Freedom & Racism

The New York Times recently featured a blog post on their front page about Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul, and his views on civil rights law, specifically regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A snip:

In an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Mr. Paul appeared uncertain about whether he would have supported forcing private businesses to desegregate in the 1960s, suggesting that might run afoul of his libertarian philosophy. His views emerged as Ms. Maddow asked Mr. Paul if he thought a private business had the right to refuse service to a patron who was black.

“I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form,” he said. “ I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. We still do have private clubs in America that can discriminate based on race.”

The New York Times is doing its college best to pillory him for his supposed beliefs about racism, and it pretty well succeeded by touching off a firestorm around this issue.  (It’s hard to tell what he actually believes, or even what his stated views are.  Though I have read people say that he does give “yes” answer to the private business question, I have watched the whole thing and I did not see where he does so.  Instead he equivocates and dodges every direct question Maddow asks, never states whether he’s for or against the Civil Rights Act, and often just goes into bits of historical anecdote.)  Rand for his part is doing his best to turn himself more mainstream, to compromise his views for the sake of electability, something his dad has never done, so that he ends up not seeming to have any values or firm beliefs at all except getting himself elected Senator.  This seems to show that while beliefs are transmitted easily from parent to child, moral courage is not.  This does not jeopardize my support of Rand Paul though because I am past the stage of seeing coercive democracy as a legitimate form of government.  Even if I agreed with 100% of what a candidate in my voting district said, I would not vote for them.  I no longer believe in the legitimacy of election to the offices of our government today, so it makes no difference to me whether Rand Paul loses because of this, or whether he completely disavows his presumably pro-freedom views, or whether he wins as a Dixiecrat in Kentucky.

However, the substance of the racism issue needs addressing.  It is important to say, the views here presented are mine — I eschew presuming to speak for other people by labelling this to be the “libertarian” response.  It is my own, with which people who call themselves libertarians might agree.

So I will take up Rachel Maddow’s question that Rand Paul would not.  Do private businesses, such as restaurants, have a right to refuse service to people because of their skin color?  Yes, they do.  Is this discrimination?  Of course.  Is this unfair to minorities?  Yes, if they want to eat in that restaurant.  Or go to that college.  Or ride that bus.  (I am only contemplating private companies and institutions here.)

What are the problems with this?  Well, racism is ugly.  It is backwards, it oppresses the minorities who are being discriminated against, and it hurts both parties involved, the discrimanator and the discriminated.

The government intervention solution to this problem is to force racist business owners not to discriminate along racist lines among their clientele.  By doing so, the “rights” of the person who was discriminated against are restored, and the hope is that in the long run, racism will be stamped out.

However, to say that the government has the right to force business owners to integrate is to say government has the right to correct our consciences or actions wherever it disagrees with them.  Assuming control of a man’s business and forcing him to run it a certain way is slavery.  It is not total slavery like the slavery of the blacks before the Civil War, but it is the same principle.  The denial of one man’s property rights by another, be it the property of his body, his money, or other goods he has acquired, constitutes slavery.  It is nothing but the doctrine that the “people in charge” have the right to tell others what to do, the same doctrine which supported slavery of the blacks before the Civil War.

It is also important to realize that this coercive solution can work both ways: as the government in a society which supports forced integration may force racists to cease discriminating, by the same token we may expect the government in a racist society to force non-racists to discriminate, which I imagine almost everyone would be against.

Still, the question remains, should we who are against racism not attempt to fight it by supporting government intervention against discrimination and opposing laws that are outright racist and discriminatory themselves?  Indeed that is at least a consistent position, but it is in conflict with the fundamental human right of property.  The right of property entails the right to dispose of one’s property however one wants.  Because a private business is indeed the sole property of its owner, the owner may operate their business in whatever way they desire.  This includes discrimination: there is no obligation to serve everyone who wants to be served, to hire everyone who wants to be hired.  Imagine a law that forbade discriminating based on a customer’s ability to pay.  Then business owners would be forced to serve everyone for free, which clearly would be recognized as slavery.  A man needs offer no explanation in why he disposes of his property as he does; if he does not want to commercially transact with another party, he does not have to, whatever the reason may be.  The negation of this idea is the real human rights violation.

I also question the efficacy of interventionist laws to effect the kind of change intended.  The advocates of corrective measures like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 believe that such laws will have the effect of ending racism by forcing racists to interact with other races and thereby realize their beliefs were wrong.  This is nothing but a dream.

The method of exterminating racism by forced integration is guaranteed to be fraught with conflict, no two ways about it.  Nothing less could be expected by forcing people into space with others they deeply dislike.  Racist elements will resist the imposition of outside mores, and, to judge from the American experience in the 1960′s, react violently.  Lastly, to the extent that the policies do end up changing the way some people think, believing that everyone’s mind will change in a positive way is unrealistic.  It is impossible to tell how any individual would react in a forced integration situation, but it is just as reasonable to assume that a borderline racist’s views may be polarized as to assume that they will become non-racist.

