Wow! First you post a brilliant perspective that I’ve never considered or heard before so clearly and precisely that it now seems obvious, like something I should have realized long ago.

Next, you patiently and systematically expose the flaws and false prejudices of an intelligent, but highly indoctrinated product of our modern education system.

Brilliant and if I may say Friedmanesque!

-Mercy

Allowing employers to discriminate against Jews increases employers’ choices but decreases Jews’ choices.

No it doesn’t. A Jew has exactly as many choices they would have if the employer had never existed. The employer does not reduce the choices that the jew has independent of the employer. The jew is free to work for other employers or start their own business.

(I would also point out as a matter of historical fact that jews reached above normal levels of income and rose to ownership of many major economic institutions in a time when anti-semitism was not only legal but common and accepted. Clearly, the free-market rewarded jews and people who voluntarily interacted with them much better than the government policies of the day. Indeed, jews were represented and “protected” by the government only after they had obtained economic power in the free market. Anti-semitism in government hampered jews much more than anti-semitism in the free-market. )

In my view, people are not morally obligated to engage in non-violent economic transactions against their better judgment.

For your view to be correct, we would have to presume that every single person on the planet is obliged to form whatever economic relationship that any other person on the planet wishes and on the other persons terms. From your perspective, if person A refuses to form a business partnership with person B, the person A has reduced person B’s economic choices and thereby committed an act of aggression against person B. You believe that this act of aggression on A’s part justifies B using the violent power of the state to force A into a partnership for B’s benefit.

You just happen to make the arbitrary claim that it’s fine for private citizens to decrease other private citizens’ choices but not for government.

Private actors cannot reduce the choices of others. If I do not hire you I can not prevent someone else from hiring you nor prevent you from starting your own business. I can’t take away your property nor compel you labor for my benefit. Government can do all those things and does so on a routine basis.

Think of it this way, in order for the employer in your example to “reduce” the choices of the jew in your example above, the employer would first have to create the business that could employe the jew in the first place. In other words, to refuse to hire the jew, he would first have to create a job in the first place. Only by first creating the opportunity of a job can the employer then take it away. So the employer would first have to increase the jews choices in jobs before snatching it away. At worst, the jew would be exactly as well/bad off as if the employer had never created the job in the first place.

Government does not have to increase choices before reducing them. In order to prevent jews from working, the government doesn’t first have to build a factory and start selling a product before it can refuse to employ jews. It can prevent jews from having jobs they had before the government acted. It can prevent them from starting their own businesses. This is exactly what happened with Jim Crow laws. The free-market employed newly freed slaves willingly because no individual employer, seller or consumer wanted to suffer economically just to pursue some supposed common good.

You’re making the arbitrary claim that government is allowed to have a monopoly on violence but not on other forms of coercion. I am not.

The only way you can non-violently “coerce” someone is by bribery. Since you can’t reduce their preexisting choices nor their preexisting standard of living, you can only “coerce” someone by first making their life better and then taking it away. In such a case, they end up in the same state as if you had never acted.

Again, it’s not me personally, and it’s not their personal tradeoffs.

No it is you. You personally are willing to impose with violence your personal beliefs about what tradeoffs other people should make. It’s just that as a practical matter, you need to coordinate with enough other people who share your beliefs so that you have enough physical force to overwhelm your target. Just because a lot of other people agree with you doesn’t mean that you personally have not made the decision to impose your will by force. After all, if the majority of people disagreed with you would you suddenly consider yourself wrong in either a moral or practical sense? I seriously doubt you believe that your validity of your ideas depends on their popularity.

You can’t offload the moral responsibility for you violent coercion of others onto the shoulders of a faceless mob. You made the decision to hurt people and you need to own up to it.

i>There is no such thing as a free market in reality. It swiftly turns into a situation where those with more guns and more relatives “corner the market” so to speak.

Your confusing free-market with anarchy. The free in free-market means freedom from violence. People make economic decisions based on economic factors. The role of government in such a system is to create a bubble of non-violence in which people can interact. Conversely, in your system, the role of government is to employ violence to coerce people into making the economic choices that you personal believe are correct.

f your ideal government magically managed to prevent people from using violent coercion, they will simply turn to other kinds of coercion. That’s the free market at work.

As I explained above, giving people more choices and then taking them away or bribing people is not coercion. As I said, by your definition, my unwillingness to buy something your store sells reduces your choices (because you would choice to sell me something) so you would be justified in using violence to make me purchase something.

I’m not saying I should be dictator of America. I’m saying we should vote on it, with exceptions for tyrannies of the majority in the Constitution.

Why shouldn’t you be dictator? After all, do you not have a good enough understanding of the millions of economic transactions that go on everyday that you can vote for politicians who will pass laws to force people to make those transactions as you see fit? A right decision is a right decision regardless of the number of people who make that decision. We don’t vote on engineering decisions why should we vote on economic ones? If you understand what is the best economic decision for people to make to such an extent that you are willing to fine them, imprison them and even in extrema kill them, why do you need the opinions of others?

