Ron Paul is a Racist Kook

http://dwb.thenewstribune.com/news/crime/story/4883332p-4477868c.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7045725

Your point about hate crimes is silly. What defines a hate crime is the expressed motive for committing the crime, not the particular race of the perpetrator or the victim.

That's only racism if you define racism in terms of personal bias or discrimination on an individual basis. The point that you seem to have missed is that there's a bigger a picture. Racism is only really a problem when it's systematic and systemic. It's only a problem when certain groups, not individuals, have identifiable, quantifiable disadvantages relative to another group.

It would be so nice if we could remedy these inequalities simply by agreeing not to discriminate and treating everyone equally. Unfortunately, people are not equal from birth. Until those inequalities which result from accidents of birth are unrelated to a person's race, then we don't have a level playing field.

So that answers MiTH's question of when has it been long enough. It can stop when members of every minority group have the same opportunities as whites. It's over when all groups are represented in positions of privilege and power in numbers proportionate to the percentage of the population they represent.

This idea that the free market corrects racism is just laughable. What about child pornography? There is hardly a practice that's more universally condemned, yet as long as there's a market for it, the practice continues.

The market doesn't enforce right and wrong. The market would have us believe that corn syrup belongs in every food and that cutting down rainforests to produce fast food burgers is an efficient use of natural resources. The market gets it wrong - a lot.

Lemme get this heterosexual.

Denny's, Cracker Barrel, etc., are still indulging in practices from the 1950's. Those businesses are sued, because the federal government passed laws against that sort of thing, and have to pay out fines and settlements. The free market that kept every single business in the South segregated from European settlement up until the federal government struck down segregation and passed civil rights laws deserves the credit. So, Ron Paul will fight racism by repealing the laws that made segregation illegal.

In conclusion, Ron Paul supporters are stupid and terrible people.

That, and a hail of racial slurs, earned him a trip to jail Thursday, along with a rare charge from Pierce County prosecutors: a black-on-white hate crime.

The playing field will never, not in a million years, ever be level. I love how some people think I am the one floating around in alternate universes. If you want to legislate your way into a level playing field, I'll be back here on the ground waiting.

Until then, the best and most fair way to treat racism is to hold all people to the same standards. Yeah...its not perfect...boo hoo. But its a lot better than trying to legislate on a case by case basis determined by arbitrary decisions of fairness by authoritarian politicians and judges.

The free market is not a moral correcting instrument. But it does have an incredible effect of following corrected morals. Correlation/causation...you remember, right?

You are right though, that the free market doesn't enforce right and wrong. I would argue that the government doesn't either, but that is another argument completely. What the free market does really well though, is place a financial incentive to correct behaviors to align with commonly held morals.

This explanation also explains why the free market didn't have much affect on racism until the civil rights movement: Nobody seemed to do or say anything about racism until the civil rights movement. Once awareness and financial pressures (in the form of boycotts mostly, but others as well) started showing its faces, businesses responded...even without the "help" of the government.

As to child pornography...it follows the trends of every other addictive behavior and highly non-elastic demand. I don't know what the solution is, but it probably won't be fixed by a free market. Even I can admit that much. I have never said a free market will fix racism either...just that it provides a financial incentive to do so.

Seriously what the ******** is the matter with you

Yeah...cause Fredrick Douglass really had people up in arms and marching in the streets, didn't he?

Because Child Pornography is racism? Huh?

Children are impressionable and ignorant in ways that adults are not. That's why we have the notion of "parenting". Good parents protect their kids from such activities. Failing that, they outsource to law enforcement to defend their parental rights just as they would to defend their property.

People choose not to avoid corn syrup, it's cheap and tastes good. Probably not very healthy. Health isn't topmost on people's minds 100% of the time.

This does not mean there are no externalities in market transactions. In fact, there are externalities in every transaction we make. Most are so small that regulating them would wreck the economy.

The rainforest externality could maybe rise to a level of requiring legislation depending on how honest and scientific the environmental alarmists are. Then again, markets do provide incentive for owners to conserve that which is valuable about their property. For instance private ownership is preserving endagered species from poaching in Africa better than public bans ever did.

All of this has squat to due with the financial stupidity of racist business practices.

It's not a straw man argument at all. Well, OK. My extension of it, where I accused you of Marxist thought, THAT was a straw man. Hopefully a funny one.

But to be serious about it, in a nation with such a maldistribution of wealth, how can you say everyone is treated equally? It's absurd.

We aren't treated equally. I wish it were so.

But the distribution of wealth argument is not how I measure equality. It is more like how I measure productivity gaps. Equality is how we are treated and held to standards. When you use wealth comparisons, you are treating wealth as something that is granted and not earned or created.

