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The Freedom Files |
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Winner of the Advocates for Self-Government Lights of Liberty Award!
The Freedom Files
"Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-meme."
DIY since 2001…
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Hello Freedomphiles! Today, I was reading an article in The Saint Louis Post Dispatch – buried in the middle of the business section – entitled Group Says Most Firms Bar Bias Against Gays. After reading this tiny piece, two of my opinions were immediately reinforced. The first was the theory that the media suffers from what I call axiomatic inversion – good news is no news. The second was that every good social change that has ever happened in this country has been a product of us – the people – not the government.
The article quoted Elizabeth Burch, executive director of The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the organization that performed the survey. She said, “The truth is, it’s corporate America that has been the unlikely hero in the movement for equality for gay and lesbian Americans.”
Unlikely?
Hardly.
Take out that one word, and the sentence makes complete sense. Kim Mills, the group’s education director, provides the perfect explanation for what Burch finds so damned baffling: “Most successful companies know discrimination is bad for business.”
This is as it has been since the dawn of time, and this is why free markets are so much more consistently effective than government coercion. It doesn’t matter what the CEO of Big Business, Inc. thinks of homosexuals. He could go home and complain to his wife about having to spend the day with those “fudge-packing faggots” at work, but if he wants to stay rich, he better keep hiring and serving them. That is the brilliance of capitalism – it recognizes the self-interest of the individual and forces him to cooperate peacefully with members of every sex, race, religion, and sexuality if he intends to become or stay rich. As The Cato Institute’s David Boaz said in his brilliant book Libertarianism: A Primer, “People who may not see themselves as comfortable members of a tight community with the others in the group can come together for a specific purpose, in the process learning to coexist if not to embrace.”
But then governments get involved and screw everything up. As it is right now, it is perfect. Choices for everyone. The majority of people don’t think a business should discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation – and the majority of businesses don’t do that – 92%, according to the HRC. That leaves 8% of the businesses in this country free to hire all the bigots and homophobes they want and keep them the fuck out of my office.
But there is a minority whose rights are being threatened. It’s that 8 percent. From the HRC to the ACLU, there are organizations out there fighting to take away an individual’s right to hire or not hire anyone he chooses. This is America, kids, and it is based largely on the idea that each individual has the freedom of association. Just as an employee has the right to work or not work anywhere he chooses, an employer should have the right to hire or fire anyone he chooses. In the same way, as a consumer has the right to buy or not buy anything he wants, a producer should have the right to sell or not sell to whomever he wants. Neither you, I, nor anyone else should be able to impose our values on anyone else. Once again, people would like to abrogate your right to be an asshole.
I wear rainbow-colored shoelaces in honor of Roy G. Biv, the first openly gay mnemonic device, so don’t think that I am against gay rights. I mean, think that if you want – I don’t really give a fuck what you think – but if you want to follow my logic, you have to keep up. So – if you brought them with you – leave your cumbersome knee-jerk reactions at the door.
People do not have the right to go anywhere they want and work anywhere they want. People do have the right to offer their services for money, and they also have the right to offer their money for services. But if someone doesn’t want their services or doesn’t want their money, they have no right to force it on them. A right is an expression of your freedom. And we really have only one freedom – the freedom of self determination. This is the freedom to live your life in the way you see fit, free from coercion. The only stipulation is that you must not coerce another. Rights are merely the various ways you are protected from coercion. The right to not have a religion forced on you, the right to not be censored by the government, the right to be secure in your person and property from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Your rights are the government’s limitations. You are free only to the extent that the government is in chains. Ayn Rand said freedom “does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state – and nothing else.”
So what is the government’s job? It is to protect our freedom, and you don’t do that, as Rand also said, “by the violation of the rights of others.” Your right – as an expression of your freedom of self-determination – is to live your life to your best ability. It’s to know that here, ideas and initiative determine your place in the world – not accidents of birth. To know that any agreement you make will be completely voluntary, that you steer your own ship.
But you don’t.
Maybe you, like me, couldn’t care less who your co-workers sleep with, so a law prohibiting discrimination doesn’t affect you much. But it does. Once we let a politician decide that there are some people we have to associate with, the precedent is set.
You see, discrimination isn’t a bad thing. If someone only accepts the best in life, they are said to have discriminating tastes. It is the person who discriminates for no reason that makes no sense. To say that you don’t hang out with racists or homophobes is rational – you know that a racist or a homophobe will not be intellectually compatible with you, or that they don’t share the same values with you. But you cannot tell just by looking at someone – unless they are wearing a shirt that said “I hate niggers and faggots” – what their values are. So to say that you don’t want to hang out with someone because of a superficial physical characteristic is both lazy and narrow-minded.
The market nullifies this problem, as any homophobe or racist must keep these opinions to himself if he wants to do business. It may also lead some to notice the good things about individuals from the different groups they hate and lead to a greater understanding of the nature of people. You see, every person who is saved from a hate-filled life is done so by an individual, not an interest-group. I can pinpoint the two or three people who opened my mind to homosexuals. They didn’t do it by calling me names or taking me to court – they did it by being nice and open and honest with me. Few myths hold up to the brilliant power of truth.
When a bunch of individuals surrender their autonomy to a collective promising to lead them to a better place in society, they also surrender their opinion of what a better society is and the best way to get there to the leaders of that group. In his book, Parliament of Whores, PJ O’Rourke said, “A special interest is any person or group that wants to be treated differently from the rest of us by the government.” Once the government takes away one person’s freedom to meet its own end, every one of a million special interests will come out of the woodwork, asking, “Where are my perks? Where’s my justice?”
When justice loses its objectivity, protected classes are created, which will naturally cause a fracturing of society into specific, set demographics. Next thing you know, you’re filling out a census form, telling the government that you’re a disabled black Jewish homosexual woman – and you’ve lost your individuality. You’re wrapped into a neat little package, and everyone assumes they know your point of view on various subjects without ever bothering to know you as an individual. It was this idea of the individual – whether he know it or not – that led Legs McNeil, the man who coined the word “punk,” to say, “No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool…”
The next step in this phase is for different classifications of people to fracture off and pit themselves against one another. That beautiful market synergy that exists independent of government is now destroyed by a few who profess to speak for an entire group of people, claiming to know their minds for the same reason racists and homophobes claimed to know the “truth” about whatever group – because they’ve taken a superficial characteristic about someone, drained them of all individuality, and generalized every character trait, opinion, talent, or philosophy to fit into a neat mold: gay, woman, black, Christian.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is where it all began. For generations, corrupt and bitter little white men upheld Jim Crow Laws, government’s attempt to suppress the equalizing forces of the market. The Jim Crow Laws forced businesses to not serve or hire blacks. Think about that for a second. Why would there be a law if that kind of discrimination was the status quo? Because it wasn’t – the self-interested lure of green burns far more brightly than the blackness of organized hatred. So someone had to step in and stop the market forces – the Jim Crow laws.
That is where the CRA comes in. It was supposed to end the Jim Crow Laws and stem the tide of racism, but have we reached a world where, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, we are judged “not on the color of our skin, but on the content of our character?” Of course not. We have not become a color-blind society. If anything, we are more acutely aware of race than ever before in our society. We’ve been segregated and labeled, and pitted against one another to fight for a little more power – some advantage over another group that the government deems “different” from us one way or another. But, as Rand said, “Remember also that the smallest minority is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
There is no such thing as group thought or group identity. The only person you are just alike is you. The only person who can know what you need and what is best for you is you. The only person who can speak for you is you. To think that someone can or is entitled to speak for you because they share a skin-tone or a love for same-sex romps with you is short-sided and pretty fucking stupid.