It’s very simply. If what you’re doing is harming no-one other than yourself, the government has no business interfering.

I didn’t ask you what choices of mine you thought needed controlling. I asked you what behavior or yours i.e. your personal choices needed controlling? What decisions do you make that you think that the real world political process would make better? If you can think of some choice you need to be coerced into, then why don’t you make that choice now?

This is actually a thought experiment. Think of it this way. If everybody in the world thought exactly like you do and made the same exact choices that you would, would you still believe that government would be necessary?

This thought experiment reveals the aggressive and dominating nature of your viewpoint. You want to use the power of the state to dominate other people and force them to make your choices. Your viewpoint is grounded in hubris. You think you understand how everything works and that you easily grasp the best tradeoffs for all circumstances. This is why you have no problem using violence to force people to make the right choice.

Most political ideologies boil down to rationales of why one person has the right to dominate another by violence. You don’t create rationales for why other people need to dominate you by violence.

If government steps in and prevents you from dumping your waste in our water supply, it is reducing your choices, but keeping you from reducing everybody else’s.

Except, that in this particular example, the government creates the problem by removing the water supply from the free-market. If the water supply is private property, then people can’t pollute with violating another individuals property rights.

But you missed my main point, government hurts people in order to function. It never takes an action that does not injure someone. When it works correctly it hurts people in retaliation using violence to punish those who violated the right of others. The free-market, however, functions on creating win-win situations. People make transactions because they believe they will be better off for having done so.

I’m saying that without government regulations and laws there’s hardly such thing as a “voluntary” interaction.

This is true to the point that as a practical matter government must create a bubble of non-violence in which the free-market can function. However, you seem to be saying that only interactions of which you personally approve are voluntary and that therefore people are only free when the government imposes your beliefs on everyone else by violence.

Everything always comes down to violence if you’re going to look at it this way

So, the existence of violence in the world justifies you using violence to impose your beliefs about the best economic choices on everyone else. If the existence of violence means that all interactions are violent then why bother with non-violence at all? This is the logical absurdity that comes from defining any tradeoff as a violent attack You’ve already stated that someone not giving a job is equivalent to being punched in the nose. Does that extend to people not having sex with me. Can I claim rape if that good looking neighbor won’t bonk me? After all, aren’t they reducing my choices by refusing to let me choose to have sex with them?

Merely refusing people’s every whim is not the same as sticking a knife through their heart. Not hiring someone on a basis that JewishAtheist personally doesn’t think justified is not the same a breaking parts of their body.

How do you figure? You appear to be insisting that your assessment of the free market should be imposed on the U.S.

Of course, and I suppose I am imposing my religious beliefs on everyone else by supporting freedom of religion? This is the kind of squirrly thinking you wind yourself up in by refusing to recognize your own hubris and wililness to use violence. By our standards, if you think everyone should be an jewish-atheist then I am actively oppressing you with violence when I prevent you from using violence to march everybody out church? Leaving people alone is not imposing your beliefs on them by force. End of discussion.

Again, we see your hubris and egocentrisim. If your choices do not dominate, if you cannot coerce people to make the choices you deem proper, then everyone lives in an unjust society. You interpret it as actively harmful to people if I simply let them make their own decisions.

The less free-market 2000’s north provides better opportunities for African-Americans than the more free-market late 1800’s.

Well, for African-americans, the late 1800’s weren’t very free-market, The south engage in overt racial socialism and in the north the government failed to protect african-americans from extreme racial violence. Samual Grophers got the AFL rolling by explicitly excluding African-americans from the union. Most of the scabs murdered by unionist were African-American. When the government granted labor monopolies to unions, this locked African-americans out of all the good jobs. Even so, in the 1800’s African-americans migrated away from areas with more government intervention to create a just society and to the more free-market areas.

That dynamic continues today, African-Americans migrate out of the more socialist northeeast to the freerer south. This is especially true for middle and upper class African-Americans.

I would point to the racism of the past as examples of what happens when people like you impose their sense of greater good on the free-market. Had we been having this discussion a century or more ago, you would be castigating me for letting the free-market give good jobs to racial inferiors instead of to whites. You claim that I was reducing the choices of whites by forcing them to compete freely with negros who were little better than animals and could therefore work more cheaply.

Not if all the companies in town are run by WASPs and they collude to prevent non-WASPs from starting businesses.

I hate to keep interjecting facts into this debate but history show the exact opposite. It takes economic sacrifice to refuse to deal with people based on non-economic criteria. Most people simply will not sacrifice that much for long. Without government intervention or government approved private violence, the scenarios you envision are not stable for more than a few years at most. You cannot point to a counter example.

You keep blaming the free-market for the inequities of historical government. Somehow, you’ve conflated Jim Crow laws, racist unions and government approved racial violence as the actions of the free-market. I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion. Oh, wait you have degree in the liberal-arts don’t you?

