Has anyone ever read this blog posts by Tim Wise?
It was written shortly after the Rand Paul interview where he discussed his views on property rights. I was just wondering what you guys think of it. While I think he is being really extreme in his claim to say free marketers are morally bankrupt I think he has some points when it comes to minorities being discrimininated against since being prejudice is inheritently irrational that can be hard for an individual to overcome.
Do you think market outcomes reflect racism?
I think human actions reflect racism
Bwahaha I read his article and the only thing he can point to historically is segregation. Its awesome because our predictions are completely correct; racism has to be propped up by the state! See jim crow laws. They forced segregation of many private services. Rand Paul should focus on this.
I asked if you thought market outcomes reflected racism. Presumabely you’re trying to focus on micro-cases where, given that one party is prejudiced, he may act unfavorably towards another. The obvious answer is to simply expand the scenario to include multiple providers of the service and claim that competition between them dampens their ability to discriminate.
Yeah I know what you asked and I gave you the answer that I think is more appropriate given the scale in which it happened.
Omg. Rand Paul’s full name is Randal Howard Paul. Lol. I would leave a comment in that guy’s blog, but I don’t feel safe giving him my info.
The scale on which racism happened? You can consider it on the micro scale or the macro scale. Which one do you mean? What do you mean that human actions reflect racism? Why does it matter?
Discrimination happened on a pretty large scale in this country in the past. I’m putting it on both. Human actions reflect racism since being prejudice towards another group is irrational and in our nature. To be more blunt, you can’t apply broad generalizations towards something like prejudice and hope that the outcome is more rational based. And it’s why I think libertarians have a hard time convincing minorities and it’s why I think it’s not in Rand Pauls interest to bring up this issue.
As well as convincing Tim Wise and people like him. (Pun intended.)
One look at his blog and his word choice tells you how partisan Tim Wise is when he attacks people who disagree with him as being morally bankrupt and uses language similiar to that. I thought about writing him an email, but choose not to do so since it would be pointless.
His blog post is full of ad hominems and other fallacies.
I’d rather say it’s the egalitarians that are inherently irrational on this matter. What you call “prejudice” maybe behavior based on the experiences of many generations - And it comes pretty natural like almost everybody living in a poly-racial country can tell you. Said that I think the “social scientists” that invented the term “prejudice” did so in order to set any further debate on the subject in favor of their policy preferences. You see prejudice indeed implies a judgement prior to any experience and that means decisions without even looking at the facts. Hence “prejudiced” people must be irrational, right. That nearly comes over like a tautology. So I suggest talking about “racial preferences” would be the more meaningful and (for a scientific purpose) useful term to use.
“Human actions reflect racism since being prejudice towards another group is irrational and in our nature.”
Why is prejudice irrational?
rational = purposeful in mises language
rational = optimal in neoclassical language
Being prejudice against another group of people is irrational because you’re often forming an opinion about that person that is not based in logic or facts. Hence a prejudice opinion would be irrational. When you do this you cease to treat a person as an individual and throw him into a collective.
For example you see an unarmed African American walking down the street as you are and you cross the street for fear of getting robbed.
By rational you mean optimal, not purposeful. This is fine.
Black people are actually more likely to be criminals. If he were wearing a blue-collar clothes, a suit, or work clothes, I probably wouldn’t be scared. But if he were wearing gang clothes, I’d be stupid to assume he’s not more threatening than a middle aged white female.
You’re talking about the kind of inane discrimination, like against people with green eyes or something. But there’s no pathological discriminations like this that exist. Moreover, for the race case, you have yet to actually provide any reason to be afraid of people’s prejudice. It doesn’t have any significant consequences on the market.
For my example I stated that the individual was unarmed(without even getting into crime statistics). If one moved just because of his skin color then it would be irrational. And I never set out to prove that we should be afraid of peoples prejudices, I said one shouldn’t apply a rational scenario(especially one that is sweeping) to a irrational behavior which I think is an area libertarians are weak on since they marginalize the problem of racism in America to the point where they pretend like it doesn’t exist.
Racism is ultimately untenable and unstable precisely because it is irrational and self-defeating. The greatest threat to racism is the free market, competition, and voluntary activity. Voluntary cooperation is always economically efficient relative to isolation, which is why society emerges in the first place; it is the logical and necessary outcome of human nature, which is rational. Those who refuse to cooperate with individuals because of their race, for example, arbitrarily disadvantage themselves. The firm that refuses to hire talented and productive black workers will suffer; their competitors will gain the advantage. The racist southern basketball coaches, in the 50s and 60s, played their best players, black and white. They wanted to win; their jobs depended on it.
