Saturday, May 22, 2010
What KInd of Liberty?
As I understand it, for libertarians like John Stossel and Rand Paul, the American ideal of liberty is better realized by protecting the freedom of a grocery store owner to refuse service to a black man rather than protecting a black man's freedom to walk into a store to buy food for his family.
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Libertarians are kooks.
ReplyDeleteThank zeus libertarians have no influence in the USA.
Libertarians have NO solutions to solving any of the problems that nations face. For example, ask a libertarian how they are going to solve the health care crisis, and you will get lots of talk, but nothing that is in any way an attempt at a solution. You will find it is that way with every issue for a libertarian. They just got no plan for ANYTHING.
Also, notice that everyone they quote as a great... lives in the 1700s. They are folks caught in a time warp. They think it's 1740.
Cheers!
RichGriese.NET
That's not true, libertarians love Ayn Rand, she died in 1982, better known as 2 A.G. (Anno Gipper)
ReplyDelete"Libertarians have NO solutions to solving any of the problems that nations face. For example, ask a libertarian how they are going to solve the health care crisis, and you will get lots of talk, but nothing that is in any way an attempt at a solution."
That basically sounds like every politician to me. As a matter of fact I believe our politicians just passed 2400 pages of a lot of talk without much of a solution, but I could be wrong, sometime around 2014 I hear we'll get to find out, while the taxes kick in immediately... I'm reminded of a quote from one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
(No, I'm not the Dan above.)
ReplyDeleteThe OP is exactly correct. When I was still masochistic enough to reading LiveJournal's "libertarianism" forum, there was one commenter who claimed that the fact that traffic laws require you to drive on only one side of the road is a reduction of freedom. He (sometimes) admitted that this lead to a question of whether maximal freedom was necessarily the best policy, but he insisted that the law only had the effect of reducing freedom.
He (and many of the other denizens of the place) seemed completely incapable of thinking of the effects of the law as providing new freedom (the freedom of movement, the freedom from harm) that countered the loss of the "freedom" to arbitrarily use a car on any surface you could get it onto. Nevermind whether the new freedoms outweighed the one lost (which they obviously do), he didn't even see there being any new freedom.
And, as is so common with libertarians, his discussion doesn't even notice the fact that the flat surface he wants the freedom to drive on, was created though the efforts of others, with a particular purpose, which his "freedom" would complete frustrate.
What you miss is that protecting the freedom of the grocery store owner to refuse service to a black man ultimately, though perhaps counter-intuitively, does protect the black man's ability to walk into a store to buy food for his family in two ways.
ReplyDeleteThe first way is that free markets, which include the freedom to refuse service to others, provides a strong disincentive to discriminate based on race. If a grocery store owner refuses service to black people, he loses customers and therefore profits. If he refuses to hire black workers, he reduces the supply of workers available to him, raising the cost of labor. If he refuses to buy supplies from black suppliers, he raises the costs of his business. All of these reduce his profits, and in the long run this means that he will be driven out of business by less-bigoted grocery store owners, who will in turn be driven out of business by even less-bigoted grocery store owners.
Secondly, free markets protect black people from mistreatment because by definition a free market means the government is relatively weak. Ultimately the government poses the most threat to black people--it does not suffer a loss in profits by being discriminatory, and it can gain from appealing to racist voters through racist policies. In a free market consumers can behave racistly, but it costs them to do so, whereas voting is free.
It should also be noted that the free market system provides the single greatest anti-bigotry weapon there is: anonymity. When I go to a grocery store, I have no idea who makes the food. Even if I'm incredibly racist, I will buy goods produced by black people happily, because I will not realize black people produced it.
Anon,
ReplyDeleteI understand the theory, but in the real world, markets do not always have the magical effect that libertarians predict they will.