The “very sloppy real world political system” has more of a right to do it, considering we at least vote for it, than whoever happens to have the most guns, money, or power and answers to nobody at all.

Okay, the government enforces it’s well on people because it has the most guns. Again, you projecting the attributes of the state onto the free-market.

Be honest, you’ve never actually studied any libertarian thought have you. You clearly see the possible worlds divided into one of violent anarchy and warlordism versus an economically totalitarian state governed by democratic despotism. There is a middle ground which minimizes violence from all sources. That is what we should be shooting for.

Unfortunately, in such a state, you couldn’t force people to act as you want them too. I don’t think that appeals to you emotionally.

Either way, I never said it’s only something Republicans are capable of. I gave the only two examples of it happening that I can think of, and one was a Democrat. You can hardly accuse me of bias here.

And I don’t even remember what action you’re talking about re: Bush. He kept way too many Clinton era appointees in positions of responsibility, e.g. the head of the CIA and the Dept. of Transportation.

I was thinking of the Justice Department, and the way candidates were literally asked for their political views before being hired.

And I don’t even remember what action you’re talking about re: Bush. He kept way too many Clinton era appointees in positions of responsibility, e.g. the head of the CIA and the Dept. of Transportation.

Laws? You seem to have no problem believing that republican administrations violate that law but you ask me to believe that the law keeps Democratic and/or socialist organizations from doing the same thing.

WTF? I mentioned Truman as well as Bush.

You’ll note that in both instances, their actions became scandalous.

I don’t give liberals any more credit than being mindless libertines. There is certainly no liberality in leftism. So I’m having trouble accepting the idea that they have a conscious intention of using sex to sell fascism. I could be wrong. Or unconscious societal forces may just shake out that way.

Since there is sex involved, might as well pursue the theory. I have a suggestion–upgrade to a 2-dimensional political model. The 1-dimensional left/right model will not support the level of analysis you need. See politicalcompass.com for the model, and a stunningly accurate survey. The closer to [0,0] you score, the more conservative/less ideological. It straightens out all this confusion between libertarianism, authoritarianism, and rightism.

Taking your test, I did give up a lot for sex. But love, security, and companionship came with the deal.

Laws? You seem to have no problem believing that republican administrations violate that law but you ask me to believe that the law keeps Democratic and/or socialist organizations from doing the same thing.

That the same law that includes the bankruptcy code currently being subverted by a series of sham sales of the country’s auto manufacturers?

Well, we are a republic, after all. We don’t vote for individual laws or actions, but representatives. This obviously has its downsides.

And it seems to me that one of your hobbyhorses, that of workplace discrimination, is much more prevalent in economic systems where the state is a major employer or worse _the_ major employer. I rarely hear of someone being fired for being the wrong ethnicity, but I have heard a lot of accusations of people having to expouse certain views or support certain candidates in order to be hired into certain government positions.

It’s true that this happened under the Bush administration, and with the red scare under Truman and McCarthy, but over all, I’d say it’s the farthest thing from the truth. You’re much more likely to get fired for having the “wrong” political views in the private sector than in the public. There are laws against that sort of thing.

But I didn’t vote for this system, where large chunks of the economy have been effectively nationalized or otherwise put under government control over the past six months. Noone ran on the platform of nationalizing the economy, neither Bush who got the ball rolling or Obama who vastly speeded up the process.

And it seems to me that one of your hobbyhorses, that of workplace discrimination, is much more prevalent in economic systems where the state is a major employer or worse _the_ major employer. I rarely hear of someone being fired for being the wrong ethnicity, but I have heard a lot of accusations of people having to expouse certain views or support certain candidates in order to be hired into certain government positions.

Your conceptual problem is that you can’t separate actions that reduce other people’s choices from actions that increase other peoples choices.

Define “other people.” Allowing employers to discriminate against Jews increases employers’ choices but decreases Jews’ choices. You just happen to make the arbitrary claim that it’s fine for private citizens to decrease other private citizens’ choices but not for government. I make the claim that private citizens’ abuses of power are just as dangerous as governments’.

In the free-market, I can only induce you to interact with me if in your own assessment you will be better off for having done so.

Right. But you can do that by having your henchmen destroy my property until I “choose” to interact with you. Or you can do that by using your influence to make everybody else “choose” not to do business with me. Etc. There are a whole lot of ways you may coerce me.

With government power, I can force you to interact with me even if i>in your own assessment you believe you will be worse off for doing so. In extrema, I can have you killed.

You’re making the arbitrary claim that government is allowed to have a monopoly on violence but not on other forms of coercion. I am not.

There has never been a free-market tyranny. There has never been free-market mass murder. Throughout history, societies with the freest economies have also been the societies with the greatest degree of egalitarianism, the greatest degree of freedom of conscience, the greatest degree of economic class mobility and the greatest degree of intellectual creativity. Given this track record why shouldn’t we seek to base our society on such a proven system.

