hayek and by David Ramsay Steele recognizing, more or less, that ownership is not a natural kind and that societies can and should experiment with what rights are included in ownership.

The great Liberal Party of Gladstone did not, overnight, become the Labour Party of Attlee, or the Democratic Party of the Great Society.

If we’re being pick, by what standards can Gladstone be deemed a “classical liberal”. He didn’t believe in democracy to anywhere near the same extent that today’s classical liberals (or for that matter social liberals) do.

But anyway, you can have “liberalism” back if the left can have “libertarianism” back.

@64

But we have reasonable (no, I don’t insist it proves it, just that it indicates that) evidence from another time and place that the social side did go away all on its ownsome.

Maybe it would have done in the South, maybe it wouldn’t have done. What we don’t have is evidence that such a libertarian solution would not have worked.

Tim Worstall: But we have reasonable (no, I don’t insist it proves it, just that it indicates that) evidence from another time and place that the social side did go away all on its ownsome.

…ad so forth and so on. A society you feel happy about is not the same as a society that is in fact just with regard to the status of its ethnic minority and female members.

“If it comes down to liberty as defined that way or the realities of reliable health care, safety, prospects for improved quality of living, dignity, the safety to express one’s loves in public, etc. etc. etc…then yeah, I’ll let liberty slide. “

At which point, you’ll be in a situation where whether or not you get all, or even any, of the things you took in place of liberty is up to somebody else, because you handed control of your life over to them. Better hope it was a good deal, ’cause it’s the last deal you get any choice in making.

That’s what makes liberty the most important value. It’s the key to obtaining all other values.

“(2) Secondly, in both cases of rights and liberties, the “negative” ones do not have primacy over the “positive” ones by any law of the universe, except in your imagination. “

Unless you consider the law of non-contradiction to be a law of the universe. Positive rights are rather like division by zero in this respect: Once you add them to the system, you can construct situations where there are contradictions, where respecting one person’s ‘rights’ requires violating another’s.

And, I assure you, liberals don’t use the word ‘right’ in the same way the general public does, either, and don’t fool yourselves on this. Try talking to the average person about “welfare rights”, or something of that sort, if you’re in doubt about this.

“4. Bloix – you’re quite right, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the inherent private-ness of a gang of Klansmen burning your house down because you tried to register to vote, and that in the face of that, Goldwater and his acolytes arguing that the Federal government doing something about that was the greater violation of individual rights.”

And you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, while the 14th amendment didn’t authorize the federal government to reach private choices, it DID demand that states extend the equal protection of the law, and authorize the federal government to make sure of that. That means that the state damned well CAN, under the 14th amendment, be compelled to do something about a gang of Klansmen burning down your house, if they’d do something about anybody else burning down anybody else’s house.

The distinction you’re trying to distract from, is between discrimination in doing things that you’re otherwise entitled to do, and discrimination in doing things that you’re NOT otherwise entitled to do.

Jim Crow had two important components of state discrimination, within the reach of the federal government under the 14th amendment:

1. Government mandating discrimination. Rosa Parks was sent to the back of the bus as mandated by state law, not because the bus driver was a racist.

2. Government discriminating in extending the protection of the law, and thus enabling private discrimination of a rather violent sort. Not sending the police around if the Klan are burning down your house.

The Goldwater position didn’t let the federal government reach all discrimination, but the sort of discrimination that it DID let the federal government reach was by far the most important.

Apparently there were no people in the south that wanted Rosa Parks in the back of a bus, it was only the evil government that wanted that.

Why didn’t the good people of the south change the law to make things better? Because government is inherently bad, and decent people don’t get their hands dirty using the government to coerce people and derive them of their liberty.

If that’s true then who the hell was electing and re-electing the government that passed these horrible laws?

Listen, why don’t liberals understand how principled libertarianism is?

At which point, you’ll be in a situation where whether or not you get all, or even any, of the things you took in place of liberty is up to somebody else, because you handed control of your life over to them.

Does the one lunch-counter owner lose more liberty under the CRA than the hundred people who are denied his lunch without it?

Bad faith argument alert!

Henri Vieuxtemps, your social/political hypothetical is the equivalent to the “safety” argument that runs: “I don’t wear a seat-belts because I’d rather be thrown from the car to safety rather than get stuck inside and drown/burn to death”.

If I were more clever, I’d connect this to the apparent concern libertarians have with coercive seat-belt laws, but I’m not, so I won’t.

“Does the one lunch-counter owner lose more liberty under the CRA than the hundred people who are denied his lunch without it? “

Well, yeah. He loses control over “his” restaurant. while the hundred can just find their lunch somewhere else.

What “chose to focus on this”?

“”Yeah,” he told Matthews when asked if he would have voted against the act in Congress. “But I wouldn’t vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.””

He gets asked, and as a man of principle, he answers honestly. It’s Matthews at the focus control, address your question to him.

Brett Bellmore @69: “Unless you consider the law of non-contradiction to be a law of the universe. Positive rights are rather like division by zero in this respect: Once you add them to the system, you can construct situations where there are contradictions, where respecting one person’s ‘rights’ requires violating another’s.”

You already constructed contradiction in your libertarian system, just with negative liberties. If everybody discriminates against you, then you would have to move to someplace else to get a job and to buy a loaf of bread. So their negative liberty would contradict your negative liberty to not have to move from the place you were born into.

To my mind it is much more powerful form of coercion in fact.

Than the government making everyone serve everyone, not more powerful than what was done against African Americans.

Your negative liberty to not move is only violated if somebody forces you to move. Not enabling you to stay is hardly the same thing.

In 2008, I was laid off back in Michigan. I couldn’t find work within commuting distance of my home. If I had stayed, I would have eventually gone broke, and not been able to pay for food, or make the mortgage payments on the house my bank actually owned. I moved. This did not involve my rights being violated in any way.

I gather I’m supposed to find the idea of people moving in order to improve their circumstances offensive, somehow. Personally, I find the idea that people won’t move to improve their circumstances offensive. Take charge of your lives, people. Don’t ask others to improve them, improve them yourselves. And if this involves picking up and moving, DO IT.

You’re not sessile organisms.

Henri Vieuxtemps, your social/political hypothetical is the equivalent to the “safety” argument that runs: “I don’t wear seat-belts because I’d rather be thrown from the car to safety rather than get stuck inside and drown/burn to death”.

Sorry, I don’t see it. I was talking about delicate social interactions, not mechanical contraptions.

Mistermix over at Balloon-Juice has a relevant post up. You can find it here. He makes the point that in fact, if a place of business in the south wanted to be non-discriminatory to non-whites, they were prevented by state law from doing so. In short, the tyranny of the CRA was replacing the freedom fries of the Jim Crow laws. Why is one tyranny and the other isn’t? seems the relevant question to ask of the US libertarians who like that line of argument.

I apologize if I misunderstood your argument, but I don’t think your experience with being laid off and finding work in another area is equivalent to a discussion of wide-spread, severe structural racism that impacted the lives and well-being of millions.

Are the liberals in Canada basically social democrats too?

Oh hells no.

sg – I would argue that it was obsessed, but not necessarily above all else; rather there was a tension between the ideals of individual rights and human freedom and equality and the belief in unlimited property rights. As more and more working class people gained the franchise, and as trade unions and the rise of corporations thrust the “social question” into the public eye, eventually liberals had to make a choice – some of them became Tories of all parties, and some of them became New Liberals.
Brett Bellmore at 69 – let’s be careful with what the 14th amendment authorized, because the Congress and Supreme Court disagreed on this point. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 extended to the right to “make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens;” the Civil Rights Act of 1871 established that “any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State, shall subject… any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, …secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall,…be liable to the party injured” enforced through Federal courts and made it a Federal matter if any two persons attempted to “by force, intimidation, or threat” to “[deprive] any person or any class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges or immunities under the laws;” and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.”

