Defining the noun "Liberal"

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Bowser, Nov 18, 2016.

  1. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    If you write about it, it appears very speculative and in most cases is wrong. It is not without reason that you usually do not even try to support your personal attacks with quotes and links - this usually would be impossible.
    Which means that you have no idea about the meaning of freedom of contract, at least in its classical liberal variant. There may be some American liberal newspeak phrase "freedom of contract", which means something very different. Up to now, I have been unable to make sense of this phrase as you use it - your claim that you would use my notion is simply complete nonsense, trivially wrong.
    Once they are prevented from rejecting contracts on certain specific grounds, they are prevented from executing their own freedom of contract, which includes the right to reject any contract without even giving a reason, and, if they chose to give a reason, the right to reject any contract for any imaginable reason. Of course, rejecting a contract for racial reasons is simply a particular case of rejecting for personal whim. So your claim is in contradiction even with elementary logic. Or yet another example of American liberal newspeak.
    If you want to repeat meaningless (because unsupported) claims, go to some church. You can repeat this claim even fifteen thousand times, it does not become more true from repetition.
    Why should I make such meaningless contentions? I have not made any claims about motels in the Confederacy, nor before nor after 1964. People in totalitarian states do what the law prescribes, because they have to, and this proves nothing about liberal government. There was no black revolt against slavery, and there is no white revolt against modern slavery (at least if you do not count electing Trump as a revolt).
    That they violate elementary property rights, which clearly include the right to deny entry to every person for whatever reason (including morally reprehensible racist reasons) as well as the right to refuse to make contracts to every person for whatever reason (including morally reprehensible racist reasons) is obvious and trivial.
    You don't even understand that my claim was not about American reality. It is about a hypothetical situation, namely about "allowing white racial discrimination in commercial dealings", and that this would lead to some consequences in a liberal government. This cannot be falsified by any facts about US reality, given that US reality never was liberal. Before it was full of racist laws and regulations, now it is also full of anti-liberal elements, now more anti-white than the traditional anti-black. But is was never really liberal. It was at best American liberal, whatever this means.
    But freedom of contract and private ownership do not lead to such conflicts. Only in your fantasy, they lead to a conflict with some unspecified list of "basic civil rights and liberties", which has nothing to do with classical liberal rights and liberties.
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not at all. It means you don't know how those laws worked, what they addressed, and their relationship with classic liberal freedom of contract.
    Yes, you have. You have claimed that black people were not denied freedom of contract in the governed regions by voluntary white racist discrimination in motel bookings.
    Nobody is talking about what the law "prescribes". The only subject here is what the law allows. And this directly bears on liberal government in the US, because liberal government is bound to defend civil rights and liberties, and not allow the denial of them so common in the US.
    Wtf?
    In a state of ignorance as complete as that, why do you keep posting such goofball claims in front of knowledgable people?
    And that careless formulation leads to direct conflict, impossible to resolve under liberal principles, between the civil rights and liberties of different citizens in the US. If white racists are allowed rejection based on race, freedom of contract under the law (among several freedoms) will be denied to other people in the US.
    Wrong again.
    The observation was not that the US government was liberal. The observation was that allowing white racial discrimination in commercial dealings resulted in the denial of many civil rights and liberties to black people, in the US. Whether or not the US government was liberal (it was clearly failing the liberal requirement that it defend civil rights and liberties among the governed) was irrelevant to that point.
    By definition, in any consistent theory of government.

