More and More and More

Piling on the CRA flap

I have a couple of my own thoughts that still rattled out from all this.

I come to a libertarian grounding out of a utilitarian calculus of sorts. I look for ways to maximize public or private utility and one way to achieve that is to give individual people a very large burden of personal autonomy and freedom. In the case of dealing with a systematic and institutional method of racism and bigotry enforcing a caste system unfairly and purposefully on others, it strikes me as an obvious conclusion that this does not maximize utility or personal liberties. It instead exploits the utility and liberties of others, even others who might seek to collaborate with disfavored groups for personal gain. Such as businesses. Plessy v Ferguson was not a case over schools with its now infamous "separate but equal" ruling. It was a train company that brought the case and wanted not to discriminate when operating trains in the South, especially for routes that went into the North.

So I admire that this law, and its related Civil Rights Era laws of the Voting Rights Act and the Poll Tax Amendment, extended the benefits of liberty to more people who were being denied it and exploited by society. If the cost of this was that over corrective government was used to deny the liberty of individuals to exercise some of their free association rights, by hiring or firing or having customers of a particular ethnicity, I'm reasonably comfortable with this cost measured against the prospective benefits.

What I don't admire is that many seem to have accepted that these gains, along with apparently affirmative action which carries its own highly dubious costs and benefits at times, are sufficient to correct issues of long standing historical effects and grievances. Laws may now be more colour blind (with a few notable recent exceptions for crack dealers and Arizona's Hispanic population), but institutions still are not as they are peopled with, well, people. The powers of police and the instruments of justice are still all too easily directed at disfavored groups. Homosexuals, immigrants, blacks, the poor, even sometimes still women, to the exclusion of more politically powerful or influential who the law still serves and will rarely exploit and target. The waging of the drug war and the imposition of things like "stop and frisk" searches make it all too easy to find such racially charged statistics. As do more functional and basic things like unemployment rates, educational attainment or school qualities, and poverty rates.

There are, as a result, some curious divides on this issue between intentions and the results of our institutional uses of power. Much of this, I suspect, stems from some curious political divides. For instance, many "liberals" favour pouring more money into flailing school districts. Guess who does not: minorities who might potentially receive those monies. They instead are one of a bizarre political alliance pushing for charter schools or public choices in primary education. Along with economic libertarians and religious conservatives, who I'm not sure actually favour school choice along these lines so much as they use the same sort of choice that they would offer homosexuals for marriage rights. "Everyone is free to send their child to get a religious education!", with no ideas on how to fix education for everybody who doesn't want to do so. The prospective beneficiaries of more money for schools are teachers and administrators, a reliable liberal voting bloc with more political influence and power than minorities possess. Of course, those same religious conservatives who are modestly aligned on the issue of schools also deployed and vigorously support anti-drug laws which essentially corner the violence and depredation of black market drug trade into poorer neighbourhoods (generally those inhabited by minorities) in order to "protect" middle class youth (who generally end up experimenting anyway with something or other that they're not supposed to be doing). Even to the point of subscribing to sterner and blatantly racist in their effect sentencing laws on crack vs cocaine/marijuana distribution and setting up policing initiatives that target and hassle minorities for the simple fact that they can without complaint (usually) and that it sometimes produces seizures of narcotics or finds a few outstanding arrest warrants. And of course libertarians aren't big fans of affirmative action, which like the Rand flap over CRA, gets us into some hot water when our political philosophy gets adopted by some less savory people in order to justify objectively racist ends.

It would be foolish for people to set out to repeal the Civil Rights Act and other 60s era rights and privileges like it, on the grounds that immense improvements of personal liberty were made possible and in a few critical ways, guaranteed an equal right of exercise. But it also looks foolish to pretend that it ushered in a new epoch of history and freedom. People are still people. If they want to be bigots and they have the power and means to do so, they will.

Here's a link tree of the fallout
Leftie?
Milton!
More libertarians and the law
Where I am apparently an immature buffoon
Pragmatism
Goldwater vs FDR or people are all idiots and monsters in some way or another
The Russians are coming, oh and Rand