The larger point here is that if state governments are unwilling to prevent discrimination, the Federal government has a duty to act. The Supreme Court eventually disagreed with these acts, but changed its mind eighty years later. At the same time, the Supreme Court did adopt, if just for corporations, the idea that the 14th amendment did incorporate Field’s broader, and economic, conception of privileges and immunities, etc.

But I really question whether you can separate these two categories of discrimination. If the only grocery stores in town refuse to serve you because you attempted to register to vote, or if the monopoly employer blacklists you because you signed your name to a civil rights protest letter, or if the landlord evicts you because you tried to desegregate the local school – these private acts have the same effect, if not a greater effect, than a private act of violence. I think Field is right here: “A person allowed to pursue only one trade or calling, and only in one locality of the country, would not be, in the strict sense of the term, in a condition of slavery, but probably none would deny that he would be in a condition of servitude. He certainly would not possess the liberties nor enjoy the privileges of a freeman.”
Henri – well, yes, Henri. “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…Congress shall have power to enforce.” The 14th amendment specifically set up the central government as the aegis of the people against state governments which were attempting to reduce large minorities or even majorities of the population into slavery in all but name.

I’m sorry to be exceptionalist on a thread on the U.S Civil Rights Act, but official discrimination has been the rule in pretty much every state of the union at one point in time – and the Federal government’s duty was to prevent that; obviously, duty and execution are not always in synch, but the principle is still there.

As for the power question, I think it’s actually an asset. Private actors (the kinds we’re talking about here) and local governments are much more powerful than individual citizens, and you need something more powerful than them to restrain them.

Henri Vieuxtemps, the seat-belt analogy runs A’s follows: Much as worrying about getting trapped by a seat belt is absurd compared to the danger of driving without one, the risk your hypothetical black southerner runs from not “knowing where the racists are” is absurd compared to the harm of out-and-out racist store policies. It’s a bad faith argument, or, if your serious, just a really bad argument, and it strikes me as particularly funny be because the libertarians I’ve known have succumbed to poutrage over coercive seatbelt laws (incidentally, I feel I should have the right not to kill some moran in what should have been a simple fender bender, but that’s separate).

In addition, you’re exhibiting another characteristic of libertarians, obtuseness as debating tactic.

Given that Brett Bellmore has stated he’s okay with a Jim Crow outcome of market decisions, what good does it do to engage with him about the particulars?

Even more explicitly, he’s said that the ‘evil’ of federal government intrusion to break up Jim Crow is far greater than the evil of an entire category of people living under the disenfranchisement and exclusion of a social structure in which the minority of wealth-controlling individuals dictate to the rest of the populace the precise circumstances under which those individuals will be allowed to share in the wealth.

It sounds quite a bit like a philosophy that is designed to defend the right of a lord to maintain a serfdom.

Henri at 76 – Henri, if you were black in the South in 1964, the real question is what do you when there’s only one grocery store in your small town and they refuse to sell to you, or when your landlord (who’s working together with all the other landlords through the White Citizens Council) evicts you, or when the monopoly employer blacklists you? We’re not talking about a paradigm of many different small providers, we’re talking about big institutions.

@Aneece, 100

I don’t care about any libertarians or any seatbelts; like I said, I don’t see seatbelts causing any social conflicts or tensions. A ban on refusing services based on various criteria (except to the communists) I do find problematic, however. If someone doesn’t want to serve me at a restaurant based on the way I look, I’d prefer them to refuse outright, rather than doing it because of the fear of a lawsuit.

Now, I’m open to the argument that it was a sensible enough solution, under the circumstances; but you guys aren’t even willing to admit that there is any tradeoff involved in it; that’s just crazy.

Brett Bellmore #87 — No, you’re not making sense. If you can’t get a job or buy food because of your skin color, not because of exterior economic conditions in Michigan, then everyone has forced you to move. In the case where economic conditions are bad or opportunities are non-existent, then no individual, or even no group of individuals, is willing the constraint upon you especially. Once economic conditions improved, you might stay despite your skin color, and get a job.

My working day would be different in that, for example, if I am a racist, I would not have to serve people I despise. That would probably make me less unhappy, less resentful. Less resentment would be passed to the next generation. 45 years later, there would be fewer people with confederate flags at a townhall meeting.

“What evidence do was have that there was a libertarian problem in search of a solution in the South, re: social Jim Crow? What’s was wrong with this social arrangement, from a libertarian perspective?”

1) I’m not a libertarian.

2) As far as I understand libertarianism the social arrangements that people come to are different from those that are imposed by law. It’s entirely possible, again as I understand it, for it to be immoral according to libertarians for the law to insist on a particular outcome even while such solves a social outcome which many/most libertarians would personally consider immoral.

Which ends up as, in no doubt my incomplete understanding, as being that libertarians would argue that both the imposition of and the illegality of social Jim Crow woul;d be morally wrong: perhaps wrong in different measure, but both wrong to some degree.

“I’m glad you’re happy about interracial dating,”

How sweet, we get to discuss my sex life on Crooked Timber.

“but it doesn’t deal with all, or indeed any, of the real problems faced by minorities in the UK. ”

Don’t be blitheringly stupid. A sufficiently high level of intermarriage (one that the UK passed decades ago as regards Afro Caribbeans for example) means that there aren’t any minorities about which anyone can be prejudiced. This has happened variously with Normans, Saxons, Hugenots, Irish, Catholics, immigrants to mention only my own genetic inheritance. We make jokes about D2 because he’s Welsh and Ginger and they’re different. It’ll happen again with any and every other group that immigrates in any great number: one of my previous colleagues in UKIP (you know, that political party described as being so horribly racist?), still working for the party, has just had a child by a Tamil: all of us are chipping in for that very English thing, the christening mug (er, this may or may not be appropriate, as none of us have ever asked about the religion thing).

@93 “Not just in the sense that you think it would wither away without being legally abolished. ”

That is the sense in which I’m arguing. Without the (immoral!) legal support for it it will whither away. As it has in the country that I know best.

Tim Worstall, two words:

Chicago. Boston.

Pre CRA, these places were such redoubts of racial harmony that many black Southern emigres returned to South, where at least the place they were required to stay in was clearly delineated.

Worstall – are you really saying that racial discrimination is dead in the U.K? Because evidence from matched-pair job application experiments shows otherwise – traditionally white names have an interview offer rate nearly 20% higher than traditionally muslim names and 12% higher than traditionally African/West Indian names. Ditto when it comes to acceptance rates at Oxbridge, etc.

It’s not clear from you 117 that you agree that the relevant parts of the CRA did aggravate racial animosity, but if you do, please demonstrate that what you call “refusal of basic services/attendant indignity” would represent a more serious problem.

No, the goal was to end segregation

So, has it been successful?

Henry at 118:

I’ve explained why denial of basic services is a more serious problem than individual animosity – see 104 and 105. Economic retaliation to uphold Jim Crow went way beyond spit in coffee.

And the Civil Rights Act has been moderately, though not completely successful. Disenfranchisement was generally eliminated, and modern disenfranchisement is an illegal, marginal behavior (Title I). Discrimination in “hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce” was eliminated – with very few private clubs retaining exclusive policies as well (Title II). State and local governments have ceased de jure discrimination (Titles III and IV, VI). Title VII (employment discrimination) is a bit of a mixed bag – certainly, there’s much less than there was in 1964, but the extent to which it remains is rather difficult to deal with under the Act (largely due to S.C decisions and uneven enforcement, rather than the act itself). Housing discrimination wasn’t covered in the ’64 Act – had to wait until ’68 – but there has been much less success here, due to a multiplicity of factors.

