Chapter 12:  A Color Coded Society

 
 
 

I do not believe that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the U.S. than elsewhere. Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America.

 

        The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was probably the only instance in which the policies of positive liberalism coincided, albeit temporarily, with the principles of classical liberalism. Black Americans had been deprived of their rights by federal, state, and local governments ever since they had been freed from the bondage of legal slavery. In the 1960s they were finally granted their rights as U.S. citizens primarily as a result of the efforts of liberals.
        Requiring all levels of government to treat all citizens equally, regardless of the color of their skin, represented a rather abrupt reversal of government policy and could not be immediately 100% effective. There were instances where black Americans were still treated differently than white Americans but this practice was now widely considered to be absolutely illegal and eventually these instances became very infrequent. Admittedly blacks are sometimes treated differently than whites by law enforcement officials even today but when this happens it results from the racial prejudice of individuals rather than government policy. Furthermore our laws provide for punishment of such behavior.
        The premise that all citizens, regardless of the color of their skin should be treated equally by government is one of the fundamental principles of classic liberalism. Having gained that objective the black leadership did not stop there but proceeded to press for legislation to outlaw discrimination in other areas and eventually went on to demand discrimination in favor of blacks.
        As a classical liberal I am very much in favor of anti-discrimination laws that apply to governments and also to  corporations but I am absolutely opposed to laws that ban discrimination in hiring by any businesses owned by individuals or partnerships. The hiring policies, as well as all other policies, of publicly held corporations are not controlled by the owners of these corporations but rather by a few individuals, or in some cases only one, who control the corporations. For this reason I believe that prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring by these corporations is perfectly consistent with classical liberal principles. The owners of close corporations do control the corporation but insofar as they have elected to operate as corporations to gain the benefits of corporate ownership I feel that it is perfectly reasonable to regard their hiring practices in the same light as those of publicly held corporations.
        In the case of businesses owned by individuals or partnerships the situation is very different. When an individual owns a business that business is his private property and according to classical liberal principles he has the right to the enjoyment of his own property. I feel that he has every right to hire people of his choice regardless of the color of their skin or any other physical characteristic.
        Everything I have said regarding government prohibitions against discrimination in hiring practices applies equally to the sale or rental of housing units. Any individual who owns a house or an apartment building has a right to rent or sell to anyone and to refuse to rent or sell to anyone unless he has received a government subsidy or a tax concession under any low cost housing program. If the owner has received such a benefit the government has a right to prohibit him from discriminating on the basis of race, sex or other physical characteristics. Limited partnerships, which normally engage only in the business of renting real estate should be subject to the same prohibitions as corporations because in these entities the policy of the business is not determined by the owners.
        The government should prohibit discrimination based on race by any schools that receive direct financial support from any government, whether federal, state, or local. The government should not have the power to prohibit discrimination by schools who receive only indirect government financial support such as the availability to their students of government loans, grants, or scholarships. A private school may decline to accept any government aid for the express purpose of remaining as free as possible of government control. This type of school will usually be a very good school and in most cases this type of school will usually not discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions policy. If students who need scholarships or student loans are not allowed to attend such a school the students, regardless of their race, would be penalized.
        All of the observations above apply to non-discrimination but not to affirmative action, which is a euphemism for quota policies. Quota policies are nothing more nor less than racial discrimination. When schools adopt quota policies racial minorities are admitted to schools even though they do not meet the basic academic standards of those schools. In most cases they will be less capable of earning good grades than are those students who met higher academic standards. Most of these students will either drop out of school or transfer to a school where they can keep up with their peers. The results of such policies are therefore very detrimental to those students themselves and this is especially true if they drop out of school and do not pursue an education elsewhere.
        When quotas are applied to the sale or rental of housing units they are, at best, an attempt to force people to live where they do not want to live and the fallacy of such a policy is obvious. When quota policies are applied to the hiring practices of the government members of a racial minority may derive some benefit but the taxpayers as a group will be penalized because the government will not be hiring the best qualified people from among those who apply. This policy also discriminates against other applicants for the job on the basis of race and thus reinstates the policy of government discrimination on the basis of race. The same is true in the case of corporations except that then it is the stockholders who are penalized by reinstating a policy of racial discrimination. Quota policies cannot be justified as a payback to those who have suffered from discrimination because many of those who, at least theoretically, benefit from quotas have, in many cases, never suffered from discrimination and most of the white Americans who are penalized have not practiced discrimination.
        To put it in the simplest possible terms no society, including ours, can eliminate racial discrimination by practicing racial discrimination. And this would be impossible even if such racial discrimination benefited only those who had previously suffered and penalized only those who had previously benefitted because it would be impossible for anyone to determine the point at which the wrongs of the past had been redressed. The best that we, as a society, can do is to eliminate racial discrimination in the present and in the future to the maximum extent possible.
        There is another type of quotas where the results are especially pernicious and this is the use of quotas in awarding government contracts. In the first place those people who bid for government contracts are almost always people who have already achieved success. There is simply no good reason why the government should pay more to these people than they would pay to others. In addition this policy leads to businesses controlled by whites hiring a figurehead black in order to gain concessions from the government.
        Quota policies, originated and supported by liberals, hurt the very people they are ostensibly intended to help just as most liberal policies do. There are other liberal policies and practices, too, that apply particularly to minorities and yield bad results. Payments to unwed mothers have contributed greatly to the number of single parent families of all races and this has been especially true of blacks. The practice of so many black leaders of excusing criminal actions by blacks on the basis of racial discrimination is another example of this especially since the victims of these crimes are far more likely to be black than white.   The "black leadership" appears to be willing to excuse any behavior of any black American on the basis that this behavior resulted from discrimination at the hands of whites even when the behavior in question is directed against blacks. The same "black leadership" blames racial discrimination for any observed differences in education and income between blacks and whites and absolutely ignores the extent to which the behavior of blacks contributes to these differences. But even if we assume, solely for the sake of argument, that this is the true state of affairs the only rational solution to the problem is to eradicate racial discrimination, insofar as this is possible, and thus enable black Americans to compete on as even a footing as possible with whites. This does not ensure equal results among blacks and whites any more than it assures equal results among all whites but it will come closer to doing this than will a policy of taking money and opportunity from whites and giving it to blacks. The "black leadership" consists almost entirely of liberals and what they propose to black Americans are always liberal policies of exactly the same type that have almost invariably failed to work wherever they have been tried. The truth is that if blacks in America are treated and behave as Americans the "black leadership" would have no constituency and therefore no source of money and power.