    So when such conflicts occur, as in your application of those principles to the US racial situation, the fault must be in your formulation or reasoning - not the basic idea of the principles themselves.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    According to the law: the police will not kick someone out of a public event because of their race, religion or sexual orientation.
    According to the law: the police will kick someone out of a private event if the owner states they are not invited (and, if it comes down to it, can demonstrate that they are not invited.)
    Outside that, they will often attempt to defuse the situation using common sense. Most of the time (in my experience) that works quite well. For the instances where it doesn't - well, that's why we have police and courts.
    You certainly seem to be having problems with concepts that free people don't have much trouble with.
    I can see how you would think that, in the same way that a free-market extremist would see the US as a communist horror, and a far-left radical socialist would be horrified by the unbridled capitalism within our borders.
    The US doesn't hew to any one ideology, which is one of its strengths. We are capitalist - but it is moderately regulated (labor laws, EPA requirements, the SEC, the FFIEC.) We have socialist functions - roads, national parks, public governance of utilities. So if you believe we do not hew strictly to the ideology of classic liberalism, I have no problem with that. We don't really make strict adherence to any specific ideology a priority.
     
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  7. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    And once you fail to explain and support this, this remains your fantasy.
    And I continue to claim this. Voluntary discrimination does not result in a denial of freedom of contract, by definition of freedom of contract. This is independent of whatever racial discrimination which happens around this, by openly racist laws and regulations or illegal behavior of racists, which can really lead to such a denial in real US.
    Typical totalitarian thinking. Liberal law allows everything what is not explicitly forbidden.
    No. White racists are allowed to discriminate only in their private decisions. Not if they act as employees of the states. But the only way "freedom of contract under the law" makes sense would be some equal right to make contract with government instances. Everything else is completely private, and should not be regulated at all if there is freedom of contract. So, if they discriminate only in their private decisions, this leads to no conflict with freedom of contract.
    You mingle "observation" with "unjustified claim". Once you do not deny that in the US there was a lot of non-liberal law, you cannot use evidence of racial discrimination as a proof of volitional racial discrimination in private commercial dealings as the cause of this discrimination.
    They occur only in your fantasies, and so the fault will be probably in your fantasies too.

    In a liberal government, with liberal property rights, it would be sufficient to say that the owner does not want that person on his property, and that that person refuses to go, to kick it out. So, according to liberal theory, the situation you describe as actual law is not liberal law.
    No. You have such problems with accepting the concept of property. Government slaves deluded by propaganda to think about themselves as "free people" often have problems with this, they consider the government as the owner of everything, which has the right to establish arbitrary anti-liberal rules as "the law".
    Much better. Once you do not even claim to follow classical liberal principles, there is no disagreement about this.

    There is, of course, the problem that, once the government is not restricted by any principles, democracy will tend to degenerate (in small steps, so that each step in itself can be described as "moderately regulating") into a totalitarian state. But this is your problem. All what is my problem is that the US tries to enforce their totalitarian rule over the whole world. If that totalitarism will be restricted by isolationists in power to US territory alone, and your propaganda does not distort theories of law used elsewhere with newspeak, you will have my compassion, but not more. It will be your problem, and if you like this, your choice. The same what I think about Northern Korea.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    That's false, of course.

    Under all systems of law that enforce property rights, including liberal ones, there are limits and curbs on them sufficient to allow reasonable and consistent enforcement. There are all kinds of things that ownership of property does not give the owner the right to do. In the US, these limits include disallowing race alone as the reason for rejecting (or defaulting on) a commercial transaction involving property - because without that limitation, many civil rights (including property rights) cannot be defended by the government and cease to exist under the law for black people especially.
    Two or three repetitions of the support in evidence and reasoning is enough - after that, your repetition of empty and unsupported wrong assertions and uninformed errors of fact are simply met with repeated correction.
    Like this:
    That is false.
    In the US, racial discrimination in private commercial transactions involving the public (motels, gas stations, grocery stores, banks, etc) leads to black people being deprived of freedom of contract. You have been provided with multiple illustrative examples.
    No, I don't. The claim is one of simple and blatantly obvious historical fact, with examples provided - observations.
    A confused sentence. Allow the simple to be repeated - the observation was that allowing racial discrimination in commercial dealings in the US resulted in many US citizens being denied basic civil rights and liberties. The denial was commonly physical, without the slightest basis in law of any kind.

    Adjust your theory accordingly.
     