This just begs the question of how you would protect the victims of racism. And, of course, your entire body of work on this question begs the question of how badly you understand human nature. Galt touched on it...you assume this hyperrationality in human nature, and that's just patently ridiculous. Really. You need to grow up, in the most literal sense. Live, experience things.

Wow.

I can't believe you took a university spot away from a deserving black person

From reading his inane crap in his anti-immigrant thread, I thought it was pretty likely dannytoone is a racist.

This thread confirms it.

You can believe anything you want. I have no reason to prove myself to an idiot.

Legislation only happened after a majority of people pushed it. Legislation tends to follow public opinion in a democratic society, you know. Legislation did not improve race relations or the occurrence of racism...it just gave a sigh of relief to the "they oughta make a law..." types.

How would I protect the victims of racism? The same way it has been accomplished for centuries: Education, persuasion, and financial incentivization.

Just a quick question...how exactly did racism against German immigrants or Irish immigrants subside, if we never had any legislation to counter racism?

What kind of incentivization is NOT affirmative action?

More despised groups came after them.

A free market has incentives to eliminate racial profiling practices in an interest to keep a broad demographic.

And are you saying that all we have to do to curb our racism of blacks is to get a bunch of Jews to immigrate?

Edited

Wow. You just implied that if a child gets sexually abused, it's the parents' fault. That's a pretty ********ed up notion of personal responsibility.

Anyway, as I suspected you might, you missed the point of the analogy. Child pornography is something clearly harmful and wrong, which the vast majority of people condemn. Yet despite all the vociferous condemnations, the practice continues -- because there is a market for it. Market forces keep many practices alive which are harmful to individuals, to communities and to societies. That is simply a fact of capitalism.

Bottom line: if it has no immediate dollar value, it doesn't get preserved.

You haven't really demonstrated the financial stupidity of racist business practices. You keep saying that employers will hire undervalued workers, like minorities, women or undocumented immigrants, because doing so is in the employer's interest. Sure, that's true -- but only as long as the employee continues to be undervalued, aka exploited. As soon as the employer has to pay the going rate, the incentive to be tolerant disappears. You've just proved that market forces encourage the exploitation of workers who are at a disadvantage due to racism.

Sorry, that is a simple fact of life. Any time people desire evil and harm, they will get it, regardless of economic order. The comparison between the two doesn't hold too much water IMO, because one is an addictive stimulus, and the other is an ignorant phobia. I can't see a free market affecting one, but it definitely can affect the other.

That is the difference between public and private property. With private property, present value and future value are interconnected proportionally. With public property, the concept of future value is discarded, because present value is always greater if no measures are taken to preserve future value.

This is why we don't have an over-chicken farming problem, but we have an overfishing problem: Nobody owns the ocean, but chicken farmers own their own chickens and land and have a financial interest in sustainable growth.

Ahh...but what you have failed to acknowledge is that if minority employees are no longer undervalued, then the racism is negligible. It means that if a latino of equal skills can earn the same as a white person of equal skills, then it matters little that one person doesn't hire latinos out of racism, because that latino can find a job elsewhere with similar ease.

And exploitation is always a word thrown around too easily. Do you realize that if someone is "exploited" because of lower cost, also means that someone has a job that he didn't and couldn't have had before?

You have no idea what the answer to this is, do you?

Ahem....

I'm trying to decide whether my joke here should be about goalposts moving, missing the talking points memo, rain on your wedding day, short attention span theater, or Mr. Crow's table for one.

I'm going to assume that among the multitude of facts of which you are ignorant, one of them is that the law in relation to employment is that an employer can win a discrimination lawsuit by proving it held all employees to the same standards. This fact being true, your second sentence makes no sense.

You are supporting the basis of my argument in this thread that Ron Paul and his ilk are racist kooks. If you acknowledge that the free market has the potential to provide financial incentives to align with "commonly held morals" such as "I don't want black people in my restaurant/movie theater/swimming pool", then you've acknowledged that the free market cannot by itself solve the dilemma of racism. So we've made progress here.

Now, consider this point: Knowing that racism will persist in an unregulated free market, those who continue to advocate for an unregulated free market are either (b) insufficiently concerned about the moral hazard of racism or (b) pleased at the persistence of racism in the market. In either scenario, the "kooks" part of the premise is thus proven and the "racist" portion is at least 2/3 of the way there, depending on how much you want to scorn looking the other way while Kitty Genovese screams.

Question for everone that really knows what racism is.

I don't like my white brother in-law, does that make me a racist?
A little on his back round he is a drug addict and is in and out of jail all the time.