There is no such thing as a free market in reality. It swiftly turns into a situation where those with more guns and more relatives “corner the market” so to speak. If your ideal government magically managed to prevent people from using violent coercion, they will simply turn to other kinds of coercion. That’s the free market at work.

The answer of course is that you are so confident of your own ability to engineer a perfect world that you feel morally justified in using the violent power of the state coerce people to behave as you see fit. In the end, it is hubris that creates your political views. You have no problem hurting people because you are so convinced you are right.

This is not true. I’m not saying I should be dictator of America. I’m saying we should vote on it, with exceptions for tyrannies of the majority in the Constitution.

You will of course automatically reject this idea but it is still true and I can prove with a simple question. What behavior that you currently engage in do believe the government should stop you from doing. What decisions to you personally currently make that you believe the real world political system could make better? Oh, do you personally need to be politically controlled?

It’s very simply. If what you’re doing is harming no-one other than yourself, the government has no business interfering. If what you’re doing is harming others, the government (i.e. the people, in a democracy) may have the right to interfere.

You won’t think of anything because of course you already do what you believe to be right. You support of political economic coercion arises purely from you wish to force other people to behave as you want them to. Nobody goes to the government to help them with their own self-restraint issues.

Who’s talking about self-restraint? I’m talking about keeping markets fair and efficient rather than letting people “cheat” by coercion.

Your belief in state power is ultimately a believe in your own rectitude, in your own individual right physically hurt people for disagreeing with you on matters wholly unrelated to violence. You are willing to hurt people just because you don’t agree with the tradeoffs they make, because they engage in what you personally believe to be the optimum behaviors for the entire population.

Again, it’s not me personally, and it’s not their personal tradeoffs. It’s all of us, and it’s the tradeoffs they make where other people have to bear the costs.

No, it isn’t. It is very real and practical. One you understand the inherently violent nature of government you can never look at it the same way again.

Again, violence is not the only form of coercion.

Government actions always hurt somebody. They always make someone do something they don’t wish to do. They always reduce the choices that the people as a whole can make.

Not true. If government steps in and prevents you from dumping your waste in our water supply, it is reducing your choices, but keeping you from reducing everybody else’s.

But no American is free to choose not to live under the violent power of a government. At best we can only choose which violent power to subject ourselves to. If this is a choice, it something akin to picking which thug will rape you. Yes, you have a choice but only in choosing the bad over the worse. Why should people have to make such choices over non-violent interactions?

Everything always comes down to violence if you’re going to look at it this way. If there were no government, companies (and people) could just shoot employees or neighbors or whatever. It’s only the threat of government violence which gets rid of the threat of other violence.

What is America offers the highest degree of freedom from violence? Do you think people should have to choose between obeying you and your cohorts or subjecting themselves to even more violence elsewhere?

You’re free to work within the system to change it.

You believe that the tradeoffs of violent coercion are systematically superior to the tradeoffs of voluntary interactions. I argue for the opposite.

I’m saying that without government regulations and laws there’s hardly such thing as a “voluntary” interaction.

I have history on my side. Whenever people have complete freedom to seek employment as they wish you get a far more people get jobs based on merit than they do in societies in which the state interferers in employment decisions. The more free-market late 1800’s north presented better opportunities for African-Americans than did the South with it’s myriad economic Jim Crow laws.

The less free-market 2000’s north provides better opportunities for African-Americans than the more free-market late 1800’s.

The systematic mechanism of the free-market punishes people who make economic decisions based on irrational criteria more surely than any political system ever well. If you refuse to hire people based on some criteria other than their ability to perform the job better than anyone else you can find, I will hire them and gain a competitive advantage.

Not if all the companies in town are run by WASPs and they collude to prevent non-WASPs from starting businesses.

If you do not change, you will soon simply cease to be an employer and your bigotry will no longer be factor. This action of the market has demonstrated itself time and time again over the centuries.

I don’t share your faith in the efficiencies of the free market.

So, your arguing that government is magic, that people are perfectly rational actors when they engage in politics and that the political system always make the correct long-term decisions?

No, I’m arguing that the people have the right to choose the system they want.

Of course not, your just have to create a strawman by claiming that I am making an argument for perfection. If you actually understood anything about libertarianism you would know that our entire concept rest on the idea that perfection or even near perfection is impossible. Neither is it even possible for people to even agree on what a perfect ideal should look like.

All I know is that libertarians and communists alike are always insisting that “if only our system were really tried!!” When in reality it never happens because it’s never feasible.

In the end, it is you who believe more strongly in your own perfection. I am unwilling to impose by my assessments on fair or optimum economic behavior on other people because I have little confidence I have the information necessary to make the best choice.

How do you figure? You appear to be insisting that your assessment of the free market should be imposed on the U.S.

You on the other hand, have no such doubts. You believe that right and wrong in economics is so clear cut and easy to determine that you feel perfectly comfortable having the very sloppy real world political system implement your ideas by violence.

The “very sloppy real world political system” has more of a right to do it, considering we at least vote for it, than whoever happens to have the most guns, money, or power and answers to nobody at all.

