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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: (Re:**N) Affirmative Action
Message-ID: <608@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jul-85 21:27:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.608
Posted: Tue Jul  9 21:27:01 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jul-85 04:27:07 EDT
References: <259@kontron.UUCP> <7800352@inmet.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 114
Summary: 

In article <7800352@inmet.UUCP> nrh@inmet.UUCP writes:
> Williams is a professional economist, as I recall.  He's black.  Do you
> claim similar or better credentials?  Or do you claim I misrepresented
> his ideas?  Or do you claim you've some better basis for judgement than
> he does? 

Credentials are not the point: when credible economists make contradictory
claims (and it would probably be simple to find opposition if there is an
economics citation index) then it is important for us to try to evaluate
them for ourselves.  Perhaps you want to believe in him because of his
credentials: I'd rather discuss his arguments.

> I suggest YOU go into the same neigborhood, and announce publicly that
> you intend to FORCE people to deal with those they hate.  I suspect
> I might get away with contusions -- you'd be dead.  The reason is
> that bigoted people are convinced of the rightness of their ideas.
> If they think blacks are inferior, they'll be amused by my intent
> to hire the best people available regardless of race.  If, on the
> other hand, you ride in and tell them that you intend to force them
> to hire blacks at gunpoint, they will rightly see you as a menace.  Why?
> Because if MY ideas are wrong, I've harmed only myself -- and they
> believe those ideas to be wrong.

Federal laws prohibiting discrimination are not the same as me personally
going and trying to force bigots to do something on my individual
authority.

I still say you should have tried "amusing" the bigots in the manner I
suggest.  Lot's of "amusing" "nigger-lovers" got shot or hanged.

Federal laws provide both authority for and example of equality:
something a "nigger-lover" burned out of business won't show.  This
enables a reduction of the vicious cycle of inheritance of bigotry.
We won't change the minds of the bigots much, but fewer of their
children will grow up with as convinced or virulent a bigotry because
they will see blacks (and others) working jobs that used to be 
"beyond their capabilities."  They will deal with them on a day-to-day
basis without the artificially exaggerated class differences (which are
considered racial by bigots.)

> The point is
> that if you force bigots to hire "fairly" and you're RIGHT they stay 
> in business.  If I hire the talent away from them at lower prices and
> out-compete them, they go out of business, and I (who did not discriminate)
> make money.  Even bigots catch on eventually, but you suggest armed
> conflict that leaves them nominally in charge, and I suggest out-performing
> them, which does not.

I suggest reducing the transmission of bigotry, rather than breaking them.
The "armed conflict" has been taking place for 30 years now.  Massive gains
in civil rights have resulted, probably with a smaller deathrate from the
"conflict" than from snakebites.

I don't think "outperforming" bigots is feasible without the protection of
Federal civil rights law.

> Indeed.  Such attempts at coercion should be met with as much nastiness
> as can be mustered.  Did you get some idiot, ivory-tower notion that
> libertarians would not defend themselves if threatened by such actions?

The question is how?  With what money?  Will that defense be economic?
If not, you surely won't see Libertarians trying to philanthropically
undo racial discrimination.

> >The fact is that coercion must be overcome by greater coercion.  
> 
> No disagreement there -- libertarians are against the INITIATION of force.

Whoopie.  You still have the problem that there are people who are not
opposed to the initiation of force, and that they will make your
"opposition" uneconomic for you, as they have for others over the past
few hundred years.

> On the other hand, the politics of this sort of thing were
> pro-discrimination for hundreds of years (From Slavery to Jim Crow to
> low budgets for Ghetto schools, while the economics have always been
> against discrimination.  It's fine to talk about using politics to upend
> things, but politics, while (in some ways) a good servant (sort of) is a
> very bad master.  Far better to limit the laws that may apply to people's
> lives than to use them to change behavior in a good way ("just this once").

The politics on a federal level are now clearly anti-discrimination: I
say make hay while the sun shines.  Nor are we making laws that regulate
people's lives: we are making laws prohibiting discriminatory laws and
actions.

> >Several hundred years
> >of discrimination show this clearly.  
> 
> Excuse me, but several hundred years of government-abetted discrimination
> are hardly a good argument against libertarianism, nor against allowing
> people to make choices without the government meddling.

We are now forbidding government-abetted discrimination the same (very
successful) way we have forbidden government-abetted violation of a host
of other rights.

Yet that is not enough.  Governments are not the only organizations
that can interfere with people's choices: so can business and social
organizations.

> >30 years of stronger government
> >coercion has produced sudden and dramatic lifting of barriers, as a variety
> >of history and occupational statistics show.
> 
> You seem to have missed "Losing Ground" by Charles Murray.  In it, he
> asks the (oh so "ivory tower") question "Did the Great Society work?"
> The answer (surprise!) would seem to be "no".

You can't be seriously implying that everybody agrees with that one book.
Do a little research (or wait a while until a rebuttal is printed.)
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh