For a lot of activities, like racist filtering when selling a house, there’s no government involvement.
For others, like a diner, a bus, a movie theatre, those are the rules that the property owner has set, not the government. However police will arrive soon enough to eject/arrest the person under trespass laws.
Until it gets to Jim Crow or Sundown laws, or worse, there no need of direct government involvement.
Actually all those activities require government assent to avoid bringing nasty consequences upon those discriminating. A government which deliberately excluded black people from participation and therefore only existed to protect those wishing to discriminate and to punish those who would oppose it.
That seems like very wishful thinking. Do you think the government would have to step in to allow businesses to refuse cakes to LGBT couples, or there would always be nasty consequences for doing so? Heck, people still eat at Chick-fil-A, and it does more than that.
Yes. Because discrimination requires impunity. The ability to harm others without consequences. You need government backing for that.
I’m afraid I legitimately don’t understand what you are arguing then. Does a business need government backing to choose who it will hire, buy from, or sell to? Definitely yes, because you need some sort of enforcement to have private property and a market in the first place. But it seems like you’re saying discrimination somehow can’t happen without more than that, which seems plainly ahistorical – unless you’re arguing that a government failing to prohibit discrimination is tacitly supporting it?
“nobody can censor except the government” is already a shaky proposition
“nobody can discriminate except the government” is way off the deep end
The expression I always liked (which I heard somewhere) is, “Libertarians all have five minutes of good material”. Every conversation with them goes like this:
Libertarian: “Anything that isn’t hurting someone else should be legal”
Reasonable Person: “That sounds pretty reasonable”
L: “So weed should be legal, because it isn’t bothering anyone”
RP: “I agree”
L: “The only problem is weed profits are currently controlled by The Jew”
RP: “Wait, what?”
L: “Yea, you see, ever since the Rockefellers made a deal with Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing….”
RP: backs out of room slowly
I really don’t follow you here.
All that is required for private individuals, companies and organizations to get away with systemic discrimination is the absence of government intervention. If I was a landlord who decided not to rent to Black people or a baker who decided not to sell a same-sex couple a wedding cake or an employer who decided to pay women less than men for equal work I wouldn’t need government backing to get away with those things, just government indifference.
To my eyes the main target of that graphic is Zelensky, and to make it clearer that we’re talking about the Ukrainian president’s ethnicity the cartoon throws in the FTX guy with a subtle “and do you know who else is Jewish?”.
yes, yes, but when people are whinging on about philosophical ideas, government policy must only be a force for good or force for evil.
we can’t have any nuance about what makes good policy or bad policy. we must either love everything any government has ever done, or – if we find any fault with any policy throughout history – we need to be against all government entirely.
i pretty sure that’s the libertarian position.
Taking this further, if you were a diner owner who decided to maximize your profits to serve Black customers, and treat them equally, in certain areas you would likely be visited by the “pillars” of the community about not upholding local traditions. It was not always the government but societal pressure.
Sam? Yeah, and a bad polycule for the scene. Wish I’d memorized the link, but three work-related polycule date requests a week is too many.
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