Understanding and love is a virus. It spreads wherever truth is present. Truth cannot be present where coercion exists. In the world, things progress naturally at a steady, healthy pace, and right when it looks like things are getting better every day, the government smells what’s in the air and tries to help it along with legislation. This results in a stagnation of progress, a polarizing of races, genders, and orientations, endless legal problems, and an entrenchment of the more extreme haters on either side of the issue, acting as “representatives” of their race, gender, or orientation, which naturally leaves many people in the middle with the misinterpretation of those as the views and values of the mainstream. Then you have three years of race riots immediately following the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
It was originally intended to end the practice of hiring, firing, serving, promoting, and the such based on race or sex. It was not supposed to give anyone an advantage over someone else, but that was impossible. Just by saying that you cannot do that is saying you don’t have to worry if you hire most of the minorities that come through your door. It was wrong right away to tell people who they could and could not hire and fire. To say that there should be no law passed that discriminates is fine and consistent with our liberal tradition and our constitution – the government does not have freedom of association. A law written this way would have ended the Jim Crow laws and equalized the legal support for anyone trying to make it in the world. But the act itself, opposed by racists and non-racists alike, was wrong from the start. In fact, it only passed as a tribute to the slain John F. Kennedy, to secure his legacy.
Shortly after it was passed, though, Lyndon Johnson said at Howard University that the “next and profound stage of the battle for civil rights” was “not just [for] equality as a right and theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” This is a scary thought. The whole point of our system is a reaction to the truth that there is no such thing as equality of outcome. People are not born with the same intelligence, beauty, drive, or anything else that gets you a leg up, regardless of their sex, their race, or their sexual orientation. The point is to allow everyone to develop their talents to the best of their abilities. This naturally leaves the world with corner stores and Microsofts. To say that those two have to be equal in outcome is to say that we must take most of what Bill Gates has rightfully earned and give it to the corner store. If we do say that, what incentive is that for anyone to succeed?
But they did say that. And in September of 1965, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which created “affirmative action.” This basically threatened people who received government money that they better take some actual concrete steps to hire more minorities, which was our first step away from the implication of unfairness to the actual abrogation of the right of free association.
This further led to other proactive measures, such as Section 8 of the Small Business Act, which created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and set aside a percentage of all government contracts for minority owned businesses. Now was the idea of “equality under the law” now officially dead – apparently some were created, as Orwell said, “more equal than others” – but the government had asserted it’s freedom of association, which it stole from us, and told us who we were required to do business with and it what numbers.
Then the Supreme Court got in on the act. In 1968 and 1969 (United Paperworkers v. United States – no link, sorry), two court decisions found that certain seniority systems for advancement in business were illegal because they kept minorities out of many promotions. In a world that was barely free of Jim Crow laws, what seniority system wouldn’t be discriminatory? It takes time to build up numbers and seniority, and a seniority system is a way of promoting job loyalty. It discriminated against people who had only been there a short time. And who would have been there the shortest time? Unfortunately, a problem that would have corrected itself eventually was then exacerbated by do-gooder morons who couldn’t see how much fucking harm they were actually doing.
In 1971, the final guidelines for Affirmative Action were set. The Supreme Court put the burden of proof not on the accuser, but on the accused. If a business wanted to set a minimum employment requirement – like a High School diploma, degree, or experience – they had to prove before a government judge the need for that requirement. Even if they could prove it was a fair requirement, if it had the effect of limiting minorities, it was said to be a “built-in headwind” against minorities. As the unanimous opinion stated, “Congress has placed on the employer the burden of showing that any given requirement must have a manifest relationship to the employment in question.” So much for due process – another right gone for the “greater good.”
That landmark decision was followed for twenty years. Business after business was hauled into court to prove they didn’t discriminate based upon race. According to Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground, “a business that relied on the federal government for its income, or a substantial portion of its income, could find itself in big trouble even if noncompliance was only being investigated.”
Then in 1991, Congress passed and George Bush signed The Civil Rights Act of 1991. This addressed a problem brought up by Alfred Blumrosen of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in 1971, “If discrimination is narrowly defined, for example, by requiring an evil intent to injure minorities, then it will be difficult to find that it exists.” And that problem is the problem of taking away people’s freedom a little at a time – all that other freedom gets in the way. You cannot legislate intent, and outcome is too dubious a standard to judge by.