So overall, yeah the 1964 Act was successful.

Ron Paul was a racist before he became a ‘libertarian’ and has done nothing to suggest he has ceased being a racist since.

I guess we could pretend that his opposition to the civil rights act is purely a result of his libertarian philosophy, just like we could pretend that lowering taxes increases revenues and we can all loose weight eating ice cream.

Or we could instead pick the more likely conclusion that Ron Paul is in fact a racist who turned to libertarianism when he discovered that it provided him with a convenient cover for his racist views when outright racism became unfashionable.

Henri, one way I know racial animosity is less than it was:
1) We no longer hold well attended picnics in public parks beneath the burnt corpses of castrated black men.

2) We have a black president.

We can play dueling anecdotes if you want, but I think I hold the trump card.

See Boston, then see Chicago. Norms changed.

Henri – how did ‘the poverty’ get there? Or rather, how did it (in your example) acquire such definite and entrenched racial characteristics? This is a pattern of disadvantage and one-sided exploitation as between two groups we’re talking about here, not sickle cell.

It is surprising that libertarians don’t seem to grasp the real possibilities of coercion by contract. It is, after all, fairly common as a criminal or political gambit. Company towns are an example. The various versions of the Mafia are another – to a large extent it works by imposing itself as a contractual arbitrator.

This is a distinction, I think, that comes from the fact that not many libertarians are actual business people, nor do they think about business rather than economics. In a lot of supply chains there are quite a lot of potential control-points – typical ones are wholesale suppliers and some kinds of financial institutions. If you can’t get trade credit, or only get it on extortionate terms, your business is basically fucked. Similarly, if your access to important supply chain nodes (North American example: the grain elevator) is constrained you’re not going to be competing.

It’s well known that the temptation to organise a cartel for profit is very strong; the corollary is that organising one for power is at least as tempting.

This is all very strange, as the classic libertarian text is after all about a boycott.

Suppose nobody will deal with you. Take the libertarian logic all the way. If the racist shopkeeper won’t sell to you because of your skin color, then he is hypothesizing that you have somewhere else to go. So let’s apply that blind adherence to absolute logic which is so endearing of the libertarians; let’s suppose that nobody else in the world will deal with you, either. Well, you can’t go buy your own island, because you don’t have any money, because nobody in the world would give you a job. So the big question is: At that point, is the racist shopkeeper obliged to deal with you, to sell you bread? Because otherwise you would die, which (I will guess) violates your negative liberty. So the libertarian defense of the racist shopkeeper is based upon a contingency of the world (i.e. that there is some other place to go, a ghetto perhaps), and not only based on the faulty principle that rights to properties will be non-conflicting. In fact there are three premises: (1) the faulty principle that rights to properties will be non-conflicting; (2) the contingency in the world that there is some place else to go; and (3) the assumption that someone can intentionally do something detrimental to your interests while claiming to be indifferent to your suffering, and thus escape moral blame. If you take it logically all the way, Ron Paul’s position is like saying, “You cannot live, and you have no right to.”

“With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to buy bread, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a bread salesman, and that means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my store, the bakers who bake the bread, the farmers who grow the wheat.”

Jim Crow had two important components of state discrimination, within the reach of the federal government under the 14th amendment:

1. Government mandating discrimination. Rosa Parks was sent to the back of the bus as mandated by state law, not because the bus driver was a racist.

2. Government discriminating in extending the protection of the law, and thus enabling private discrimination of a rather violent sort. Not sending the police around if the Klan are burning down your house.

What about:

3. A wealthy property owner opens a shop and refuses to serve customers that are black. When the black customers refuse to leave his shop, he calls the police, and the government dutifully responds by violently removing them from his premises.

Libertarianism is about “freedom from government”, right? Now when libertarians (and most other people) demand freedom of speech, freedom from torture, freedom of religion and so on, there is one key aspect that is common to all these freedoms – namely that every single one of us has them in equal amounts. We all have the same amount of freedom of religion etc.

But property rights don’t work like that. We don’t all have the same right to property. Some have little or no property. And a small elite have vast swathes of property. So when we look at a libertarian state where the government refuses to interfere in who a business owner serves (freedom from government), we also have to look at the other side of the coin, at all the other people denied the enjoyment of that property (not just those the businessman refused to serve, but everyone else too, since only that businessman owns that property, no-one else). Those people can be removed by the government from that property, at the businessman’s mere whim. The government interfere’s with which points on the Earth’s surface they can freely interact with. As #1 says, MEN WITH GUNS from the government will remove them from that land. Their “freedom from government” is violated. And because the distribution of property is unequal, then it follows that those with more property have more “freedom from government” than those with less, all other things equal.

So unless everyone shares property in some fashion, or we split the world’s property 6.8 billion equal ways, then some people have more freedom from government, greater rights. Now, what could justify an unequal distribution of property and thus unequal amounts of freedom from government?

Your answer ought to be quite enlightening.

@105 – “I’ve yet to see libertarians grapple with the reality of company towns in America.”

This is where the gold standard comes in to play. It’s raining outdoors now, besides the Apple/Facebook/Google cloud now own the Mill. Redundant will be made virtual one day.

Are we not ignoring the marketarian stripe of libertarianism that says clearly some business owner would immediately fill the supply gap for feeding and sheltering of our discriminated-against souls? Perhaps we aren’t, because as long as the status quo deprives these individuals of capital yearning to be free, we may respect the market’s right to remain silent on these matters. We certainly wouldn’t want to comment on a possible hypothetical cartel of likeminded racists who would restrict access anyway to our colorblind market forces, should they wish to exert themselves.

On the other hand, some forward looking Galtian overlord might imagine the uses these disenfranchised might bring to society by subsidizing their relocation and employment, realizing of course that costs might be recouped once these individuals multiply and their labor is monetized. It would be a market driven investment. Perhaps costs could be recouped maximally by having them also live in the company town with company currency? This might have been touched upon above.

#143 was posted before I saw #142.

Well, racism is immoral to most leftists, including myself. But many of us also believe in freedom of speech even for views we disapprove of. Are you also saying that the reconciliation of these two concepts “isn’t obvious, and that the results may look a bit odd”?

* had, not have.

And while I’m at it, wouldn’t this debate be a lot more productive if historical economics was as widespread and reflexive as Econ101?

@StevenAttewell It’s obviously not a panacea, poverty and wealth inequality still have to be dealt with, but without it, it’s almost impossible to make any headway.

I don’t see it that way; it’s not obvious to me that cause-and-effect are aligned like this.

I’m not against social engineering, but in this economic system there have to be more clever ways to do it; like that law with Indians and cas1no licenses, for example. The federal government is very powerful, and if they really wanted to help, they could, for example, force their military contractors to build factories in economically depressed minority areas, hire locals there, and pay good wages. If that worked and reduced or even eliminated the white/black wealth disparity, I’m sure a whole lot of racial problems would go away as well.

It seems to me that this version of libertarianism enables a natural method by which a libertarian community could force black people back into slavery – or extermination – without ever breaching their “rights” as carefully defined by Brett. It depends on the victim group being economically weak for starters (e.g. fresh out of slavery) but that’s about all. Like this:

1) the majority group decides voluntarily to use its voluntary powers over its own property to exclude the minority from economic life: refuse to serve them in shops, refuse to employ them or offer them housing, so that the minority group rapidly becomes impoverished
2) as the community becomes impoverished, the majority community voluntarily offer to buy back their property at below market rates, further weakening them
3) the majority group decides voluntarily to use its voluntary powers over its own property to prevent the minority leaving: refuses to sell them bus tickets, plane tickets or gasoline
4) the majority group calls in all debts and evicts the minority from all current property, using the strictly legal stipulations of current contract law (1 months’ notice etc)
5) now this minority is essentially homeless and bankrupt, the majority group forms an association that offers them housing and employment in a specified camp area, under extremely punitive terms, including that they have to seek the camp manger’s permission to leave. They can own their own property inside camp, but admission to the camp is the cost of everything they still own. Every member of the minority group who chooses to enter the camp does so of their own free will, signing a contract. The remainder, starve to death outside or find a way to leave without any economic support.