  9. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    The claim I have made was not one about various actual systems of law, which are nothing but liberal, but heavily over-regulate almost everything. Your claim that this over-regulation extends to all systems of laws is your own fantasy. But, without doubt, classical liberalism imposes very strong restrictions on the government, so that it is not probable at all that it will somewhere be realized completely.
    Which have shown nothing, because freedom of contract is not violated if you cannot get any contract, so presenting cases where some people are unable to get any contracts gives you nothing.
    Feel free to repeat your prayers wherever you want. I couldn't care less. But if you hope that I take such repetitions of nonsense seriously, you err.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Neither was the refutation. You made a general claim, and received 1) a general refutation (your claim overlooked the role of physical reality, which caused you to misformulate liberal principles and make mistakes in reasoning) and 2) illustrative examples to help you think and fix your errors.
    Freedom of contract is violated if willing parties cannot contract with each other in a legal manner because others - not party to the contract - physically prevent them.
    I don't think you can.
    Quit posting obvious and repeatedly corrected falsehoods, and you may regain the ability to take other people seriously. Right now, nothing you post on US racial matters is serious.
     
  11. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    You mingle a simple claim of "you are wrong" type with a refutation.
    Only if the third party has no independent right to prevent them from doing what they try to do. As I have explained you several times.
    And you quit killing small children. (Or, better, stop to distribute unproven accusations. In this case I can stop to post similar tit for tat replies too.)
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    You have, in the past, seen the general refutation several times. Basically, it's that you have overlooked the fact (and even denied the fact) that a theory of government must incorporate physical reality, and can be thrown into conflict with itself by having incorporated erroneous assumptions about that physical reality.
    But that is exactly the situation with freedom of contract under liberal governance. No one has the right to deny civil rights and liberties (such as freedom of contract) to other people, under liberal governance. There is no "independent right" to violate other people's rights, in your "classic liberal" theory.

    Your response so far has been to deny that this can happen, sometimes directly, usually by pretending that the denial was of some contingent opportunity (such as a job) rather than of a basic right such as freedom of contract.

    And that is a deeply silly thing to do, in front of Americans familiar with their own history and circumstances.
     
  13. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    You have made obvious and trivial methodological errors in the description of the connection between theories of law and moral theories and reality. You were, unfortunately, unable to understand my corrections, and seem to think that repetitions of the same claims, combined with joepistole-like "this is fact" cries give you something.
    Learn to read. I have not written they may have an independent right "to violate other people's rights". But other people may have an independent right to prevent them from doing what they try to do. Think about it, and find out the difference.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    No, I haven't.
    You have.
    Here's one of them:
    Again: That is false in general, and the example of American racial discrimination (even provided for you in baby steps, such as truck driving jobs and redlining banks) proves that it is false.
    You have been forced to deny that such violation is even possible, in order to pretend that your "liberalism" was not allowing it.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2017
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The question is how you want to handle the situation in which some people have a fundamental right (under liberalism) to make contracts with each other (freedom of contract), and your formulation of other people's rights has provided those other people with an equally fundamental and inviolable right to prevent them.

    You have set up a direct conflict of fundamental (liberal) civil rights and liberties, and the loser is denied theirs. In consequence the loser lacks equal civil rights and liberties under the law - a criterion of liberal governance. Your liberal governance is in self-contradiction - your theory has glitch.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2017
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    When someone is having a private event, and they invite people onto their property, that is correct. When someone ADMITS THE PUBLIC (this is the concept you can't seem to get your head around) then they do not get to exclude specific segments of the population. This is because, in the past, people who open to the public have used that concept to deny people rights. In a liberal government, the government has a role in protecting people's rights. I am glad they do so, even though I not one of the groups that has (in the past) has had their rights violated.
    I have no problem with it. You cannot seem to make a distinction between admitting specific people onto your private property, and admitting the public. They are not the same, no matter how confusing the concept is to you.

    You are making the classic argument from ignorance here. "I cannot understand the difference here, so there must be no difference."
    Agreed. And when a country uses principles outside a given (fixed) ideology, and allow the people a choice in which of those principles to incorporate into their governance, then democracy will tend to strengthen as new concepts are added beyond those of a fixed totalitarian ideology.
     