What makes you think this is a bad thing? The whole purpose of a union is to get workers a better deal from the employer. If employer accomodates workers without resorting to a union, so much the better — they do not end up with a permanent, costly, and sooner or later always self-serving bureaucracy.

He said to me: the only time a company gets a union is when they deserve one.
Aptly put, and very true IMO. Companies which mistreat their employees deserve a union. Those which do not, don’t deserve it.

This is what is meant by freedom of association.

?! Freedom of association =/= freedom NOT to associate.

Why do you think a majority of voters has a right to interfere with other individuals’ right to enter voluntary agreements? What is the origin of this right, and how can a group of people have such a right if they happen to be 50.1% of voters and not when they happen to be 49.9% of voters?

It’s coerced or non-voluntary agreements I’m concerned with.

In that case why do you assume that the voters will always be people whose values you share? This is the point I tried to make before. In the bad old days voters in some places elected representatives who immorally imposed racially discriminatory restrictions on private contracts. Why do you assume that that won’t happen again, or that other groups (like Jews) won’t be the victims the next time around?

Obviously we aren’t a pure Democracy. We have a Constitution in large part to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Discrimination against Jews or other groups is unconstitutional. There is no constitutional protection for discriminating against Jews. I suppose there is a process to reverse those protections.

Your conceptual problem is that you can’t separate actions that reduce other people’s choices from actions that increase other peoples choices. You can’t separate actions which people can take voluntarily versus ones which they take under fear of death.

In the free-market, I can only induce you to interact with me if in your own assessment you will be better off for having done so. With government power, I can force you to interact with me even if i>in your own assessment you believe you will be worse off for doing so. In extrema, I can have you killed.

There has never been a free-market tyranny. There has never been free-market mass murder. Throughout history, societies with the freest economies have also been the societies with the greatest degree of egalitarianism, the greatest degree of freedom of conscience, the greatest degree of economic class mobility and the greatest degree of intellectual creativity. Given this track record why shouldn’t we seek to base our society on such a proven system.

The answer of course is that you are so confident of your own ability to engineer a perfect world that you feel morally justified in using the violent power of the state coerce people to behave as you see fit. In the end, it is hubris that creates your political views. You have no problem hurting people because you are so convinced you are right.

You will of course automatically reject this idea but it is still true and I can prove with a simple question. What behavior that you currently engage in do believe the government should stop you from doing. What decisions to you personally currently make that you believe the real world political system could make better? Oh, do you personally need to be politically controlled?

You won’t think of anything because of course you already do what you believe to be right. You support of political economic coercion arises purely from you wish to force other people to behave as you want them to. Nobody goes to the government to help them with their own self-restraint issues.

Your belief in state power is ultimately a believe in your own rectitude, in your own individual right physically hurt people for disagreeing with you on matters wholly unrelated to violence. You are willing to hurt people just because you don’t agree with the tradeoffs they make, because they engage in what you personally believe to be the optimum behaviors for the entire population.

Hubris.

Oh come on. This is a stupid cutesy argument.

No, it isn’t. It is very real and practical. One you understand the inherently violent nature of government you can never look at it the same way again. Government actions always hurt somebody. They always make someone do something they don’t wish to do. They always reduce the choices that the people as a whole can make.

Every American not already under arrest (or similar) is free to leave at any time.

But no American is free to choose not to live under the violent power of a government. At best we can only choose which violent power to subject ourselves to. If this is a choice, it something akin to picking which thug will rape you. Yes, you have a choice but only in choosing the bad over the worse. Why should people have to make such choices over non-violent interactions?

What is America offers the highest degree of freedom from violence? Do you think people should have to choose between obeying you and your cohorts or subjecting themselves to even more violence elsewhere?

You are so comfortable with using violence against people that you see no problem with forcing people to choose between how badly they will be hurt and then calling that freedom.

<i.Are you really *that* ignorant? No employers ever voluntarily discriminated based on race?? LOL.

Are you really so ignorant that you believe that the real world political system never commits injustices in enforcing employment law. Are you really so ignorant that you believe that using the violent power of the state to coerce employment relationships possess no serious negative tradeoffs?

Of course not. You are not arguing that the violent coercing of employment relationships by the state never goes awry just as I am not arguing that the people in the free-market never make decisions I would consider unjust. I am making the same argument you are making in regard to government. You believe that the tradeoffs of violent coercion are systematically superior to the tradeoffs of voluntary interactions. I argue for the opposite.

I have history on my side. Whenever people have complete freedom to seek employment as they wish you get a far more people get jobs based on merit than they do in societies in which the state interferers in employment decisions. The more free-market late 1800’s north presented better opportunities for African-Americans than did the South with it’s myriad economic Jim Crow laws. Even more African-Americans would have migrated north and prospered had not racist unions blocked their employment and had the government protected them from unionist mob violence. But even as all that was going on, the free-market was integrating diverse European ethnic groups that had been violently oppressing each other for centuries.