Note also how easy step 3) is under a perfect libertarian society where all roads are privately owned.

At this point it’s up to the majority group to decide whether or not to start cutting the food allocation to the people in this camp, or use them to pick cotton.

At no point have they broken anyone’s “rights.” You could even stipulate this happening in a perfect libertarian community where the government strictly prevents any violence or outright theft – no lynching or cross burning (except in public spaces!) But in such a perfect libertarian community the majority group could openly state in media their intention to enslave the minority through voluntary action, and it would be legal and there would be nothing the rapidly empoverished community could do.

I’m interested to hear from the libertarians in the audience where in this model the minority group’s “rights” (under libertarian terms) have been violated. Where could a Federal government step in to prevent the process without abusing the “rights” of the majority community?

So, the feds, if they wanted to, could add these conditions to the contracts.

At which point the local majority community screams government racial discrimination, and you’re back to square one.

“Given that Brett Bellmore has stated he’s okay with a Jim Crow outcome of market decisions, what good does it do to engage with him about the particulars?”

Well, once you’re willing to start with false premises, you can prove pretty much anything. Let’s be clear about this: “Jim Crow” was a system of coercively enforced racial discrimination. You can’t divorce “Jim Crow” from the coercion. When people say they disapprove of “Jim Crow”, they’re not talking about private discrimination carried out without any coercion. They’re talking about a system where racial discrimination was enforced by armed gangs which would attack you if you didn’t take part in it. One of the gangs being the government…

So, no, as a libertarian I am NOT ok with Jim Crow.

Furthermore, as a person, I’m not ok with private racism carried out apart from any coercion. I think it’s a disgusting vice. I’ll have no part of it, I do not associate with people who engage in it.

But, again, as a libertarian I don’t think vices are appropriately the subject of laws. Social condemnation, shunning, that sort of thing, but not of laws.

In fact, I’ll go further: My disgust with racism is one of the things that makes me dislike “liberals”. Because you use of tendentious defintions to establish your innocence while you demand systematic racial discrimination in such areas as hiring and school admissions doesn’t particularly fool me.

Finally, SG, interesting scenario. The libertarian response would be, it violates nobody’s rights if somebody on a deserted island starves to death because they can’t supply all of their needs themselves. Why, then, would it violate their rights if there happened to be other people about, and the same thing happened anyway?

But even in a liberal world, if everybody is against you, you’re screwed. So how does this implausible scenario make libertarianism look any worse than liberalism?

“Why, then, would it violate their rights if there happened to be other people about, and the same thing happened anyway?”

It does seem sometimes like the ideal world for some libertarians would be one with no one else in it.

oooooooooh do we have a real life libertarian here?

Perhaps I may ask then: what would a libertarian have to say about this?

Because I genuinely don’t see how a libertarian could even begin to have an opinion on it.

JH, I’m don’t actually agree with the Paul/Bellmore position here, but for the sake of a nit, I will play devil’s advocate on one issue.

One serious question is the counterfactual: would things get better if governmental Jim-Crow were abolished, but social Jim Crow left in place (or at least, no federal law against it). This depends greatly on what we mean by social Jim Crow.

If racists are allowed to privately enforce their code on blacks, and this is tacitly accepted by the government (i.e., the police won’t help you remove someone by force or lynch them, but they won’t put you in prison for doing it either), then this is still in a sense governmental Jim Crow.

If racists are free to not transact with black people, but are *not* free to prevent them by violence from transacting with each other or non-racist whites and others, then it is perfectly possible for black people to build up a great deal of property. History bears this out. There were some very successful primarily black towns in the South during reconstruction. They disappeared or failed because racist terrorists pillaged and burned them, stealing or destroying their property and killing many of the people, not unlike the pogroms in eastern Europe.

Even while they were unable to transact business fairly and equitably with most of the white population, and even under real and actual Jim Crow, it was possible for blacks to build their own settlements and economies that were quite a bit more successful than anything they could experience as sharecroppers or servants in racist white communities — *until* the white people took notice and destroyed them violently.

A legal regime in which laws against violence were truly enforced equitably would almost certainly have been enough to make a huge difference.

The question I have (and the reason I could never take the hard-right-libertarian line on this question) is whether it was possible for legal enforcement against violence to ever be equitable in the immediately post-Jim Crow south. It’s still not completely equitable *today* in places that don’t have a legacy of slavery or explicit Jim Crow laws. Given that, some kind of strict legal guidelines to push in that direction were, I believe necessary and appropriate.

But the idea that a truly non-discriminatory legal regime could and probably would ultimately have led to the end of social Jim Crow as well (or at least something like what we have now — still heavily discriminatory, but rarely explicitly so and much ameliorated among most of the white population) doesn’t seem at all far-fetched to me.

The question is whether such a legal regime was possible in the absence of specific federal steps against the social structure of Jim Crow. I don’t think it was, and I think the reason people like Paul and Bellmore take the position they do is not that they disagree, it’s that they don’t even ask themselves the question.

JH @151: Everyone in fact disapproves of Jim Crow because of its political and social character, not just because everyone who is contributing to this ugly political and social situation is, privately, an unvirtuous figure. What this shows, I think, is propertarians who disapprove of Jim Crow are, in fact, operating with a ‘richer’ political theory than they think they are operating with. They actually disapprove of social Jim Crow for the reasons pretty much everyone else does. But there really isn’t space for this in their theory.

You’re imputing the following claim to propertarians:

X is wrongfully harmful if and only if X violates a person’s rights.

If denied, this puts the propertarian in the awkward position of having to explain why, if social Jim Crow is wrongfully harmful, the government cannot forbid it.

But this isn’t really much of a trap. A propertarian explains that not all forms of wrongful harm justify the use of violence to prevent such harm; or that a due respect for the dignity of each person must entail allowing each person to use their sphere of freedom in a way that will, in certain ways, harm others; or, contingently, that in the case of the US, he believes that the harm permitted is outweighed by the harm that would be done by reducing property rights; or any of a variety of other moves. He’ll explain, in short, that “wrongful harm” does not always mean “harm that the government would be justified in forbidding.”

Part of the problem is that there are different premises on which a general libertarian theory might stand. Different combinations of those premises can result in different responses to the problem you’ve raised. There may be some specific set of premises which really does lock a particular type of libertarian into a contradiction – or at least into a moral claim that is not supportable by his theory – but not all libertarians will be so trapped.

John wrote: “But why should propertarians personally consider it immoral? Deciding, personally, to support social Jim Crow is a private decision to do something privately with your private property. You might suggest that it’s immoral to be racist, but I’m not sure that libertarians are committed to that. It’s a matter of private belief, after all. And if your actions, pursuant of your private beliefs, extend only to the uses of your private property, it’s hard to me to see where the immorality in it lies, for a propertarian.”

I think that you’re going too far with what we can ascribe to libertarianism. Suppose that we live in Libertarianland and I am a racist shopkeeper who refuses to serve African Americans. Some years later, I come to see that my racism is wrong and serve all equally. On your construal, I cannot be properly said to see how my past self and my past actions were wrong, since, after all, Old Racist Me was just using his property, etc. But the move from seeing racism as a-okay to seeing it as wrong had better be describable in moral terms even in Libertarianland. Of course, you’re free to just say this is a massive reductio of libertarianism, showing it to be like emotivism.

