🚀 go-pugleaf

Mike Mills wrote:
> In today's corporate climate discrimination does hurt a company's
> effectiveness.  But this has not always been the case.  Before the Civil
> Rights Acts of the 1960s discrimination was the norm.  It was unheard of
> for African Americans or women or latinos to be in managerial positions.

I like to think that a renegade company that did hire women and
minorities would have done well even before 1960.  The fact that
they didn't would be a testimony to their own stupid racism.
But I admit there would be social factors at work, too: maybe
they'd have trouble working well with other companies that
disapproved of their hiring policies.  Also discriminatory
educational policies might have made pro-white-male discrimination
slightly closer to rational than it is now.

> Your libertarian idealism has historically not worked.   There was no
> competetive disadvantage to white male supremacy in the past, and it
> worked well for white males.

My libertarian idealism has never been tried.  Before, we had laws
forcibly separating the races and the sexes, and when people
woke up and realized how bad that was, we started forcibly 
integrating the races.  Freedom of association was skipped over
completely.

BTW I *don't* think that just giving up Jim Crow laws in a vacuum
would help much.  Because most people aren't libertarians, there
wasn't a clear distinction in the movement between social
censure against discrimination, and laws against discrimination.
So it's hard to separate how much of the civil rights movement
was successful because of the social or legal aspect.  My
parents tell me about making a concerted mental effort at the
time to change their attitudes towards black people that they
knew -- that was more of a social than a political effect.

I don't think social and legal censure *should* be tied together
like that, and getting that idea across is why I'm having this
discussion.  I believe in a legal system that's really minimal,
with all the real social change coming from nonviolent social
pressure, not armed police.

> Civil rights laws and affirmative action
> changed that and created a more egalitarian society.  America today
> resembles little the America of 1776-1960.

Forced integration is better than forced segregation, and I think
the results prove that you are right about that.

> When Cracker Barrel Restaurants fired all of its openly
> gay employees a few years ago there was very little impact on it's pool of
> applicants, especially in the South where repressive notions discourage
> gay people from coming out. 

I don't believe that allowing people to make their own choices
about who to associate with will immediately solve all our problems.
If we allow freedom of association, people will associate in ways
we do not approve of.  But I think forcing Cracker Barrel's owners
feel like they are  fighting for their right to make moral choices, 
and that doesn't put it in a state of mind conducive to considering
that their choices might be wrong.  Leave them alone; let them
come to it in their own time.  In the mean time, there are other
places that will hire their gay ex-employees.

> Don't look to the free market for justice and morality.  Bigotry is seldom
> its own punishment.  Societal censure is required to change attitudes. 
I believe the free market forces people to face reality, in the
long run; and I believe justice and morality are aspects of
reality.  But I will concede that the market doesn't promulgate 
justice and morality very quickly.  Societal censure is more 
effective in the short run, in the scale of people's lives.  But 
anti-discrimination laws go a step further: they're not just 
societal censure but actual coercion.  There is an important 
difference, IMO.  A "culture war" as we're undergoing right
now between the left and the right, is far less damaging if
it's a matter of social censure, than if it's a matter of
coercion.

Replacing social censure with coersion is why we have militias
fighting back, instead of "interest groups" talking back.  We
reap what we sow, even if we're sowing coercion for a good
cause.

> If
> our friends in this discussion couldn't find jobs because of their
> homophobic views, I think they'd be the first to demand civil rights
> protection.

I wouldn't want to hire someone who talked about me in the way
that some of our friends in this discussion have, and I would
defend my right not to hire them.


-- 
                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  http://www.quetzal.com
 Boulder, CO          \/   cbogart@quetzal.com
 Chair, Libertarian Party of Boulder County