Quote Of The Day

Published on 6/3/2010 in Hispanics (Minority Issues) and ModernPolitics. 2 Comments

“The fact of the matter is that this country moved from segregation required by law to segregation forbidden by law without trying freedom of association for a millisecond. So I don’t presume to know how much or how quickly segregation would have broken down without the law. There are strong incentives for employers, unhindered by law, to hire the best person for the job, regardless of race, and it would have been nice to see how well and quickly freedom of association would have worked.” — David Henderson, professor of economics

2 Responses to “Quote Of The Day”

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  • LaurenceB
    6/3/2010 at 8:24 am

    Well, I wasn’t going to respond to your previous comment because I didn’t want to start another long argument, but since you insist… :)

    I believe this is mostly just an incorrect recollection of history. Although there were Jim Crow laws regarding some things, I don’t think it is at all true that all segregated policies of private businesses were compulsory. As far as I know, for example, there simply was no law requiring the local soda shop to serve black people and white people differently. My sense is that social pressures, not laws, were generally to blame for most of this. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this point, and you can demonstrate differently.

    Having said that, let me hasten to add that that discussion is very much a side-issue for me. Even if it is true (and, again, I don’t think it is) that we moved from legally-mandated segregation to legally mandated desegregation, without giving the free market a chance to work, I wouldn’t be at all convinced that we had missed an opportunity. First, the enormity of the injustice hardly called for patient restraint. And, second, there are a whole host of unanswered questions that the Rand Paulites haven’t addressed. For example -

    What, then, would have been the ideal libertarian solution? The federal government can’t nullify state laws, and the states obviously weren’t willing to change them, so – lacking federal intervention – what would these purist-of-the-pure libertarians suggest? Doing nothing? – leaving the state Jim Crow laws intact? How exactly would that have introduced free market forces? In what scenario would that have ended segregation? In other words, have I missed some grand alternative libertarian plan to the Civil Rights Act? If so, please spell it out.

  • HispanicPundit
    6/3/2010 at 12:08 pm

    My understanding is that the libertarian position would have been the civil rights act minus the private ownership regulations. Thats it. Any government land, business that works for the government, or partly owned company would have been prohibited from segregating. This includes public schools, parks, transportation systems, etc.

    Only private companies would have been able to chose which way to go. Just as private citizens are allowed to choose who to allow into their homes. If they wanted to continue to discriminate, they could have, but they would have had to bare the financial costs.

    I assume boycotts, social pressure, and the plain power of efficiency would have lead a considerable amount of them to stop segregating. Slower, perhaps, but still in the same direction.

    It was worth atleast a try, IMHO.

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