The systematic mechanism of the free-market punishes people who make economic decisions based on irrational criteria more surely than any political system ever well. If you refuse to hire people based on some criteria other than their ability to perform the job better than anyone else you can find, I will hire them and gain a competitive advantage. If you do not change, you will soon simply cease to be an employer and your bigotry will no longer be factor. This action of the market has demonstrated itself time and time again over the centuries.

Now, your immediate retort to this argument will be that the free-market does not produce the exact outcome that you personally wish for or that it does not produce it quickly enough. You will claim that you can use violence to force the outcome in a timely manner without any significant tradeoffs. History is littered with arrogant people such as yourself and history shows they were always wrong.

Riiiight. Because the free market is magic! People are perfectly rational actors, always making the correct long-term decisions!! LOL

So, your arguing that government is magic, that people are perfectly rational actors when they engage in politics and that the political system always make the correct long-term decisions?

Of course not, your just have to create a strawman by claiming that I am making an argument for perfection. If you actually understood anything about libertarianism you would know that our entire concept rest on the idea that perfection or even near perfection is impossible. Neither is it even possible for people to even agree on what a perfect ideal should look like.

This is why people need to be left free in order to experiment. Looking back at history it is clear that people at different times had vastly different concepts of the ideal society. We shudder looking back at most of them. Why will our descendants be any different? What do we take for granted now that our descendants will find evil or comical?

In the end, it is you who believe more strongly in your own perfection. I am unwilling to impose by my assessments on fair or optimum economic behavior on other people because I have little confidence I have the information necessary to make the best choice. You on the other hand, have no such doubts. You believe that right and wrong in economics is so clear cut and easy to determine that you feel perfectly comfortable having the very sloppy real world political system implement your ideas by violence.

If the employer doesn’t hire Jews don’t work for him. What if the Jewish employee doesn’t want to work for anti-Semites? Should he be forced to work for them? This is what is meant by freedom of association.

Why do you think a majority of voters has a right to interfere with other individuals’ right to enter voluntary agreements? What is the origin of this right, and how can a group of people have such a right if they happen to be 50.1% of voters and not when they happen to be 49.9% of voters?

I just want that kind of contract to be unenforceable. Why don’t the voters have the right to decide which kinds of contracts are binding?

In that case why do you assume that the voters will always be people whose values you share? This is the point I tried to make before. In the bad old days voters in some places elected representatives who immorally imposed racially discriminatory restrictions on private contracts. Why do you assume that that won’t happen again, or that other groups (like Jews) won’t be the victims the next time around?

It’s a very loose contract if a contract at all. “Consent of the governed” is not the same as majority rule and certainly does not imply that morality is determined by majority vote. (For example, the majority once tolerated chattel slavery.) Indeed, preventing tryanny by majority was one of the chief aims of the authors of the document that you quote.

I’m not saying that government can do whatever it wishes, just that the whole concept of laws is not ridiculous.

Consent to someone’s close presence is not consent to be punched. (Does a woman who allows a man to be near her consent to be raped?) By contrast, employment is a contract with specific terms, all of which you consent to if you sign it. If you and an employer agree to the terms, and the employer later fires you for reasons that are allowed by the contract, you have no grounds to criticize him. If you don’t like this situation read the contract before you sign it. If you don’t like it, walk away.

What if the employer doesn’t hire Jews? I didn’t sign any contract that that’s okay. What makes his right to not hire Jews more important than the voters’ right to say that ethnicity and religion cannot be used as grounds for hiring or firing?

You made a voluntary deal whose terms were specified in your employment contract. Nobody forced you to sign it. Nobody prevented you from reading it before you signed, or from showing it to your trusted legal advisor to get his opinion. Yet you want to force other people to use only contracts that you approve, under pain of state punishment if they don’t.

I just want that kind of contract to be unenforceable. Why don’t the voters have the right to decide which kinds of contracts are binding?

Ginny:

I’m curious about your assumptions:
What rights do you believe we are born with and that the government has no right to constrain?

I think rights are a human creation.

You really don’t seem to distinguish between our rights to some good and the right not to be constrained from; some here seem to think we have a right not to be disapproved of.

The right to not be discriminated against for race or ethnicity is not the same as a right to employment. Nobody’s forcing anybody to hire you. We’re just saying that while you’re hiring, race and ethnicity are not valid reasons for discrimination. See the difference?

I can’t imagine a government capable of promising such goods as housing, jobs, etc. The more a country assumes such responsibilities the less likely are the people to actually get them.

Nobody’s arguing that the government should provide housing or jobs to anyone capable of getting them on their own.

It is true that in your ideal world, people can choose not to start a business. And it is such costs (the government doesn’t stop you from starting a newspaper but makes it damn difficult to do so) that hurt a community – not unlike the self-censorship that goes on in a police state.

I don’t believe that the “cost” of not being allowed to discriminate based on race hurts the community. I think it helps.

