Running racism in America thread

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” -- my favorite quote from F. A. Hayek.

Whether they realize it or not, those progressives of the past, and the people quoted in that story today, are like the arsonist that starts fires over and over again, and then rides in on the fire truck to put the fire out. While cluelessly using gasoline that they think is water.

It's bad enough that these redistributive ideas, done in the blunt ways they advocate for, are immoral -- infringing on some people's individual rights (property rights, or others) to try to boost the fortunes of others creates a backward ideology in which they think you can create justice for some. ... by theft and coercion of others.

Those ideas in practice obviously aren't even very effective (and you don't see that kind of story enough), which isn't surprising given what we should have learned from history. They have actually had the effect of instititutionalizing racial disparities and exacerbating them for some people. Which is why it is so frustrating seeing the same kinds of tired voices being quoted, advocating for the same kinds of things without understanding that they are simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

As a country, we're not going to learn, I am afraid, which is frustrating as hell. I didn't comment on that essay you posted the other day about reperations, because I am worn out by it. But the entire focus, if we want to remain a free country with a primacy on individual rights (which is the only moral society), should be on trying to undo the institutionalized things our governments have created that keep the playing field uneven.

The starting spot is so obvious to me, which is undoing stupid drug laws, enforcement of them, and the general attitude toward "law and order" in the country that has had incarceration rates (with black males being the people way disproportionately affected) climbing to out-of-control levels since that "crime bill" in the mid 90s that created a crony-capitalist prison industry and effectively has our government supplying the inputs (black men) for someone to get paid that rigged stream of cash for imprisoning people. It has entrenched poverty and hopelessness for the same racial minorities who are now trapped in the cycle we have created.

Do enough things like that, and it won't be an overnight "fix." But there are almost two experiences for black peple in this country since the civil rights movement. The leveling of the playing field that has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years (and we have made huge gains, even though it is difficult to see it at a time like this) has allowed a lot of black people to achieve more, and there is a much bigger African-American middle class than there was in the past. But at the same time, a scary number of people have been left behind in that hopeless cycle I was describing, because the playing field is still way too unlevel, and we have almost this stubborn insistence on keeping it in place that way.

I wish we'd get rid of the ridiculous "fair share" rhetoric and these dangerous ideas in which the solution to an unjust world is to take from one person to give another person things that person hasn't individually earned. It is a formula for a worse America. Instead, I wish we could really commit (not just rhetorically, but by deeds) to making the playing field as level as possible, which is actually much more difficult to do. It's not an expedient "feel good" way to approach the world, but I don't care what the racial or ethnic group is, when opportunity is there relatively equally for everyone (and even when it isn't, actually, if you just don't make the obstacles so insurmountable to guarantee failure), people with something to offer will avail themselves of it -- for their own reasons. That isn't a "theory" that people love to distill my posts to, it's empirically what the last 500 or 600 years have demonstrated.

 

Free markets, by definition, require voluntary exchange. No coercion. They require societies that are free from all forms of government-enforced economic privilege. If you really think that slavery can exist in a society in which free markets are allowed to operate, you have absolutely no understanding of what a free market actually is.

In any case, pointing to the immorality of slavery doesn't really address what I posted, does it? Unless you have a grand plan to go back and change 400 years of unjust history, it's explanatory about our past as it informs our present, but it says nothing about how we should be living our lives today. Unless the point is that we shouldn't reinstitute slavery.

You are actually making the point I was trying to make about hundreds of years of history. During times when various groups of people have been left free, without barriers, to just live their lives, with enough of a level playing field for them to strive for things, it has led to general prosperity for those groups. When those opportunities don't exist -- with slavery being the most extreme example, short of maybe genocide -- it obviously does a great deal of harm to a group. To the extent that we don't have slavery today, but we still have institutionalized craziness and government control of things that are standing in people's ways, getting rid of those things should be our sole focus.

 

Indeed. It doesn't even have an answer for how you got "invisible hand" from that post.

I'm not making some argument about a theoretical aggregate good and free markets, as determined as you are to attach that to my post.

I was making an argument about what I think is moral, and how practically you can see the empirical effects of behaving morally the way I was suggesting. Get out of the way, and stop with preferences or disadvantages for some and not others. ... and regardless of race or religion or sexuality or whatever, we don't need people who "have an answer for everything." What you get is equality of opportunity, and there is nothing inherent about that that benefits one race or another or one group or another.

The point of my original post was that those people with "answers for everything" have actually caused a lot of harm for the people they were purpoting to help, which was the major point of that article you linked to.