In the city I grew up in, another unintended consequence of a forced integration law was easy to observe in the phenomenon of “white flight.”  In the 1970′s, the federal government mandated municipal school districts across the country to start programs of busing students across town to force more racial intermixing at schools.  This caused many white families to move out to the suburbs to escape these policies, perhaps not because of outright racism but merely discomfort with the situation.  The end result, which clearly persists today, was the abandonment of many of the old parts of town and the growth of suburbs that are much richer and almost all white.  A rule intended to increase integration in schools ended up causing more economic stratification and geographical separation between the races.

Another problem that advocates of anti-racism laws overlook is that, in order for such laws to be passed, the society must already be broadly anti-racist.  In other words, in a deeply racist society like the United States was in the 1800′s and early 1900′s, there is no hope of anti-racist laws ever being passed.  The real danger is that positively racist laws instead will be passed that legalize and institutionalize discrimination, mandating separate facilities for different races, banning education for minorities, permitting slavery, and so on.  To be sure, these laws are pure evil, and American states all had plenty of laws like these.  (It should be noted, however, that if these laws are supported by a will of the majority of the population including the minorities, then they are fundamentally just in a democratic way.)

If racial discrimination is a problem in a democratic society, then anti-racist laws like the Civil Rights Act only have a chance of being passed when the problem is already receding.  To the extent to which they act to repeal actual racist laws, they are mostly superfluous, and in the extent to which they impose rules against discrimination on private citizens, they are tyrannical.

What is the way, then, to combat racism?  I believe what it takes is for people who disagree with hateful and ignorant doctrines such as racism (as well as religious superiority, homophobia, sexism, etc.) to stand up to intolerant people and disagree with them on their level.  It takes not only friends, but the victims of the discrimination themselves to stand up.

The lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960′s were so admirable and effective because they fundamentally challenged the culture of segregation in a peaceful form of protest.  As long as everyone observed the segregationist rules, the true ugliness of racial discrimination was hidden.  The protesters endured tremendous humiliation and risk of personal danger to unmask it.  By confronting the issue directly, entire communities of individuals were forced to decide whether they could really support such obvious, baseless hatred.  It takes a long time, but this is the only way change can happen.

There is plenty more I could write about this, but I will now conclude this post.  To summarize my views, though, I defend the right of anyone to believe what they want, which includes racism.  By the same principle with which I oppose the enslavement of blacks to whites, I oppose the coopting of property to force racists to enter into associations they do not want to.  I do not defend the right of anyone to harm anyone else.  I believe that when left free to associate, people will naturally overcome artificial and false prejudices about each other.

Axioms of existence

Recently, I have come across three proposed axioms that govern mathematics and human life/existence in general, and such things as these provide fertile ground for thinking.