Clearly, the greater power and reach of government doesn’t bother you. But in a world where corporations come and go, it is government programs that continue. No company – even one as massive as Exxon or General Motors – has a fraction of that reach. No company is guided by such unpredictable, unpragmatic, and influence-driven forces as the government. None can be as invasive. You seem to view the world as it is so often described in movies – with a giant, many tentacled evil corporation as our opponent. Most of us find that view laughable.

Not at all. There doesn’t have to be some giant spider-like corporation to make corporations a threat to our freedoms. Any form of power is a threat to our freedom. That’s not to say that nobody (or no corporation) should be allowed any power, just that we as a society have the right and the interest to set certain ground rules for the exercise of that power.

When Wal*Mart moves into a community and uses its position to drive out competition via anti-competitive means (loss-leading, telling suppliers and shipping companies that they’ll use them only if they don’t work for other companies, etc.) then it is using its power to hurt society just as much as any government.

I see I wasn’t clear. No, I don’t think we have a right to not be disapproved of. That seemed to be a new right that was invented by some on the left after 9/11 (some people think we are, gasp, unpatriotic because. . . ). I am willing to be disapproved of – and I damn well intend to disapprove of others.

Wha…? Who invented that right? I’ve never heard of it.

I’m curious about your assumptions:
What rights do you believe we are born with and that the government has no right to constrain?

You really don’t seem to distinguish between our rights to some good and the right not to be constrained from; some here seem to think we have a right not to be disapproved of.

I can’t imagine a government capable of promising such goods as housing, jobs, etc. The more a country assumes such responsibilities the less likely are the people to actually get them.

It is true that in your ideal world, people can choose not to start a business. And it is such costs (the government doesn’t stop you from starting a newspaper but makes it damn difficult to do so) that hurt a community – not unlike the self-censorship that goes on in a police state.

Clearly, the greater power and reach of government doesn’t bother you. But in a world where corporations come and go, it is government programs that continue. No company – even one as massive as Exxon or General Motors – has a fraction of that reach. No company is guided by such unpredictable, unpragmatic, and influence-driven forces as the government. None can be as invasive. You seem to view the world as it is so often described in movies – with a giant, many tentacled evil corporation as our opponent. Most of us find that view laughable.

It’s a very loose contract if a contract at all. “Consent of the governed” is not the same as majority rule and certainly does not imply that morality is determined by majority vote. (For example, the majority once tolerated chattel slavery.) Indeed, preventing tryanny by majority was one of the chief aims of the authors of the document that you quote.

Oh please. You did agree to be within punching distance of the person, just as you did agree to be within firing authority of the employer. It’s the same damn thing.

Consent to someone’s close presence is not consent to be punched. (Does a woman who allows a man to be near her consent to be raped?) By contrast, employment is a contract with specific terms, all of which you consent to if you sign it. If you and an employer agree to the terms, and the employer later fires you for reasons that are allowed by the contract, you have no grounds to criticize him. If you don’t like this situation read the contract before you sign it. If you don’t like it, walk away.

But I didn’t make a voluntary deal to be fired or not hired because of my ethnicity.

You made a voluntary deal whose terms were specified in your employment contract. Nobody forced you to sign it. Nobody prevented you from reading it before you signed, or from showing it to your trusted legal advisor to get his opinion. Yet you want to force other people to use only contracts that you approve, under pain of state punishment if they don’t.

The central flaw of your argument is that you treat coerced compliance with govt diktats of which you approve as being morally the same as voluntary contracts — i.e., in both cases one can choose not to comply with a rule and bear the consequences. But the kind of choice you cite is fundamentally different from a contract, since it is not voluntary. If I don’t like a proposed contract I don’t have to agree to it or obey its conditions; but if I don’t like the govt’s restrictions on the kinds of voluntary agreements I can make with third parties I have no choice but to be subject to the govt’s rules whether I want to or not.

That is not true. If you don’t like the govt’s rules, you are free to leave the country. The rules are the contract of citizens (and residents) with the government. And they are morally valid because this is a democratic republic. (”That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”)

Not personal preferences but profound moral differences that you don’t recognize. You did not agree to be punched. The person punching you is violating your rights. But you did agree to work for an employer who could fire you on a racial (or other) whim.

Oh please. You did agree to be within punching distance of the person, just as you did agree to be within firing authority of the employer. It’s the same damn thing.

You are saying that if you make a voluntary deal and it doesn’t work out well for you, then that is essentially the same thing as if someone imposes his will on you by force. It isn’t.

But I didn’t make a voluntary deal to be fired or not hired because of my ethnicity.

Shannon Love:

Yes it is. If you break equal opportunity laws (or if your simply innocent and convicted any way) you will be fined. If you refuse the fine and/or evade paying it, you will be imprisoned. If you attempt to escape imprisonment, even from a minimal security prison, you will be shot in the back and killed. The enforcement of every law from jaywalking on up ultimately relies on the states ability to bring overwhelming lethal force down upon any who disobey.