  17. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    My usual "quotes please" answer, which will not be answered by providing any quotes, is sufficient to show that this is simply nonsense.
    No, it does not, and you have not provided any proof at all.

    If black truck drivers lead to problems if they are used to deliver some goods to white racists, and therefore a company prefers white truck drivers, this is a free decision of that company, which is part of their freedom of contract. Part of the white racists freedom of contract is to prefer firms for delivery which do not use black drivers.

    There are, in fact, much more dangerous inherently racist laws which are heavily supported by "liberals", like minimum wage laws. Their original intention was openly racist: At that time, blacks and other (chinese) workers have accepted lower wages to compete with whites on the job market full of racist capitalists. The intention was clear: With forbidding low wages, this advantage was taken away from the non-whites, so, given the racist prejudices of the capitalists as well as better education of the whites would drive the non-whites out of the job market. This is the modern form of racism. And it has, openly, the form of rejection of freedom of contract.

    This is simple. There is no conflict. Nobody has a right to prevent a contract between other people in a liberal society.

    The number of exceptions is small. Essentially, they are all variants of the following: A has made a contract, say, a marriage contract, with B. In this contract, B voluntarily restricts the own freedom to marry other people. After this, B has no longer a right to marry C, as long as the contract between A and B remains valid.

    What you have invented as a conflict is none. If A has some property, and is allowed to deny B to enter the property, B cannot sign a contract with C which presupposes that he has the right to enter A's property. If he is doing this, he is cheating C. A is not part of this conflict at all, he has his property right, and it remains his property right. A contract between B and C does not change A's property rights as well as any other rights and liberties. It cannot give neither B nor C more rights relative to A. B gives C some rights against B, by restricting his own rights, and reverse.

    Why do you think I have some problem with understanding this concept? The concept is simple, and in obvious contradiction with classical liberal property rights. Because liberal property rights do not make such a distinction. Allowing the PUBLIC is simply a particular case of allowing some other people to use the property. And in liberal law there is also a place for allowing only PARTS of the PUBLIC to enter the property.

    Actual American liberal law denies the right of the owner to allow only some PARTs of the PUBLIC to enter the property, PARTs which he is (in liberal law) allowed to define himself. It leaves only a restricted property right, where he is allowed to allow only a finite explicit list of other people to the property, or the PUBLIC, that means the whole mankind, with, may be, some exceptions which are also part of a finite explicit list or so.

    Such natural things like allowing only Christians, only Muslims, only men, only women, only adults, only children, only blacks, only whites, only those which I like after looking at them for unknown and unexplained reasons are, instead, heavily regulated. Some choices seem to be allowed, other choices forbidden.

    I have no problem with your open rejection of classical liberal property rights. There are many acceptable moral reasons why one may reject liberal property rights. Say, unjust distribution of property. If you fight for your survival in an environment where all food is privately owned by people who refuse to give it to you, so that the only way to avoid starvation death is to violate their property rights, it is easy to understand that you will start to violate them. Then, liberal rights do forbid legal obligations to help. Such obligations are accepted only as moral obligations, and in some variants (Randism) even these moral obligations do not exist. So, for those who believe in such moral obligations, and think they should be supported by laws which penalize the refusal to help, it is natural to reject liberalism.

    My objection is that American "liberalism" is a political movement which is inherently anti-liberal, and misuses the word "liberalism" to cheat the people.
    Nonsense. I understand the difference, and reject the regulation because it violates classical liberal property rights.
    You have not understood my point.

    A totalitarian ideology is in no way a consequent, principled, fixed ideology. Reread 1984 if necessary. The ideology changes every day, but you are forbidden to recognize these changes, because history is rewritten too every day.