What libertarian claims to think is wrong is interference with persons’ use of their property that does not infringe on the right of others to use their property. I can muster moral disapproval of racist shopkeepers and try to persuade others to boycott them. Racist shopkeepers can make the next move using their speech rights and property rights. There does not seem to be any interference implied here.

None of this is meant to be a defence of libertarianism, since I don’t agree with it and I do agree with all those who are skeptical of the idea that a properterian regime would lead to racism, Jim Crow and the like going away.

“So you agree, Brett, that the scenario is plausible under a libertarian society, without anyone breaking any laws?”

SG, I explicitly describe the scenario as “implausible”, and your response is that I’ve agreed that it’s “plausible”? Can you explain to me why I should bother replying to anything you say, given that you’re going to invert my response?

Steven @146- exactly- hence the magical market being a “no true” creature, except of course if we get rid of all regulation, which only prevents the blessed event from happening. The true, free market. It is just over the horizon, I can feel it.

And now I close the invisible sarcasm tag with extreme prejudice.

most corporate liberals are more or less libertarians– but just scared of guns, and too stupid to gamble or solicit ho’s

c.l.ball @ 8
Interesting to consider. Suppose your suggestion played out. Some private facilities were segregated and some were not, because some individuals would want segregation and some would not. Of course the private facilities that were not segregated would not hire individuals who wanted segregation.

Now, the libertarian dogma is that the non-segregated facilities would succeed where the segregated facilities failed. Unfortunately, for the individuals who wanted segregation, this would mean the places where they wanted to work tended to fail. They might decide for second-best and go to non-segregated facilities, but these would not hire them, according to their policy.

It seems unfair.

So is it OK not to do any business with firms that hire doctrinaire libertarians? And could Brett share the name of his employer so we could do so?

SG, you posit a situation where everybody is a libertarian, and everybody hates your guts, and attribute the fact that you’d be in deep doo doo to the fact that everybody was a libertarian, rather than your being universally loathed. Meanwhile, in a world where everybody was, say, a utilitarian, and hated your guts, instead of simply being shunned, you’d be starring in the “Flay SG alive telethon for Muscular Dystrophy”, and they’d think it was fine, because it was for a good cause, and the enjoyment everybody got out of your suffering neatly canceled the suffering itself.

And you think libertarianism has problems…

Frankly, liberalism is fine with designating victim classes, and justifying discrimination against them. Ask any Asian American trying to get into the college of their choice, and running up against affirmative action. You even have your five minute hates, though the one against the Koch brothers has gone on for rather more than five minutes.

I’m not impressed with your moral pretensions.

When people say they disapprove of “Jim Crow”, they’re not talking about private discrimination carried out without any coercion.

(shrug) but they’d say the same thing about private discrimination carried out without any coercion, and I doubt too many folks are even taking the time to make a careful distinction. When people say they disapprove of “Jim Crow” they’re (usually) expressing disapproval of white people treating black people like dirt. If you ask them why they disapprove, most of ’em will say something like “because you shouldn’t treat people like that” and only a rare, precious few will say “because business owners were being coerced!”

For most people “this was wrong” is distinct from “it was illegal to do otherwise,” even when both happen to be true. (Which I don’t intend to deny.)

good luck finding one of those firms; they tend not to remain in business for very long unless they receive regular infusions of taxpayer money.

…ah, so defense contractors, then.

And you think libertarianism has problems…

I will never agree with you more fervently, Brett. Any utilitarian model that allows some people to induce arbitrarily much suffering onto other people is junk. (Now, ok, most of the modern utilitarian models that people take interest in today don’t make this mistake; for example, they set a certain level of suffering effectively at minus infinity, and go into alephs to sustain numerical comparisons. And it was useful to me to learn about early utilitarian models in my undergrad philosophy course. Some junk’s instructive. But still. Opportunities to agree with you are rare, I can’t pass it up.)

Henri @149 – I’m sorry, if you can’t understand how an inability to buy food might impede people’s willingness to assert their basic rights, you’re not arguing in good faith.

Regarding the “build Federal factories” argument, we have historical evidence of this as well: the WPA provided the first real competition for rural Southern employers, and later the war industries would do the same. We know what the response was – Southern farmers were outraged (famously, one Southern constituent wrote his Congressmen to ask “how am I supposed to hire a [racial expletive deleted] to chop cotton for fifty cents a day, when he can get a dollar an hour to dig a ditch?”), and tried as much as possible to undermine and eliminate the program, and then during the war, everything possible to keep factories and army bases Jim Crow.

And again, it’s hard to get political support for these actions when existing economic institutions can be used to threaten and intimidate people from voting, allowing Jim Crow a monopoly on the political process.

But more importantly – none of these things would be acceptable to libertarians. Federal intervention in the economy, etc.

A libertarian does not have to concede Scenario 1 to be perfect politically, since he is not committed to the proposition that the perfection of a polity consists in the mere respect of the negative liberties of others.

Libertarians can view a society riven by bigotry as morally inferior as a society. But rather than infringe property rights, they might support alternative means for improvement: fully integrated schools, curriculum designed to increase positive interactions and cast doubt on racism (or… consonantism, in the example), programs designed to increase capital investment in areas that are underinvested due to a manifest failure of the market, and so forth.

The complications you add to the hypothetical allows the discussion to become more about sociology and political science than political philosophy.

Let’s lay out the same scenario.

And then let’s just posit this: the CRA is the ONLY WAY to end the brutal exclusion of B from social and economic opportunity.

If the CRA were the ONLY WAY to end the brutal exclusion of B from social and economic opportunities, could a libertarian support it?

Why are we debating insanity?
Without government there is no property.
Think of going to the store and coming back to find that seal team 6 has taken up residence in THIER new house. Yes the fact that, without government, you have no way of removing them, means that they own the house.

Now imagine a person who sees property rights as the ultimate good and government as the ultimate evil.

That is the definition of insanity.

You wonder why the US is sinking from the first world to the third world.
Because instead of solving the country’s problem, we are debating with the insane.

elspi – because we tried not debating insanity and we got Reagan for our troubles.

Lee A. Arnold :“The libertarian response would be, it violates nobody’s rights if somebody on a deserted island starves to death because they can’t supply all of their needs themselves. Why, then, would it violate their rights if there happened to be other people about, and the same thing happened anyway?”

Ans.: Because in that case, the logical conclusion is that the others are contributing to your death, if they are not completely causing it.

No. I believe the libertarian argument is precisely that, barring specific ah- unapproved by libertarianism? actions against you, the others are not causing your death. If you own property surrounded by other’s property, and starve because you cannot pay the toll to leave, they are not causing your death. If you sell your property to pay the toll, that is a legitimate acquisition of property by the other, representing a voluntary transaction between two individuals. All ‘trade’ requires the voluntary consent of both individuals. Any individual can refuse to trade with any other. Your elevation of trade to a right, and thus also an obligation, is foreign to libertarian assumptions.

Libertarianism, what ever its nominal claims, guarantees no effective rights to anyone. This is because we give rights to get rights, and being forced to give rights, any rights, to others, as by law, is, I believe, considered theft. So effectively, all rights are in proportion to your property, which is not guaranteed. They make a big issue of ‘ownership of self,’ but this is useless without property.

I think the strict propertarian version is like a game of Monopoly, but without the squares you can land on and not have to pay rent. Unless you own them.

My ans. was given to refute the libertarian rhetorical question, not to answer with the libertarian position! Sorry for the confusion.