1. The Axiom of Choice — I first encountered this tonight after surfing through a few layers of web pages on abstract algebra.  (I was reading about that to try to find some good concepts and proof ideas to show to one of the students I work with.)  This axiom (as far as I can tell, it is axiomatic) is limited (as far as I can tell) to mathematical use only, although inasmuch as that application has to do with taking our rules of logic to their furthest extent, its use may pour over into other areas of inquiry.
   The axiom of choice states that it is always possible  to pick one object from each set of a collection of non-empty sets.  It was surprising to me when I first read this that such a statement even needed to be made, yet after reading some relevant examples, I was surprised to find that this was an essential fact that I (not to mention mathematicians throughout history) had taken for granted.  A vital stipulation of the axiom, as stated where I found it, is that a rule for how to pick the objects does not have to be given, or even to be exist, for it to still be possible to choose objects.
   Why would a rule on how the objects are picked matter?  Imagine that each of our sets is just a random group of integers, such as [2, 6, 235], [-78, 0], and [490, 23, 293875928371].  With just three sets, we can perform the choosing for ourselves in less than a second.
   But what if our collection is all possible subsets of the integers, a collection which is infinite and consists of sets which are finite as well as infinite (for example, odd numbers)?   To do work with these sets or objects from them, we must, or so we think, at least know what we are dealing with, and the only way to do that systematically with an infinite number of sets is to define the rule for taking an element from each.  A choice function for this collection (I think) could be as follows: For a given set S in our collection, f(S)=0 if 0 is in S, the least positive number in S if 0 is not in S, or the greatest negative number in S if S contains no positive numbers nor 0.
   However, there are collections and sets where we could not find a rule.  An example (thought of off the top of my head) would be sets composed of any number of integers and/or objects from my desk.  This could include of course numers, but  also a rubber band, a book, a box of tissues, a guitar capo, a cell phone, a bunch of change, an Amazon credit card statement, and so on.  Here, it is less obvious how to specify a rule to pick objects for sets without integers.  (This may fail, I realize, because there is not an infinite amount of objects on my desk, but I hope it illustrates that problems can arise with more complexity and arbitrariness in the makeup of our sets)
   What the axiom of choice says is that it is possible (and therefore allowable in formal proofs) to choose objects from sets, without specifying a rule for how to do so, and even in cases where no such rule may even be possible.  This is extremely powerful, and the wikipedia article on the subject points out numerous equivalent results throughout mathematics, and results that rest on the axiom.  In probably every math class I took at UGA, at some point the phrase “Pick an object from each set” was uttered (or something equivalent), but never did I question whether that action was doable.
   Don’t expect a complete logical justification or defense of this principle from me right now, though.  It will be food for thought for a while.
2. The Action Axiom — Ludwig von Mises specifies this axiom at the opening of Human Action.  The axiom simply states that “Man acts.”  From this (to my understanding of Austrian economics) all other economic knowledge is derived.  Whether Mises was the first to enunciate this axiom, I do not know.
   His usage of the word “act” is defined in the first sentence of the first chapter: “Human action is purposeful behavior.”  Put other ways, this is “will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”
   In the first part of Human Action, Mises goes through the ins and outs of this definition, problems that could be raised as objections to it, and some first consequences of it.  One consequence is the scale of value, which determines the action a man takes at any one time.  Since action is purposeful behavior to remove unease, and since man always has at least one source of unease which he is capable of attempting to mediate or eliminate, and since he can only perform one action at a time, a scale of values arises whereby men act on the dissatisfaction that is most urgent to them at the time.  (This also assumes scarcity, which ought to be a self-evident fact of the universe, and at any rate is assumed by other schools of economics; Mises addresses the performance of one action at a time.)  Another result that closely follows, well known in other schools of economics, is the law of diminishing returns, which Mises just calls the “Law of Returns.”
   Here we have (moreso in Human Action than in this blog post) a firm, rigorous, deductive derivation of commonly known economic laws, whose proofs are usually given with graphs of smooth curves and calculus.  Mises terms the study of human action “praxeology,” and says that economics is only the most well-developed area of this science.  I suppose this is because production and trade are obviously important as subjects of study, and more easily parsed because of pricing elements, goods produced, and such.
   The amazing thing about the action axiom, similar to the axiom of choice, is  the recognition of a fundamental element of not only all economic activity, but of all conscious endeavors undertaken by men.  It is so self-obvious that it was overlooked for thousands of years of inquiry by men, and so its terrible implications were also not understood.  Unfortunately, today, the action axiom is really only widely known on one side of the campus of Auburn University today, as well as at the Manhattan barbecue restaurant Hill Country once a month and a few other pockets around the world, but at colleges it has been shunted aside and forgotten.  This is how economics was studied, in a logical and careful manner, in the School of Salamanca, Spain, long before Adam Smith, and certainly Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises ever wrote.  If any of its conclusions are to be proved wrong, the error in the reasoning must be pointed out.  Later chains of reasoning notwithstanding — I’m not so fresh on them right now — the action axiom seems to be solid.
   (Sadly, I cannot find the simple statement of the axiom in Human Action right now, but all the other citations are from page 11 of the Scholar’s Edition.)
3. The Existence Axiom — I am nearing the end of Atlas Shrugged, but I just reached the chapter called “This is John Galt Speaking,” which is probably the roughest rough patch of all in the book.  In truth, this 60-page unbroken monologue (!) is less a piece of dialog in a book than a full exposition of Ayn Rand’s personal philosophy, just stuck right in there in the middle of a novel.  I got 8 pages in last night; I fully expect reading the whole thing to take several days, whereas I’ve had other days where I got through 60 full pages of normal parts of the book.
   In the dialog, John Galt takes over the airwaves of the whole country to explain the philosophy and moral system of the producers who have been victimized by society.  He begins at the start of the start, positing the mind as man’s one tool of survival, as an animal has strength and speed and plants have, I dunno, the sun.  Man must use his mind to attain the things he values for his life.  Actions he takes toward self-preservation are natural and moral; thought therefore is the basic moral action, while having the things he values brings him happiness.  However, unlike plants and animals for which attaining valued things is an automatic instinct, for man pursuing his goal is choice; he must decide to think, and in this way, morality is also therefore a choice.
   Proceeding from here, Galt gives the kernel of his system of reason as the “Existence Axiom:”  ”existence exists.”  That’s it.  From this follow two immediate corollaries: the existence of something, and that consciousness exists.  It seems so bare a statement, but it is understood and indeed necessary for all else we know and do.  Why should it even need to be stated that existence exists?
   In the world of Atlas Shrugged, most of society has unknowingly arrived at agreement on what John Galt calls the “Morality of Death,” where the mind of man is turned against himself, or rather disabled so that he cannot fend for himself and ultimately not survive.  To preach this ideology, the academics and public leaders partially rely on demonstrating a number of inherent supposed contradictions of existence and of morality, from which it is concluded that morality is non-real, truth is unknowable or impossible, and the mind is useless at best and man’s greatest weakness at worst.  Galt unmasks the fallacy of this ideology by reducing it to a contradiction with the existence axiom.
   In a universe of absolutes where the existence axiom rules, contradiction is impossible, and of the many consequences of this recognition is the idea that man must use his mind to improve his life, attain the things he values while adhering to the moral code, and ultimately find happiness.  All this from the simple sentence “existence exists.”