    Democracy tends to become totalitarian, because it tends toward a society where everything "amoral" (in at least one of many morals) is forbidden. Why? Simply because at some times the proponents of different morals will rule, and forbid violations of these morals. When the proponents of another moral win, they add laws which forbid violations of their own morals, but do not remove the laws which forbid the amoral behavior of the competing morals, this would be dangerous for the next elections, because it would allow the opponents to present you as amoral. The end is a society where everybody violates some law roughly three times every day, without even knowing about this. The result is that whenever they want to get you, they will be able to find some violation of some law, even if it is possibly not sufficient to imprison you, you will be at least discredited.

    Liberalism, which is based on very strong and simple principles, so that any violation of liberal principles is easy to detect, was an attempt to avoid this. It has had a lot of positive influence, preventing a complete victory of democratic totalitarism and sometimes even reverting some of its gains, but never succeeded completely.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    This:
    was followed, immediately, by this:
    Immediately, consecutively, that was.

    So what's going on - serious comprehension problems?
    Which is why the US, in its desire to become a more liberal society, passed those Civil Rights laws.
    That is not part of their freedom of contract under a liberal US government, however, because in a situation like the US it leads to denial of civil rights and freedoms under the law.
    As before, this remains a false claim. The denial of civil rights and freedoms (including freedom of contract) to black people by voluntary agreement among white racists was severe, and obvious, and well established in fact.
    That is yet another justification for the American Civil Rights laws, and also part of American liberalism. It is less important than the denial of civil rights and freedoms, because those are considered more important by American liberals.
    Those aren't inherently racist. Remember, we aren't reading minds here.
    The opposite has been happening in the US - we have been moving from a situation of extremely authoritarian government (outright slavery, oppression of women, Prohibition) to greater freedoms, under our uneven but (until recently, anyway) fairly steady and democratically liberal progression. This was guided by the Constitution, a codification of liberal governance that forced the ratchet and prevented much backsliding.
    That turns out to be not so easy.
    In the US we have much experience attempting to cajole bigots and the naive in general to "detect" such things, and have been in practice thrown back on the Constitution merely to prevent bad laws. You, for example, have a great deal of trouble "detecting" even fairly dramatic violations of liberal principles, if they conflict with your formulations of liberal theory. It's been pages now.
     
  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    That is correct. Your rights to your property are restricted, in many ways. You may not murder someone on your property, even though they are on your property. You may not keep slaves, even if you keep them in your own personal, private cage that you yourself purchased. You may not use your property to jam cellphone communications or air traffic control radars, even if that's your favorite hobby. There are many other restrictions on what you can do with your personal property.

    In liberal governments, the government has a role in protecting the rights of others. That means restrictions on what you can do with your property, so that other people are not denied THEIR rights.
    That is exactly right. Those choices that you make about your own property that deny others their rights are, in general, prohibited.
    You have constructed a strawman of what you imagine American liberalism to be, and you rail against that. And if that's how you get personal enjoyment, great. It bears little resemblance to reality, though.
    No, I don't think you do - since you claim that restriction on what you can do with your property means that, by definition, classic liberal property rights have been violated.
    That's quite a conspiracy theory you have there. I like it! You need never prove any assertion you make, because if someone questions you on any assertion, you can claim "well, I could easily prove that, but since history has been rewritten so that (there was once slavery in the US/there was once segregated schooling/the Allies won World War II) therefore my proof was taken away."
     
  20. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    Yes, I'm unable to understand what this means. Looks like you see some contradiction or so. I have added some context, but was unable to understand where you see a contradiction. The remaining stupid repetitions I have disposed.

    About the racist minimum wage laws:
    There is no need to read minds. I have seen explicit racists quotes. Don't remember exactly where, my first guess would be "liberal fascism", but this is, of course, an evil book. But this may have been also various libertarian books covering the history of minimum wage laws.

    And even if we don't care about intentions, the consequences can be seen in statistics. Look at the difference between black and white youth unemployment and compare this with minimum wages. Before minimum wage laws, there was no difference, now it is quite large.
    The relation now is even worse: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm gives "The July 2016 unemployment rates for young ... Whites (9.9 percent), Blacks (20.6 percent) ...".

