From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 01:43:07 MDT
"Alex F. Bokov" wrote:
>
>
> Just as today there are businesses that find an increasingly lucrative
> market among women, immigrants, people of color, and gays. Now they
> cater to traditionally oppressed groups not in some selfless do-gooder
> crusade but simply because their money is as green as anybody
> else's. Everywhere and everyplace there are always merchants shrewd
> enough to go after that money if governments don't interfere (with
> laws like the ones banning women from voting, banning gays from
> marrying or enlisting in the regional security monopoly, aparteid,
> etc.)
>
This only happens in a political and legal environment where
going after these dollars is allowed and where the hatred and
animosity against these out groups is no so high that the
business believe they will lose more than the dollar gained.
Good business is certainly not a cure-all. Business alone did
not break open the civil rights abuses of the 60s nor did it
bring greater rights to women, gays and other groups. Business
cashes in after the tide has begun to turn. It seldom
instigates greater acceptance of out groups directly in
opposition to the surrounding climate.
> The corollary of this is that if you want to advance the cause of
> whatever group you belong to, the key is to become an economic
> force to be reckoned with.
>
> The Jim Crow era was really a fight between the liberal Federal
> government and certain reactionary state governments. While it does
> cast doubt on the Republican "State's Rights" doctrine it only lends
> support to anarcho-libertarianism, because if there weren't any
> governments passing irrational laws in the first place, intervention
> from an even higher level of government would not have been necessary.
>
So. Do you assume that people all by themselves do not nurse
and propagate vicious memes against groups they perceive as
different enough and/or a threat?
> > Libertarians don't favor
> > > outlawing stupidity, but stupidity should have its costs.
>
> It does, by definition, except when some do-gooder authority
> decides to redistribute these costs and protect the stupid
> from the consequences of their actions.
The goal (wrongly implemented and executed as the means often
are) is to protect the victims of the nastiness and end as much
of the nastiness as possible.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:09:13 MST