Brett, the issue is not that you’d be fucked in either society. The issue is that your vision of your society denies that what is being done impinges on anyone’s rights. And if the government were to intervene to force the As to sell to the Bs, it would in your view be a gross violation of the rights of the As. You may not have noticed, but when liberals talk about Jim Crow or the holocaust, they tend to do so within a framework of violation of fundamental rights, of creating a society with checks and balances to prevent people being able to do this, etc. But what does a libertarian do? Throw up your hands and say “that’s just tough, they should have moved.”

Someone far above pointed out that once the As give up this fundamental right to trade with whomever they want, society is on its way to less freedom and ultimately bad things may happen. But in the scenario John Holbo and I have described, society is on its way to those bad things anyway.

And incidentally, what is this?

Ask any Asian American trying to get into the college of their choice, and running up against affirmative action.

Are you suggesting that “liberals” have established “affirmative action” quotas that limit the number of Asian Americans who can get into a college? Please do tell more about this sordid nightmare.

Why, yes, I am suggesting exactly that. In fact, it’s not even much of a secret, as I’m sure you’re aware. Since everything has to add up to 100%, if you establish a floor for one or more race/ethnicity, you have to establish ceilings for others.

I do hope you’re not going to go all post-modern on me, and deny that affirmative action programs involve quotas…

And, of course it’s possible to be a propertarian libertarian opponent of “social ‘Jim Crow'”, if by that you mean pervasive non-coercive discrimination. After all, since libertarianism under determines your position on all sorts of things, once the non-coercion criteria is satisfied, a propertarian libertarian is entirely capable of having other reasons for opposing the discrimination, which do not conflict with their libertarianism so long as they implement that opposition non-coercively.

@187, Henri @149 – I’m sorry, if you can’t understand how an inability to buy food might impede people’s willingness to assert their basic rights, you’re not arguing in good faith.

Again, if, in a segregated environment, one (a sizable minority) group has no ability to buy food, then you have a much bigger problem than segregation.

You seem to believe that private discrimination is unacceptable, but once everyone (with a good credit card) is welcomed at Bob’s Diner, – that’s it, your work is done, justice has prevailed. Well, guess what, there’s still a whole bunch of people, of various races, ethnicities, and religions, unable to buy food. Indeed, most of them are probably of the same race that, in the past, Bob discriminated against. But they are still not allowed in Bob’s Diner, simply because they got no money. The ban on private discrimination doesn’t do anything for them.

No, you’ve alleged that I don’t care one whit about it, because I wouldn’t pass a law against it. Completely ignoring that libertarians certainly do care about a lot of things they wouldn’t pass laws concerning. It’s like you can’t believe that anybody cares about something, if they’re not willing to pass a law concerning it.

You will object that the real world doesn’t work quite like this. Of course not. But it works somewhat like this.

Not really. In your scenario, the police chief is obviously an A. And he has the same attitudes about Bs and B-lovers as the majority of his fellow As. So most, if not all, of his force is also non-B-loving As, with those same attitudes. The idea that law would actually be evenly applied in that scenario is ridiculous, even if that’s what is on the books — just as in history, law enforcement would effectively become another arm of letterism. (And if that *is* what’s on the books, it probably won’t stay that way — by the same reasoning, the legislature is also composed of As in good standing. As is the supreme court, so judicial review is no help either.)

Social and legal discrimination aren’t divisible because the law is enforced by humans who are part of the society. Any social institution will inevitably affect the policemen and prosecutors and judges and jurors too.

Henri – you’ve misread me pretty badly, and given that I’ve been pretty vocal on issues of economic redistribution on this blog, not very charitably either.

My argument is that, in the specific historical circumstances of the Civil Rights Act, the ability to buy food is a crucial intermediary step to ensuring that poor people are able to exercise their political rights de facto as well as de jure; even if the Federal government were to engage in a fundamental redistribution of wealth, this would still be the case in the short-term. It takes time to build new grocery stores, establish supply chains and delivery schedules, etc. It’s a “teach a man to fish, and he might starve to death while he’s learning to fish so why not give him a fish while he’s learning” situation.

bianca – I believe a star-bellied sneetch machine was involved somehow.

Sometimes when I’ve been reading certain CT threads for a while, I start thinking about a speech from Perestroika, the one that begins, “I hate America, Louis,” and ends, “I’ll show you America . . . crazy, terminal and mean.”

But on the other side, not surprisingly for a blog like CT, it isn’t entirely obvious what the objection to slavery is. I think many of the US discussants would like to distinguish actual slavery from “mere wage slavery.” That is what Steven Attewell has advocated with his relation of the legendary company towns. Because–in Alex’s scenario, say–suppose you had taken away from you almost all the land you earlier thought belonged to you, leaving you not enough to support yourself, but just enough to give you what you needed to get enough resources from others to support yourself, if you worked very hard. This might be said to be all the resources you were really entitled to (if any should not work, neither shall he eat). But nobody here who knows about the specific historical circumstances (as Steven Attewell phrased it) would compare the two situations; nobody would think of it unless they had a problem distinguishing reality from fantasy.

JH @200: I think, actually, libertarians are committed to this. How not? I agree that libertarians actually don’t believe this. But I think what that shows is that libertarians (we are, as I keep saying, talking about propertarians here) really have thicker political values than their theory officially admits. The lesson to be drawn is that we should ignore libertarians when they tell us to focus just on the pure, negative protection of property rights. If they really believed that, they would think scenario 1 was politically perfect, which they obviously don’t really think, because it’s really quite politically horrible.

My understanding of propertarianism is that it holds that persons own themselves, including their labor, and whatever that labor produces. Violations of rights are really violations of this right of ownership. Governments, the non-anarchist propertarians believe – for varied reasons, as far as I can tell – are constrained in their actions by such ownership rights. In fact, the only purpose of government is to protect those ownership rights.

So, I gather JH would argue, it follows from propertarianism that Scenario 1 is without political fault. But this conclusion conflicts with a strong intuition that Scenario 1 is flawed politically. Propertarians must therefore either expand the fence-lines of their ideology, or find a way to explain away that strong intuition.

But propertarianism isn’t necessarily a full moral theory, or even a full political theory. A propertarian can agree that government is ethically bound to respect the ownership rights of all persons, while at the same time launching a broader critique of the nature of segregation and bigotry in his A/B society. He can argue it impoverishes our lives as persons, that it degrades our culture, and that every person should be treated with equal dignity regardless of whether they are vowel or consonant.

This brings us to the hard part of JH’s argument, which is that this propertarian critique doesn’t really get at our intuition. The propertarian is holding the discriminatory practice to be a “private vice” and not a “public vice.” Unless one equates “public vice” with “behavior that government ought to prevent,” I don’t think this is enough though.

JH, can you expand on this last part of the argument?

That is, to Joe Propertarian, efforts to collaborate at depriving law-abiding Propertarian Enterprises Inc. of sales, to convince its management to accept restrictions on their hiring, promotion, and firing, to punish civic disengagement and reward constructive civic engagement, and so on, all seem far more coercive than anything PEI managers may do to their employees or to any victims of their negative externalities. Propertarianism flourishes with (feeds, and is fed by) a sympathetic identification with the interests of corporate decision-makers and wealthy entrepreneurs, to the point where any effort to impede their ability to do just as they wish and get rich doing so feels like an attack on the propertarian’s own self.

As much fun as you’re all having with the “propertarian” epithet, it’s quite easy to see that the issue doesn’t require anything like private property in order to get off the ground. Consider a world where there is a service — not an inert physical good, a genuine service that must be provided by other people — that each person requires a certain amount of in order to lead a decent life. (For the sake of harnessing some latent intuitions, let’s call this service “health care”.) Suppose that health care is something that only relatively few people can perform. Now suppose further that the providers of health care are for the most part heavily racist and as a consequence refuse to serve certain segments of the population… well, you can see where this is going.