    So, what elementary economic common sense tells us - that minimum wage laws are most dangerous for those with the lowest wages on a free market, so that one would expect the worst results for black youth - are in nice (ok, not really nice for black teens) agreement with reality.

    PS.: Nice side effect, in a region which seems in economic dispair, one has to expect that the overall wages are lower, and, therefore, the same minimal wage will have a greater unemployment effect. And, once blacks have lower wages, an even greater effect on black youth. What http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/29/news/economy/baltimore-economy/ writes about Baltimore: "Decades of decline in the manufacturing and shipping industries and a shrinking population have left large sections of the city in economic despair. ... For young black men between the ages of 20 and 24, the unemployment rate was an astounding 37% in 2013, according to the most recent data available fromthe U.S. Census Bureau. That's compared with 10% for white men of the same age." nicely fits this thesis.
    Lol. Slavery was abandoned everywhere, simply because it is not efficient, and regarding equal rights for women oppressive regimes like Stalin's or Mao's have been superior in comparison with the West. So, in above cases democracies have simply followed general trends.

    That you mention prohibition is really funny - prohibition was a typical democratic idea, and failed so obviously that there was almost no choice. Despite this, the democracy needed 14 years for this. And they have learned nothing, so as a replacement we have today the drug war. The failure was almost the same, but from 1972 up to today this horrible nonsense continues. It seems, the main difference between alcohol prohibition and drug war is that the victims of drug war are not a majority.

    There has been, of course, some liberation in the domain of sexual freedom following 1968. (The funny thing is that some of those who have been among the activists in the fight against sexual repression around 68, underage prostitutes, are now in a similar illegal situation.) Similar picture as with drugs - a little bit more freedom for the majority, even heavier repression for minorities.
    Of course, my claim that violations are easy to detect holds only for the original, classical liberal principles. Your American liberal principles, which have nothing to do with liberal principles, are, instead, very difficult to detect. This is a general problem with "principles" formulated in 1984 newspeak - one can never be sure if they are violated or not, except if Big Mother Iceaura or so declares this.

    In particular, I have big trouble to find out why the problems of black truck drivers to find jobs would violate freedom of contract. Because there is nothing but your declaration. Given that there are many imaginable reasons for truck firms not to hire black drivers (maybe they have some statistics which claim that they have more accidents or so), and any reason not to hire them is fine, this is in no way plausible that no chance for black truck drivers means some violation of freedom of contract. The only thing which would be sufficient is if they would be forced not to hire blacks, with the threat of doing something illegal against them if they hire blacks. But in this case, this would be a clear violation of actual law. Thus, not a problem of liberal law.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    You say such silly things with such serene confidence.
    Slavery was never abandoned, anywhere. Slavery exists to this day, wherever the laws against it are not enforced at gunpoint. It is so much sought after that a great deal of money and effort has been expended to create its essential features via exploiting loopholes in the laws that are enforced.
    It was and is efficient, from the point of view of the slaveowner. If it were legal it would be near universal. We know that because it was, and is, in that situation.
    It was done away with in most places by the slave owners confronting guns, in the hands of the police and in the hands of hostile poor people.
    Which you used to read the minds of all and every favoring of a minimum wage, and from that you made presumptions about its function in a real economy. That was an error, and a fairly obvious one - nothing in the formulation of a minimum wage presumes even the existence of races.
    Do not instruct people on US history and economic developments, especially regarding race. When you get to the parts where you are ascribing youth unemployment in the black inner city to minimum wage laws, or the demise of slavery to its inefficiency, you lose credibility in everything else you post.
    (OK, a couple of hints: 1) most US minimum wage laws have exceptions for young people and whole categories of employment involving them. 2) the employment rate, not the unemployment rate, is your key number)
    Is there a sillier brand of economic philosophy than the one that gets its information about the US from the wingnut historical revisions?
    It is also a typical undemocratic idea - a common feature of monarchy and tyranny and despotism and so forth, authoritarian government in general.

