Continued from yesterday, Civil Rights…Aren’t, I hope you enjoy part two of Stephen L. Hall’s post.
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Discriminate: to note or observe a difference; distinguish; to make a distinction in favor of or against. Often the writers of definitions add evaluation and opinion when writing those definitions. For instance, the definitions just listed had additional, distorting, words such as distinguish was actually distinguish accurately and language was added after the last definition that the distinction was rather than according to actual merit. The Random House Dictionary, 1967, The Unabridged Edition. Coloring language distorts and spins definitions through a cultural context, let us discriminate against such practice forthwith.
Objectively discrimination is not a bad thing. It is not a good thing. It is an act of judgment; an exercise in will. It is choice.
How odd it is that those who most proclaim themselves for choice, pro-choice, are the most adamant against permitting people to discriminate, to choose. People come to issues with preconceptions, biases, and prejudices. The very people who say that such bias and prejudice are most to be eschewed, are completely biased and prejudiced against the very issue of discrimination itself.
Put it simpler, it is preferable not to have preferences, to choose not to choose, to be biased against bias; this could go on forever. This is the opposite of a tautology. Instead of always being true, such a position is always false, always wrong.
The modern conception of discrimination comes out of language from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that restricted employment and commerce from discriminating, “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, or national origin.” The fact that our focus of such discrimination is limited to only certain commercial aspects of society will have to be addressed at another time; at present it is the nature of discrimination itself which needs attention.
One’s race or color are innate, immutable characteristics, and it seems only natural that one should not be held to account for that which they have no control. Thus, the homosexual rights argument rages about whether people are born homosexual or whether it is a lifestyle choice. If sexual preference is uncontrollable then it is like race and gender and it becomes improper to discriminate on that basis, or so the reasoning goes.
In some areas and in some later laws other categories have been added to the list: creed, sex, age, and disability. It is the very source of identity politics which pollutes our public discourse that by claiming a “class” or category of these civil rights law you literally make a federal case out of claiming that someone chose against you.
Courts distinguish this as protected class status, often meaning that if you are not in the class the law does not apply do you, particularly in state agencies. This of course means that the very agencies created to prevent discrimination are themselves discriminating. People call this reverse discrimination, which is intellectually dishonest, it is simply discrimination against a different group.
But the nature of another criteria gets intentionally overlooked. While one is reared within the culture of a particular religion, one chooses their religion as a matter of conscious choice. E.g. it is central to the Protestant religion that a person may only make the decision to become a Christian once they have reached the age of maturity, and that it must be a personal choice. No matter to which religion a person subscribes, and what that religion actually pretends, the choice of religion always must be a personal decision.
Anti-discrimination has become a huge industry, from private civil rights groups like the NAACP, CAIR, La Raza, ACLU, ADL, and many others. Some of these groups, like La Raza and the NAACP, while pretending to espouse equality have overtly racist overtones themselves, others, like the ACLU, are political organizations pushing communist agendas in the name of civil rights, and still others have even been classified as terrorist or terrorist sympathizing organizations, like CAIR and the ADL. There is a lot of many to be made advancing identity politics not just from lawsuits but from fund-raising drives. This doesn’t even get into the state and federal careers built out of agencies created just to enforce the civil rights laws.
All of this bulky and expensive apparatus built around forcing people not to make certain decisions based upon certain criteria others find objectionable. But, how many are familiar with the problem once faced by the March of Dimes? The March of Dimes was a charitable organization created for the sole purpose of combating the devastating crippling effects of polio on children, leaving them in wheel chairs and on crutches, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Polio was cured. What were the employees of the March of Dimes to do now? They re-purposed and expanded to all crippling childhood conditions.
Civil rights laws were originally aimed at overt discrimination, so what happens when they succeed? When there is no longer the overt discrimination of “whites only” signs and “black only” signs, when schools, businesses, and places of public accommodation are no longer segregated? They re-purpose to look for systemic or hidden discrimination. Anything and everything becomes discrimination because there is an entire industry dependent upon being offended by someone with money being discriminatory.
The segregation era was marked by restaurants, landlords, and employers who would not serve or employ black people, or white people, under the legal imposition of segregation. Bad men! Except they weren’t. Segregation was imposed upon many of these business owners by state laws implemented to enforce the “separate but equal” standard created by the Supreme Court. Segregation was the law, not a choice.
With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 we jumped directly from a system of forced segregation to a system of forced integration. The law was justified in Congress by citing statistics showing the wage disparity between blacks and whites, and between men and women. The statistics demonstrated that these wage gaps were narrowing, but not fast enough for the meddlers of Congress.
So how effective was the Civil Rights Act in accomplishing its stated goals? While I was sitting in law school, my professor proudly stated what that wage gap was now to show how successful the law was. So I did a simple linear extrapolation of the narrowing of the wage gap under segregation to compare it to the civil rights law. There was no difference. The wage gap had continued to narrow at exactly the same rate under civil rights as it had under segregation. Civil rights laws had done nothing. By their own standard of their stated purpose, the Civil Rights Act was a complete and total failure, no better than Segregation.
So what happens without government laws, without either Segregation or the Civil Rights Act, if people are free to discriminate, to make their own free choices and election? I mean aside from the grievance industry grieving for their loss of lucrative, cushy jobs, of course. That would depend entirely upon whether a person was correct in their assumptions upon which they discriminate.
If one discriminates it is based upon assumptions about people as a group; but people overlook that choosing to make no distinction between groups is a discrimination based upon the assumption that there is no difference between the groups. To not discriminate is a form of discrimination. To believe that there is no difference between any two groups would be to believe that they were statistically identical, that would be statistically impossible. The question would be whether the difference between two groups were meaningful.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell. In a free market economy, the person who pays the price for being wrong about their discriminatory decisions would be the landlord or the employer. But where the decision is taken away from them and made by the government, the government pays no price for being wrong.
Imagine two types of employer, one who discriminates in favor of one group over another and one who chooses not to make a distinction between two groups. Let us call these groups A and B, for illustration. There will be three types of employers, let us label them 1, 2, & 3. Employer 1 favors group A; employer 2 makes no distinction between A & B; and employer 3 favors group B.
If there is no difference between the groups then all types of employers will hire equally competent employees. If group B is paid less, then employer 3 will prosper and grow by saving money on wages. Increasing demand for type B employees by employer 3 will drive up the wages of group B until the wage difference disappears. There is no long-term economic advantage to discriminate and no need for any government interference.
If there really is a difference, one group will make better employees than the other, for illustration purposes suppose group A are better workers than group B. Supposing that both groups are paid the same wages, employer 1 would prosper and grow having hired the better employees. Increasing demand for type A employees by employer 1 would drive up their wages relative to group B until the wage gap reflected the real difference in the abilities of the employees.
There is no economic incentive for employers to discriminate where there is no difference between different groups of employees, therefore no basis for anti-discrimination laws. Where there is a difference, anti-discrimination and equal pay laws impose unjust burden on employers and unjustly suppress and discriminate against employees who excel.
“The greatest injustice is to treat unequal things as if they were equal.” Aristotle. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else is smart enough to say that those who discriminate are definitively wrong. Anti-choice laws, or anti-discrimination laws, are an imposition of one person’s judgment upon another. “The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.” Frederick Douglass. To paraphrase Mr. Douglass, “the worker’s happiness cannot be purchased by the employer’s misery.”
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Be sure to tune in tomorrow for the final segment!