Blumrosen, as Tony Snow, speechwriter for the first Bush Administration, described it in 1995, “helped devise a standard that would make it almost impossible not to detect prejudice everywhere. He argued that the government should sue any business that failed to hire designated minorities in proportions roughly equivalent to their appearance in the general public.” Blumrosen got his wish with the CRA of 1991. It was called disparate impact analysis, but it was quotas.
Also in 1995, Bob Dole, the grumpy half-a-man (this was pre-Viagra), “asked the Congressional Research Service to list all the statutes and executive orders that require race or sex-based preferences. Investigators found 166, touching upon everything from technical proposals for Agriculture Department grants to nuclear waste disposal.” Snow continued. That’s a lot of government sponsored discrimination, and it can only lead to one thing.
In the August 7 issue of the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’ version of the Village Voice, an article entitled Dressed for Deceit addressed the issue of fronting: “If Miller, the owner of a St. Louis software- and technology-testing company, would agree to allow her company's name to be used in a bid on a state contract, he'd kick her 10 percent of the contract amount.”
Miller was black and a woman, one crippling industrial accident away from hitting the protected class trifecta. The government has a classification for these businesses – of course – WBEs (Women-owned Business Enterprises) and MBEs (Minority-owned Business Enterprises). She was both.
Now, if you read the article, you’ll see a lot of the horrible things that some white-male-owned business have done to create, enforce, and keep secret fronting operations – including but not limited to alleged breaking-and-entering, pet mutilation, and death threats. These are horrible things to do, and are illegal for a good reason.
But would this be a problem if the government weren’t discriminating against them?
Would this be a problem if the government hired whoever was best for the job, regardless of race or gender? Of course not. This is a problem created by the Small Business Act. Another problem created is that it makes an already inefficient government more so. If anyone has to take more into account – especially arbitrary things like race and gender – anything other than quality, price, and reputation when judging bids, they’re going to waste more and more of your time and money.
Within the confines of a peaceful, non-coercive fronting agreement, who is injured? A black-owned business gets 10% of a contract big enough for someone to break the law to get, without having to lift a finger, while another worker, unfairly discriminated against by the government, rises above the bigotry, gets the contract, and stays in business a little longer. Not only does this market solution solve the problem like a Jim Crow-era restaurant passing plates of food out the back door to blacks, but creates goodwill between the two parties – of opposite races – in the blissful occupation of commerce.
On Tuesday, March 21, 2000, the Department of Justice settled a lawsuit with the Adam’s Mark hotel chain for discriminating against blacks. The hotel chain was ordered to “implement non-discrimination policies, attract more minority customers, and pay $8 million in monetary relief, including $1.5 million for hotel management programs at four historically black colleges in Florida.”
I don’t care whether they did discriminate or not – is it right for the government to tell someone they have to sell their property to someone? No, of course not. Besides, the market is far better at regulating this type of thing. In fact, it was doing it. There was a boycott against the hotel chain, with more people signing on every day. A boycott is good because it is a statement by consumers to a company that “you better shape up – or you’re history.” It is the exact way a market should work. Pure democracy. We vote with our dollars every day more effectively than we do every four years on our leaders.
It’s a dangerous path we travel when we seek to fix past injustice with further injustice.
We have to be conscious of our rights as individuals, because some fuckhole is
eventually going to take them away for the “public good.” That course always
leads to strife, polarization, more lost freedom, economic danger, and
protected classes. It’s a path we walked over the race issue, and we’re worse
off for it. The public good is never bondage. Let’s try not to walk this
same road with the gay issue – we’re doing so well on our own. As Ayn Rand
said, “Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public
is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’
supersedes private interests and rights, and have but one meaning: that the
interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests
and rights of others.”
And that’s the recipe for tyranny.
Until next time, make every day a good one!
- Rick
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