    As we all know, failure - even very obvious failure - does not in itself remove bad choices by big government no matter how instituted. For example: In America we had people defending your formulation of property rights with the violations of the liberal principles of the Constitution right in front of them, complete failure of their claimed liberal governance, for more than a hundred years. Read the segregationists, and see your formulation of "classical liberal theory" used to defend failures that make Prohibition look like a typo.
    It holds for those principles, as formulated with your presumptions, only in abstract, before they have been applied in real life situations. It's in governance you have your problems, not in your imaginary world of unrestricted property rights and contract rights and so forth.
    Because they were based in denial of freedom of contract, and they contributed to denial of freedom of contract in others.
    Your imagination is not the reliable source of evidence you seem to believe. For example, there were - during the times of civil rights denial via racial discrimination in the US - no such reasons or statistics such as you "imagine", and nobody was making any decisions based on them.
    Not true. The threat of doing something legal against them was also sufficient. In fact. That's because voluntary agreement among white racists to enforce racial discrimination in contracts etc was legal.
     
    Last edited: Jan 5, 2017
  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    (why bother with a title?)

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    Well, what benefit does the private property or its owner receive from the social contract by which societal obligations are established? That is to say:

    How―

    ―do you intend―

    ―to enforce―

    ―that―

    ―contract?

    Hint: Explain how you intend to enforce your contracts without asking the state to occupy any part of that territory.

    Yeah, we get that you reject your own straw men; that is, after all, the reason you construct them in the first place.

    No, you're not.

    Again, how are you going to enforce those contracts? Are you going to invoke your benefits under the social contract? After refusing your obligations? How not unexpected of a racist too incompetent to comprehend that being born black is not an act of will intended to offend a white supremacist.

    Heaping up the make-believe isn't going to help. Nor will changing the subject.

    And this is only important to your nonsensical, uneducated make-believe.

    You're arguing make-believe in lieu of history. It is irrational to simply make shit up if you are dissatisfied with or simply ignorant of the historical record. As an argumentative method, such stupidity is generally unacceptable.

    Let us try the philosophical principle of charity: Do you mean people [outside] the U.S.?

    We might be treating the word "around" differently; three hundred twenty million people in fifty states and a government district covering over nine million square kilometers has us using "around" because "throughout" is regarded as more thoroughly encompassing, though in this case it would probably work just fine. Still, I would plead context: It's pretty clear I'm discussing Americans at that point. If you're looking at "around" as indicating people outside but most immediately affected by the U.S., it's a change of subject. If, in fact, you mean asking around among Americans we might find the proposition that people "are not pissed off by what the U.S. does at home" somewhat laughable.

    Thus: Many supremacists throughout these United States really are pissed off by the proposition against a suicide pact, but it is also a specific obligation of our Constitution except, strangely, our jurisprudence considers itself not formally obliged to that portion of the Supreme Law of the Land. To the other, securing the more perfect union, and the justice and public welfare it entails, for ourselves and our posterity is, in fact, a consideration conscientious statecraft is capable of empowering. Yet no matter how delicate or complicated we try to make the question, if our posterity wasn't important, nobody would appeal to it. There is no paradox, however, in supremacists attempting to simultaneously appeal to and undermine societal posterity; supremacism is, after all, antisocial behavior.

    Which, in turn, is a bit more subtle than any pretense about American society you might invent for the convenience of your continued and effortless ignorance would account for.

    You propose, for instance, to distinguish 'twixt a "liberal defense of equal rights even for those with despicable views" and "a defense of these despicable views", yet are incapable of recognizing the illiberal proposition of alienated rights.

    In the United States, you have inalienable rights. You'll find American liberals continuing to assert that on behalf of our international neighbors who encounter our jurisdiction, in opposition to more conservative arguments pretending word games are sufficient to alienate inalienable rights.

    The Constitution is not a suicide pact; your inalienable rights, common to all people, do not by the Constitutional purview include the alienation of other people's rights.

    And it is specifically illiberal to require such alienation.