What is it that makes these axioms, with all of their vital ramifications, so hard to identify?  Partly, it is that they are so deeply and universally embedded in our experience that we do not notice them until we reach much deeper problems which seem baffle all the prior assumptions we had held.  It seems that their discovery must follow concrete experience lacking understanding.  Without having observed a multitude of economic transactions, Austrian economists could not have discovered the action axiom operating behind them all.  Not until contemplating and parsing many more derivative mathematical questions for thousands of years could mathematicians notice the function of the axiom of choice in all of them.  Yet these truths are the most basic and fundamental to all of our systems of thought.

I feel some trepidation in asserting that an axiom is true; I rather prefer “seems to be true.”  I do not know whether an axiom can be positively asserted by anyone to be true, for axioms are defined to be self-evidential and requiring no proof.  However, if no proof can be given for the truth of an axiom, does that mean it is incontrovertible?  How could an axiom be debated, if it is ultimately simply supposed to be accepted as a given fact of the universe?  It seems that an argument could turn on whether someone simply refused to accept some axiom, or some specific part of one, because it was not self-evidential to them.  This is important, because while the axiom of choice is only important/understandable to those with some mathematical training and I can’t imagine anyone attempting to deny the existence axiom, the action axiom on the other would probably be extremely controversial to discuss.  Perhaps the difficulty is that the definition of axiom is a little subjective.  Something may be self-evident to one, but not obvious to another.  Again, it’s hard to imagine someone denying that existence exists, but the axiom of choice in mathematics was not accepted for quite a while after it was first proposed.  (Not to say that its widespread acceptance makes it true, either.)

One can see, each of these three axioms are basic in concept yet primitive in importance.  The question comes up, at least to me, is there an infinite number of such axioms?  I can see no reason for there to be a limit on the number of axioms to be formulated by humans, and it seems silly to attempt to arrive at some final list of 10 axioms or whatever.  However, it just doesn’t seem like there’s room for too many axioms as deep as this.  Each one refines in a strong way our understanding of the world around us; how many new subterranean logical structures are there for us to discover?

Greece Bailout

The crisis in Greece, I would say, is the second broad event in the economic meltdown, crash, contraction, whatever it is, that began when the US housing bubble burst in 2007.  The after-effects of that event (which still continue to unfold today — Mish and many others consistently point out that housing prices don’t seem to have finished dropping) were many large financial institutions essentially going bankrupt, and getting bought or bailed out.  Credit contracted, unemployment shot up, tax revenues dropped and local governments everywhere had to cut back.  The problems in Europe have the same essential causes as those here in America, and are perhaps even contiguous — i.e., the Greek crisis is in the same thread or chain of events as the American housing bubble.  Of course the Greek government probably did not own tremendous amounts of Lehman stock, but rather, the false prosperity of all the more or less socialist Western economies has ended, and the real instability of the system has been unmasked.

The question everyone had been wondering about for the past couple of months with regards to Greece was whether the EU would allow the government to default on its debt payments or step in and “bail Greece out.”  The default of a country like Greece would be very unpleasant, to watch as well as to experience, but the short term solution of bailing out a sovereign country raises many moral problems, not to mention sets a dangerous precedent.

The suspense was finally resolved in the past few days when the EU and the IMF announced they had arranged a bailout package for Greece, presumably accepted by all of the Euro countries, including Germany, the largest economy and most significant holdout against the plan.  You can read all the gritty detail in plenty of other places.

This was very predictable; the belief today seems to be that those in trouble should be “helped,” no matter what other consequences there would be, no matter who is hurt in the process, and no matter how much they brought it on themselves.  This goes as much for Greece as it does for unemployed citizens, banks, and car companies.  Oh how much things do resemble the world in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

As I said before, a default by the Greek government would be bad.  However, what the EU has signaled is that no country under its watch will be allowed to default on its debt.  This will be tested when Portugal and Spain, which is much larger, face massive debt problems in the near future.  Honestly, what do these politicians think will happen after this?  The next country to go broke will accept it?

It is funny to read Mish’s commentary on the politician’s “bazooka talk.”

It seems that the debt of the world, or of the west at least, is being called in, and we don’t have a cent to repay.