The point is that private property is not what’s at issue here — it’s rather a basic sort of freedom of transaction, whether that transaction is mediated by physical property or not.

John Holbo,

I don’t see anything in your post that addresses the position that I think moderately reflective libertarians would take (and which I have sympathy with): namely that the basic kind of freedom of association I just mentioned (as well as property rights) provide side constraints upon action directed towards any other goal we might have. So I guess I’d take the first horn of your purported dilemma: yes, these are values that we should seek to secure politically and socially; but there are side constraints upon how we can permissibly do this.

I think there is a clear analogy between us here and those who believe that a) free speech is an important value and that b) racist speech is wrong, and should be opposed in the public domain by all right thinking people. (I imagine a lot of people here (but not all) will sympathize with that conjunction of views). It’s not as if racist speech is merely a private vice, though — that’s why we oppose it in the public domain, and speak out against it when we hear it, and try to stop those who have a track record of it gaining positions of power (insofar as we legally can), and so on.

Henri – I’m arguing, as would be obvious if you stopped to think about the actual historical reality of Jim Crow, that access to food and other basic necessities (shelter, clothing, employment and credit needed to pay for those things) was made conditional on whether you acquiesced to Jim Crow. If you challenged the system, you faced immediate retaliation and there are thousands of documented cases of this in the history of reconstruction through the civil rights movement.

As Eric Foner points out in Nothing But Freedom, this was not incidental but absolutely central to the operation of the Jim Crow system. As Confederate General Robert Richardson, treasurer of the American Cotton Planters Association (and that’s not a coincidence), said in 1865: “the emancipated slaves own nothing, because nothing but freedom has been given to them.” This fact – that whites held access to the basic tools for survival and could use blacklisting as a threat against potential challengers to white rule – was what let Jim Crow function smoothly. The alternative was a 24/7 military occupation by the white South of the black South, which would have been ruinous; local economic monopoly allowed the cost of violent suppression to be limited to crisis management and individual examples.

And the same thing was true in the 1960s – which is why civil rights activists cared about immediate access to public amenities as well as the long-term project of the Freedom Budget or the War on Poverty.

Long time lurker de-lurking:

How would libertarianism treat something like good, old-fashioned quid pro quo sexual harassment? In Libertopia, what’s the legal status of the boss saying “Have sex with me or you’re fired”? Is that illegal because it’s “initiating force”? Is it illegal because it’s fraud? Is it illegal for some other reason? Or is it private conduct that, no matter how reprehensible, Libertopia law does not reach?

And, if you don’t like the threat to the job, what about the boss who says “Have sex with me and I’ll give you a nice raise and a promotion.” What’s the legal status of that in Libertopia? And would the co-workers who didn’t get the raise and promotion have any legal claim against the boss?

Just want to add that John Holbo’s posts on Libertarianism and the comment threads those posts engender are the best!

Ok, re-lurking now.

I know I’m late to this, but I don’t care whether Paul himself is a bigot. His stated position forbids the US government from using public power (granted by the Constitution) to ensure that all persons get to participate fully in the economy, or can exercise their right to travel, or to be anything but dependent on those who seek to exploit them. These rights trump the alleged right of an owner of a public accommodation to exclude people. His reasons for that are irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned.

I also don’t care whether he is being principled in taking that position. Consistency in the service of vice is still vice.

That said, it strikes me that the principles behind the CRA apply well beyond the particulars of that law. Most of the politicians who would take Paul to task are willing to say they support the CRA, but how many of them articulate the reasons why or suggest ways of extending it’s reach?

“Andrew – I don’t think that propertarianism really holds that “persons own themselves, including their labor, and whatever that labor produces”? Because if you follow that logic, as Marx did in 1848, capitalists have no right to surplus labor value. “

No, because owning your labor, you can sell it. Which is what employees do, they sell their labor to employers. Capitalists have a right to surplus labor value when, and only when, they have bought it.

Are libertarians generally in favor of making it easier for ordinary people to file lawsuits if they think their rights are infringed even by the more powerful?

Brett:
1. The definition of surplus labor value is that the employer isn’t buying – they get it for free, because they are able to exploit the inherent coercion in a dependent wage-worker class (ironically, a form of coercion that fit within the classical liberal worldview of Adam Smith but seems to have been selected against thereafter). In other words, the argument is that workers are being paid less than the value of their labor.
2. However, my argument about the neglect by libertarians of the economic liberty of workers goes beyond just the wage issue. Consider the sweeping powers that employers claim to regulate the speech of their employees, to conduct warrant-less searches of their persons and belongings, to surveil them, etc. – and the expanding role of private security forces in the world. In the propertarian view, none of these things are coercive because they don’t involve state actors.

Bianca: In my experience, propertarian libertarians talk simultaneously about moving a lot of action from regulation to litigation and about how good it will be to make various kinds of lawsuits much harder to file. They tend to be strongly hostile to class action suits, and to contingency fees when these enable less well-off people to press suits against owners and the wealthy. So the practical outcome is “You should take that to court…but won’t be able to.”

Of the current Supreme Court justices, Scalia and Thomas, I think, most often rule in ways congenial to actual libertarian emotions, as opposed to the occasional noble bit of libertarian rhetoric.

In the propertarian view, none of these things are coercive because they don’t involve state actors.

Needs a bit of unpacking, I think. Argument #1 is that the employee has willingly forfeited certain rights by signing the contract. If he or she didn’t have any alternative to signing the contract, we go to argument #2, which is that he or she should have looked harder. (Objectivists actually make a principle of withholding empathy, which may have something to do with their prominence in propertarian circles.) It’s only in the unlikely event that argument #2 fails – if our propertarian concedes that this employee really, really didn’t have any alternative to signing the contract – that we need to go to argument #3, which is that in this particular case it just plain sucks to be him or her, but the overall situation is still basically OK (because no MEN WITH GUNS).

The Right to Trade and Communicate would come to require the safety-net and welfare state. The Right to Property and the Right to Trade both have some interesting outcomes. We have already shown that coerced civil rights becomes a social necessity, to prevent the Right to Property from effecting its logical conclusion, which is to run you off the face of the planet.

Furthermore, we saw that the Right to Property hopes to avoid blame for immorality, not with a moral or philosophical argument, but upon the contingency that there is someplace else for the discriminated to go.

The Right to Trade is impacted by a different contingency, the Pareto distribution. It is another constant contingency. There appears to be no society that has not exhibited the Pareto distribution: the 80-20 distribution of incomes and wealth: about 20% of the people control 80% of the wealth, and vice versa, a rough rule of thumb. It appears to be an empirical law of societies; in the Soviet Union for example, the Communist Party had access to most of the wealth. We can only assume therefore that it has little to do with anyone’s moral philosophy, and rather it has to do with the positional geometry inherent to any system of social information and control, any such system at all. Where you are in it, of course, is partly determined by your skill and your luck, if not some older hereditary order. But no matter, it always has a top and bottom.

If that is true, then there will be some people left out of any system, including the market system. Indeed we observe empirically that markets surely do not solve the Pareto distribution, and at the bottom of the distribution, some people are left out of the market system.

But what happens if we adhere to the Right to Trade, which is logically necessitated by the division of labor?

If we do, then we have to make sure that all people are able to trade for necessities, because specialization and the division of labor has pushed us long past the era of self-sustaining lifestyles.

This justifies certain governmental coercions to provide cash transfers insofar as they enable the Right to Trade: e.g. unemployment compensation, retirement security (such as U.S. Social Security) and universal healthcare. These support the participation of recognized and predictable segments of the population in the trade game. So the Right to Trade would be a primary justification for the safety-net & welfare state.

Bruce Baugh: I actually asked about not getting any service anywhere within 50 miles, which was the tenor (and an actual quote) of some of the comments. “Good or comparable” sounds awfully nebulous to use as a legal standard, doesn’t it?

Also, FWIW, opposing a legal ban on an action isn’t the same as opposing the existence of a norm against that action. For instance, I don’t think that adultery should be illegal, per se, but I still favor a social norm against it.

Bianca – I don’t think it is a mistake. 30% of union drives encounter illegal terminations for pro-union speech; 78% encounter mandatory one-on-one anti-union meetings with managers; 92% encounter mandatory group anti-union meetings; 52% encounter INS threats and 51% encounter threats of plant closures or benefit losses.

That’s just the most obvious case. 40% of the workforce is subject to random drugs testing. By law, your workspace and locker are subject to search, as are any emails, phone calls, texts or computer usage, and the employer has the legal right to monitor you with security cameras.

And because of the ubiquity of at-will employment and the decline in union protections, due process is vestigal.

Outside of prisons, the workplace is the least free place in America.

* racist,

Outside of prisons, the workplace is the least free place in America.

Less free than let’s say the average public high school?

@JH, 252, I’m guessing Andrews’ thought experiment is a version of the temptation of Ivan Karamazov, why pollute it with Rawlsianism and other irrelevant stuff?

Also, too much emphasis on property. Let’s make it cleaner: what if it’s a racist barber; traveling, door-to-door barber. No property, only labor.

“Brett:
1. The definition of surplus labor value is that the employer isn’t buying – they get it for free, because they are able to exploit the inherent coercion in a dependent wage-worker class (ironically, a form of coercion that fit within the classical liberal worldview of Adam Smith but seems to have been selected against thereafter). In other words, the argument is that workers are being paid less than the value of their labor.”

Surplus labor value is labor by people the employer hasn’t hired, and isn’t paying? Well, then, I agree: Employers have no right to it. I’m unclear on how often people, for instance, come in off the street and sweep your warehouse without demanding in advance to be paid. I certainly don’t see it happening where *I* work…

They do, however, have a right to the product of any labor they are paying for, which, outside of unpaid interns, is pretty much all of it, despite your effort to define a portion of the labor paid employees provide as somehow “unpaid”, apparently because you think they’re not being paid enough.

I agree wage theft is a significant problem. But what you’re talking about is people being paid what they’ve agreed to work for, and you thinking they’re being cheated because they should be paid more.

You justify it on the basis that they owned the labor, and can sell it for any price they want, no matter what you think it’s worth.

As for the average wage being $40,711, and average “output per worker” being $105,000, how can that be justified under a labor theory of value? A purely labor theory of value is crap. The difference isn’t being produced by the worker, it’s being produced by the equipment they’re working on, the “capital”. I’m a tooling engineer, are you telling me the stuff I design doesn’t contribute anything to the value being produced in my workplace? When the machines are running during the night shift, unattended, who do we attribute the output to, the janitor?

JH @252: Yes, I shouldn’t have tossed in that our democratic-socialist was a Rawlsian. Fair point. But we can alter the hypothetical in any number of ways to show the same general conclusion: anyone with a moral absolute (MA) can be confronted with a hypothetical in which their government performs perfectly, but is constrained by the MA from taking the only action which will secure one important value or another. The normatively ideal government can fail to secure a normatively ideal society. If I’m reading you correctly, you think that propertarians really have no normative ideal of society beyond a government that respects ownership rights; or that if they do, it’s a weak normative ideal of society that holds less moral force for them than it should. So you write:

But it is also an expression of an important component of the propertarian social spirit. Namely: ‘it’s not illegal to be an asshole, so get off my lawn.’ This is not a propertarian ideal, per se, but it is a quite central part of the propertarian ideal that this is a tolerable attitude. It is normatively obligatory to tolerate this social attitude. […] Gaze at the spectacle of scenario one, realize it’s basically ‘not illegal to be an asshole’, pluralized, and learn the important lesson that social Jim Crow is not unfair, not unjust, doesn’t make anyone unfree, violates no one’s rights or equality. […] You can say ‘tsk, I say!’ But that’s about it. But most of us think social Jim Crow, of a scenario 1 sort, is something that calls for a firmer normative response than ‘tsk’, in effect.

I think this really gets at the center of the argument. But one can read propertarianism as simply a theory about the limits of justified coercion, and as nothing more. This theory can be set in a larger theory of human goods and nature – an odd admixture of John Finnis and Nozick, for instance. In this larger theory, we find other moral prescriptions – perhaps even other moral absolutes – in addition to the moral absolute (or very heavy weighting) of not violating ownership rights.

A propertarian of this sort might say about Scenario 1 that, given his view of human nature, it is logically impossible for such a situation to truly be stable and seek to avoid it altogether. In practice, I suspect that the dissonance this Scenario 1 produces (for reasons I touch on below) will in most conversations produce that response.

But, a more robust propertarian might take up the challenge and explain that, regardless, in Scenario 1 one would be obligated not merely to say “tsk” but to form voluntary associations, to speak against, to show by one’s conduct that the exclusion of Bs is wrong, to support Bs financially, and in short to enact a vigorous campaign of persuasion. In the end, he claims, we arrive a society that has more authentically achieved the values of human community and fellowship, of the recognition of the dignity of all, because we did so not by the illegitimate violence of government, but by the enlightenment of individuals.

In a significant respect, this differs little from what many other political theories would prescribe, except that for those theories the object of such a campaign would be both to persuade a population to change and to persuade a population to adopt a CRA. Our democratic socialists of varying philosophical foundations could agree, for instance, that an individual A or B ought not force an A to open his store to all at gunpoint. They might say that government has the permissible power to do so, following a legitimate process, and that government, following such a process, should do so. But in both cases the objectionable aspects of Scenario 1 must be tolerated while the process goes forward.

I agree with you that propertarians must do more to explain how their insistence on either an absolute respect for rights of ownership, or a heavy weighting, coheres with their other values. And my impression is that many propertarians do hold the very narrow, cramped attitude to which you object. Those propertarians have become so fixated on rights of ownership that they adopt propertarianism not simply as a theory of the limits of coercion, but as a thorough moral theory – which, I agree, is easily shown to most of us to be absurd.

Hypotheticals like Scenario 1 might encourage propertarians who think of propertarianism as a full moral theory to reflect more fully on whether such a propertarianism coheres with their actual moral sense. For those propertarians who view propertarianism as a theory about the limits of coercion, these hypotheticals focus the discussion on what is likely the least theorized and weakest aspects of the fit between their propertarianism and the rest of their moral view. So, imho, while the propertarian can still accommodate our intuition about Scenario 1, I don’t think he can fully escape the tension that it provokes.

Brett:
Unpaid interns, okay. Accounting rules not considering certain necessary overhead items as “costs” on pain of being labeled a cheat, maybe, though it seems doubtful Marxist theory is dependent on the vagaries of accounting rules. What about recent college grads making, say, $30K/year? A manager hires a few to do filing and stuff, answer phones, be a handsome face for clients. They also have experienced professionals doing certain tasks, they make $60K and up, they have attitudes and family obligations. The recent college grads think, we could do those guys’ jobs, and they offer to do exactly that in their free time, no extra pay? If their labor is being paid for, what were the pros being paid for before they lost their jobs?

JH, I think we’re basically in agreement. As to why a person would be a propertarian… one strong possibility is, as you say, that they’re confused or not fully forthcoming.

Not inconsistently with the confusion hypothesis, I would also guess that the primary draw of propertarianism for its adherents is the emphasis on self-efficacy. It is a theory that begins, and ends, with the individual, and it relies on narratives that place enormous confidence in the ability of an individual to forge from his circumstances a good life, regardless of society.