    Dysfunction is not some philosophical or psychomoral obligation of liberalism. It might seem, lately, like a conservative cause, but if the arc of history truly bends toward justice, it's likely that the new conservatism that emerges and concretizes over time―and just in time to transform again, as historical cycles seem to go, so maybe ossifies is a better word―will have shifted in a strangely relatively liberal manner subject to the neurotic demands of the new supremacism. See, it's all class warfare, in the end, insofar as we might someday clear all the ethnophobic and sexist inequality off the table and settle into a good ol'fashioned class war in which the wealthy assert the human right to constrict, cultivate, and maintain an indentured labor class. The customarily indentured subordinate class is a perpetual demand of virtually any ruling class. There are, naturally, functional challenges precluding fulfillment. Matters of scale for instance. Like how these schemes inevitably need the perpetually indentured subordinate class to be the vast majority of the population.

    Meanwhile, cheap, superficial supremacism like racism and sexism are what so many relatively disempowered people end up fighting about, because, well, they're not smart enough to figure out anything better, so having someone to hold in existential contempt is all they can come up with. So maybe you don't have the same power to make someone suffer like the rich man can inflict on you, but, hey, at least you can hate black people, right? Except ... you're a slave because you can't make them suffer for your hatred.

    Like I said, it's a bit more subtle than your critique seems capable of countenancing.
     
  23. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    Nonsense. Of course, there is some marginal slavery. But where does it play yet an important economic role? Nowhere. Maybe in some economic sectors like prostitution where they are illegal, so that people are forbidden to use usual means of contract enforcement and conflict resolution, so that such archaic methods make sense as a makeshift, but not more.
    No. We had the discussion about the US civil war, there you continue to claim that it was against slavery, while what I have seen has shown me that it was about taxation and empire creation.
    No. Its consequences for a real economy are a simple conclusion from elementary market rules, they work similarly everywhere where the state tries to control prices. Enforced minimal prices lead to oversupply of those items which would have been sold, in a free market, at a lower price. My arguments that this simple economic rule fits with reality in the domain of minimum wage laws was independent of this, it was a simple example of supporting empirical observations.

    The quotes from the racists have simply shown me that economic understanding of the wage market existed at that time at least among racists. What stupid sheeps with no idea about economy think about the economic consequences of minimum wage laws is beyond my interest, I'm not doing mind reading of people who make obviously stupid claims.
    (1) means only that the harmful effects are so obvious that even the lawmakers would not been able to hide their intentions without some exceptions, (2) No. First, let's note that in non-newspeak statistics, employment rate would be 100%- unemployment rate. Then, there are unemployed people who are not even interested in employment. These would not be influenced by what happens on the job market. To include them would decrease the effect. So, of course, those who like to defend minimum wage laws will prefer this choice. Those interested in the real effect not.
    A nice combination of ad hominem, guilt by association, unjustified generalizations and defamation.

    Some nonsense which presupposes that you are right disposed.
    In real life, one sometimes needs the courts system to find out who owns it, if property rights have been actually violated or not, with all the problems with grey zones and so on. Problems which are well-known and not relevant for the questions discussed.
    Feel free to explain how your "real people" behaved, and how this violated freedom of contract. Start with simple examples. This would allow to clarify which of them really describe violations of freedom of contract, and if this particular violation is a problem for liberal theory or not.
    Of course, "I will not use your shop if you allow blacks to enter it" by a sufficient number of racists is a good reason for the shop owner not to allow blacks. And it is, anyway, not a violation of freedom of contract. If there is a sufficient number of blacks living there, and a sufficient number of non-racist whites, it will not lead to 100% rejection of blacks.
    As it should be, in a liberal society with freedom of contract. Racists are not obliged to make contracts with anybody, neither with blacks nor with white non-racists.

    A liberal society is not a society which makes people good, but a society where evil people who hate each other can nonetheless live and cooperate in peaceful ways. If you want, instead, a society where people are forced to accept some moral values, you have to reject liberalism and accept some totalitarian ideology.
     

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