^^^^ As someone commented on the Chronicle Web Site A Tea Party Candidate calls the criticism from the American President of A BRITISH Company unamerican. Comedy
This thread scares me. It appear that many of our citizens are becoming a vocal group that would rewrite our history. I've noticed a growing sentiment that perhaps it was a minority of people that were racist in the South in the post Civil War years and that the vast majority were just hardworking Americans who were caught up in a bad era. History tells us different, and sorry Wes, as much as I like you and your posts on this board, history tells us different than the new libertarian view on what happened in the South. The South lost the Civil War but they were not ready to give up their ways of life. The Union Army forced them down a road of coexistence with blacks, but the end of Reconstruction was a victory for racism in the South. On top of their superiority complex, whites had a new reason to hate blacks in the South; they blamed them for the Yankee invasion and destruction of their homes. There was no market force moving the South toward integration. Overriding the market was the lynching and raping of the black American who had been abandoned by his Northern liberators. I don't know if the passing of and then SC defense of Civil Rights laws led to some expansion of government that would have otherwise been avoided, but if did, then we are STILL the better for it. My best friend stood in my wedding, but if the South had been left to the Market Force you describe he would have been hanging from a tree for hugging my wife.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just saying that institutionalized racism was promoted and protected by un-Constitutional laws. As Racism doesn't generally make business sense, and because the racists were the majority and the Supreme Court was willing to ignore the 14th Amendment, they were able to enact protectionist laws to ensure that they weren't put at a competitive disadvantage to those businessowners who didn't want to segregate their customers. I just think it's ridiculous to say that the South had explicit legal mandates that businesses serve white people and black people separately, and if they removed those mandates, that they wouldn't have begun serving them together sooner or later. For the famous example, Woolworth's began serving blacks sitting at the counter in 1960: 4 years before they would have been forced to by Federal law, and in defiance of Greenville law for 2 years. It's only comparable in a business sense, and most definitely not in a moral sense, but for a modern example, segregation of smokers is just as bad an idea for a business as segregation of a racial minority. Therefore business owners have to be forced to provide segregated accomodations for smokers.
Voters in the state of Kentucky this morning... Spoiler Criticizing a British company that is destroying the Gulf Coast is un-american? Can't wait to see updated poll results on Monday...
Anybody still a big fan of Rand and his dad? His views puts his dad's old racist pamphlets in a new light. I'm reminded that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
You read my post. If you seriously believe that a businessman telling a Black person that they will not be served because of their color is the same as an ignorant ass calling that same Black person a ****** on the street, then I don't know what to say to you, other than you are incredibly naive. That's as nice as I can put it. So you were willing to wait for justice, to see if "time will remove all ills." The fact that racism was rampant in the South (and elsewhere in this country) and still brutally obvious to those of us around to see it almost 100 years after the Civil War has no influence on your "Libertarian Ideal" that "freedom trumps all." Freedom to bring racism into a business serving the public. Freedom to force those of another race to ride in the back of a bus. Freedom to refuse entry into a city public pool in Houston, Texas to Black kids because of their color. Separate bathrooms. Separate water fouintains. All things I saw with my own eyes. Thank goodness Liberatrians weren't in control of Congress in the 1960's, or we might still be waiting for justice.
Rand Paul just effectivly said that laws declaring those laws to be un-constitutional are themselves unconstitutional , and explicitly endorsed a system that would (and did) allow these policies to arise. THere's no way to spin that positively. And this happened in 1960 ("you can't make an integration omelette without 100 years of violent discrimination and repression!") after the federal government finally got off its ass with Brown v. Board and Little Rock, among other things. Your revisionism here is horrific.
I wonder how Rand Paul feels about the need for regulation of one of Kentucky's biggest private enterprise, the mining industry? I'm sure the people of Kentucky would be interested to know if safety regulations would be an impingement on the minining industry's "right" to free enterprise.
The MSHA has been a puppet of industry titans for ~10 years. Rand Paul would be hard pressed to make it less effective than it already is.
I hear you and agree, but we're now talking about a high-visibility candidate for the US Senate and not some semi-obscure government agency.
All of your examples are of government institutionalized racism. No, I wouldn't have been willing to wait for justice, as I said when this topic was first brought up. I think that the fact that the Federal Government promoted injustice for 100 years justifies the fact that they took action to correct the injustice in the 1960s. I'm just rejecting the idea that institutional racism lasted for 100 years in this country without a major legal structure promoting it. And that private business would have kept it going for 100 years without regulators telling them to do so. It probably would have died in 30 years or so, as evidenced by the fact that there were 100's of black people in supervisory jobs in an integrated Federal Government (an institution that typically moves much more slowly than private business, and it definitely did in this case) that had to be segregated or removed when the Progressives decided that wasn't the way the order of society should work.
It became virulent and violent with a major legal structure trying to dismantle it. It was violent white resistance to the Union Army in the South which allowed it to develop (further, it devloped in the north as well). You simply cannot hammer this to fit whatever libertarian principle you are trying to support - and further more there's not really any need to.
From Ezra Klein: Can the federal government set the private sector's minimum wage? Can it tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants? Can it tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform? Can it tell toy companies to test for lead? Can it tell liquor stores not to sell to minors? These are the sort of questions that Paul needs to be asked now, because the issue is not "area politician believes kooky but harmless thing." It's "area politician espouses extremist philosophy on issue he will be voting on constantly." http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/area_politicians_has_some_spla.html
For about 60 years of institutionalized racism, yes. I'd say that a very developed legal framework supports that assertion.
There are a huge number of countries around the world that have no regulation on racial grounds, and I can't think of one that just naturally has no discrimination. I don't think there's any evidence throughout the world that the market and private business fixes racism.
It takes racist people to implement racist policy. You're a smart and good guy - I'm rather upset that you would trumpet this revisionist pseudo-dogma.
How many of those countries have segregated facilities and restaurants without mandates requiring that?