Unfortunately, racism is the left over residue of noncapitalistic economic systems which were extremely labor intensive and regulated (slave economies and then feudalism). In such systems, slavery was arbitrary and artificially made economically efficient due to state interventionism, and the institutions in place led to relatively low population levels (lowers the marginal productivity of capital). But rapid capital accumulation and industrialization makes slavery a liability and extremely costly (relative to free/wage labor systems). This is because wage laborers, in capitalist systems, have capital to work with, higher morale, managers who coordinate team activity, and this elevates productivity levels. Additionally, you don’t have to shelter wage laborers, you don’t have to clothe and feed them, and you don’t have to hire private armies to suppress slave revolts, et al. These noncapitalistic systems created certain social structures, institutions, and sentiments that outlasted the actual economic systems themselves.
Essentially, the rapid decline of racism and the near abolition of slavery, over the past three centuries, is the result of capitalism and capital accumulation, and not the result of political opportunism and agitation. Politics must, by its very nature, react to social change; it is never the cause of social change. If you look around the world today you will find the highest degree of racism precisely in those noncapitalistic and underdeveloped nations. As far as Rand Paul is concerned, he was merely making a philosophical argument rooted in logic–something most people are not comfortable with. If you have the right to deny someone access to your car or home, you should have the right to deny someone access to your productions/services. His argument is not about race.
Excellent post, Esuric.
It’s only irrational if the black person is nonviolent. But how is the walker supposed to know that? With limited information to go on and a belief, whether valid or not, that many blacks engage in criminal activity, it is perfectly rational (in the way you mean it) to exert a bit more energy to avoid the risk of being mugged. The DC or NY cab driver that refuses to pick up a black person is also not being irrational. Yes, he is forgoing cab fare by avoiding a certain part of the populace, but he does so because he calculates the risk to be greater than the potential benefits. Perhaps he is miscalculating and, in truth, he would come out with a net gain, but he certainly can’t know that ex ante. He is most definitely stereotyping, but stereotypes provide a fantastic service: they facilitate action in situations in which the actor has little information and no reasonable opportunity to gather the knowledge necessary to make a more informed decision.
Two points I want to bring up, which may or may not be understood already, but I feel like writing it. First, you said, “I think human actions reflect racism.” Like Sieben, I think this is a largely pointless statement. That some people are racist means little in a political discussion. If a bunch of people are racists, then the society is going to be racist, regardless of the state; and as for the origin and potential cure of racist sentiments, political economy cannot help us. It can help us determine under which institutions racism can survive or thrive. It is clear that in the free market, in which private property is respected and actors must bear losses along with their profits, there exists an incentive to regard others based upon their productivity and not their race or sex. It is clear that in the state, in which the legislator is largely immune to losses, there is no such incentive (though, of course, there may be other incentives, such as the legislator’s personal disgust toward racism). Indeed, in democratic governments, there exists an incentive to enact racist legislation, so as to gain the favor of the racist vote. With a state that claims the authority to regulate commerce, levy special taxes and fines, enact zoning regulations, etc., racists free-ride off the state. With a benign or nonexistent state, racists must bear the full economic costs of their racism.
Second point: Though an individual libertarian may be racist, the libertarian argument against political prohibition of nonviolent racial discrimination is not meant to imply that such discrimination is acceptable. This is why I think Tim Wise and many others (including libertarians) mischaracterize libertarian doctrine when they say that libertarians believe private racism ought to be “allowed.” The libertarian, acting as a libertarian, only says that such discrimination is not aggression, and as only aggression ought to be punishable, the law ought to have nothing to say about such discrimination. There is no moral or legal right to use violence against a person unwilling to hire or sell to or buy from a black person; this does not mean the libertarian necessarily applauds such action. The racist, acting in this capacity, is not committing aggression against anyone, and so ought not to be subject to legal repercussions.
To the unbiased reader, it should be obvious from this statement that libertarians may still believe racism in any form is wrong and that it is virtuous to combat racism wherever it exists. But this combat must be nonviolent. Boycotts, sit-ins, persuasion, publicizing the names of racists, etc. The kind of activism Americans tend to associate with MLK and the civil rights movement, and which was quite effective against the state’s Jim Crow laws.