Oh come on. This is a stupid cutesy argument. The government will not fine you or imprison you for not starting a business. If you CHOOSE to start a business and CHOOSE to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, etc., then the government can enforce the contract you make by starting your business within the United States of America. If you don’t like it, go live in Dubai or something. See how much you like it there.

Private businesses on the other hand cannot kill. A business can bribe, spin, wheedle and beg but they can’t kill you if you don’t interact with them. No matter how seductive a product they offer you, you can always refuse if your willing to make the tradeoff. Government does not offer that option. You obey the diktats of the state or you die.

Every American not already under arrest (or similar) is free to leave at any time. Government *does* offer that option. This isn’t the USSR.

Would you compare someone not wishing to talk to you in the street as being the same a being punched in the nose? After all, the individual is voluntarily refusing to talk to you. If you want to gain some personal advantage by talking to them, haven’t they done you harm. Do you then have the right to use the threat of violence to get them to talk to you? Why should employment be any different? Why do you have the right to threaten me with violence in order to coerce me into hiring you?

I don’t. I (the gov’t) merely have the right to force you to obey the laws to which you implicitly or explicitly agreed to by living in this country.

Less philosophically, can you point to any time at which the pure free-market denied people employment based on merit? As I pointed out above, people in the past were denied jobs based on race as the result of government policies, not the prejudices of employers. The history of America has shown that employers were always eager to employe based on merit and it was workers who demanded the state prevent them from doing so.

Are you really *that* ignorant? No employers ever voluntarily discriminated based on race?? LOL.

Instead, history tells us we should let the market punish the irrational bigots with poverty and reward the tolerant with wealth.

Riiiight. Because the free market is magic! People are perfectly rational actors, always making the correct long-term decisions!! LOL. Sometimes I think libertarians are more religious than Mormons.

The penalty for discriminating against, e.g., blacks is not a bullet to the head.

Yes it is. If you break equal opportunity laws (or if your simply innocent and convicted any way) you will be fined. If you refuse the fine and/or evade paying it, you will be imprisoned. If you attempt to escape imprisonment, even from a minimal security prison, you will be shot in the back and killed. The enforcement of every law from jaywalking on up ultimately relies on the states ability to bring overwhelming lethal force down upon any who disobey.

The vast majority of people never push the system to its lethal extremes because they know it is pointless to do so. A few times every year, however, you will read a story about some marginally sane person who gets in a tiff with some level of government over some trivial matter and who violently resist the states power. They usually end up dead by SWAT team even though the law they broke poised no physical threat to anyone.

Governments kill. All they accomplish for good or bad comes their ability to kill. Without the ability to kill a government becomes nothing more than a debating society. Governments use the threat of killing to conduct their routine day-to-day activities.

Private businesses on the other hand cannot kill. A business can bribe, spin, wheedle and beg but they can’t kill you if you don’t interact with them. No matter how seductive a product they offer you, you can always refuse if your willing to make the tradeoff. Government does not offer that option. You obey the diktats of the state or you die.

So, when you decide to force people to assume the risk of hiring people they don’t want to, you are in effect saying you are willing to kill them if they fail to comply with your demands. Such a system works short term but long term the results are gruesome.

The only difference between a state monopoly (communism) and a corporate monopoly (the common result of a totally free market) is words on a piece of paper.

Well, that and the oppression of conscience, enforced uniformity of thought, material privation, enslavement, torture and mass murder. Besides that the two systems are very similar.

The idea that natural monopolies cause a lack of innovation and produce expensive and inferior products is not born out by history. During the late 1800’s during the era of the great trust, the standard of living exploded, technical innovation exploded and the cost of all the products and services produced by trust plummeted. As long as the government does not step in to enforce a cartel, natural monopolies are not stable. The cost of maintaining the monopoly ultimately destroys their competitiveness.

Even if they didn’t it doesn’t inherently follow that the real world political system can produce a better outcome.

I see no fundamental difference between the “freedom” to not be punched in the nose and the “freedom” to not be fired for your race.

I can only assume you’ve never actually received a beating. Only people who’ve never faced real violence can be so flippant about it.

Would you compare someone not wishing to talk to you in the street as being the same a being punched in the nose? After all, the individual is voluntarily refusing to talk to you. If you want to gain some personal advantage by talking to them, haven’t they done you harm. Do you then have the right to use the threat of violence to get them to talk to you? Why should employment be any different? Why do you have the right to threaten me with violence in order to coerce me into hiring you?

Less philosophically, can you point to any time at which the pure free-market denied people employment based on merit? As I pointed out above, people in the past were denied jobs based on race as the result of government policies, not the prejudices of employers. The history of America has shown that employers were always eager to employe based on merit and it was workers who demanded the state prevent them from doing so.

Even if a reasonable person could equate a refusal to interact with an actual physical attack, it wouldn’t mean that the best solution to the problem would be government coercion. Instead, history tells us we should let the market punish the irrational bigots with poverty and reward the tolerant with wealth.