My favorite is the asshole who hates to think of having to sell their lovely home to someone just because they have the money.

There’s your free market desegregation right there!

The only good thing I take from it is how wrong these people were—to the point of Paulites not believing it anymore—and how much they sound like teapartiers.  Someday these assolesvwill sound as ridiculous as those assholes, to the point that their heirs won’t quite believe it was that bad

There were 100-years (+/-) between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Marches and the passing of laws to desegregate the US. 

It seems to me that if the Free Market™ hadn’t already eliminated segregation in 100-years, it probably never would have. 

In fact, even with laws on the books aimed at desegregating American society, there is still a lot of de facto segregation going on to this very day.  It seems highly likely that segregation in this form will continue into the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

“Free Market” my ass…

I never fails to amaze me that people who consider themselves so noble as to not be swayed by money on matters of principle cannot comprehend that other people too are not swayed by money in what they consider a matter of principle.

Their argument is more insidious than that. They claim that Jim Crow was government interference, so it wasn’t a free market, but IF it had been a free market truly, then segregationist businesses would have eventually faded away. And of course they can claim that all day long because there will never be a proof they were wrong (even if we could go back in time to change this, they can always claim that the market was not free enough for some other reason).

Correct Amanda.  The term “free market” has become a racist buzzword like “political correctness” or “states rights.”

“Free Market” is the John 3:16 of conservatism/libertarianism. They have absolutely no proof that their “theories” actually work, but they do have total, blind faith and allegiance in b-s like trickle down economics.

“We white people have taken a lot from the Negro.”  You know, he should’ve just stopped right there.  We have TAKEN a hell of a lot from people who were literally property only a 150 years ago.  The gall of this guy really grates me.

They did not believe black money spends as good as white money.

There was a Mad Men episode (The Fog), where Pete Campbell upsets the Admiral TV execs because he wants to openly advertise to black audiences.  They reply that they “...have no interest in becoming a ‘colored’ television company.

But the “free market” would lead the way on civil rights if we let it.

I had to re-read “We white people have taken a lot from the Negro.” For a moment it almost seemed to be an admission of the reprehensible legacy of slavery. Oh wait, no, they’re not using that form of the phrase “taken a lot”—they’re claiming horrible oppression because black people want to partake in the economy.

It’s also worth pointing out that there have been numerous examples throughout U.S. history of black people, becoming disenchanted with trying to play by the rules of a white economy, have set up their own economies. These attempts almost invariably end with white violence against the uppity black population.

“Wrong. On the contrary, white people in Chicago saw it as a matter of their own economic interest to keep black people from buying houses.”

Not you, but your neighbors, because if you sold to a Black person, then your neighbors saw their house value drop precipitously.  So I as your neighbor would be very upset at you if you sold to a Black family.

If some of your neighbors were not just neighbors, but friends or family, as very often happened in city neighborhoods, you might not want to screw with them this way, no matter how you personally felt about Black people.

And surprise surprise, it wasn’t all just the ignorant racist shitkickers behind it, there was money to be made.  Real estate speculators made a fortune on this procedure called Blockbusting.  Move a Black family in, the more unpleasant the better.  Buy the White familes’ houses at a low low price as they panic about the neighborhood going to hell.  Sell high to Black families who mostly can’t get credit through rapacious financial tools that eventually financially break those families.

So I as your neighbor would be very upset at you if you sold to a Black family.
Comment #10: oldfeminist on 01/20 at 01:37 PM

Meaning the me I would likely have been had I been a 51-year-old woman in 1960, already brainwashed into thinking Black people are “irresponsible” thus bad homeowners, even if they are okay to have look after my kids or mow the lawn.

“White people in the 60s used the “free market’ excuse because they explicitly saw it as a way to keep black people out, and if they had been convinced that the free market would have let black people in, they would have objected to the free market.”

Okay, this is key, and needs to be broadened to our current era, across all topics.  We see right-wingers seem to flip their stances on a dime, on a regular basis.  The media then (sometimes) tries to lightly call them on this to say “could this perhaps maybe be seen potentially as hypocritical, at least by your evil maniuplative critics?”  Which the right-wingers will deny, and the media will move on.

In the minds of the conservatives, this isn’t hypocrisy.  They are staying true to their primary ideology: winning.  If all you care about is victory, how can lying, cheating or stealing be wrong?

We see the left do this some as well, but the intensity is lacking.  Where the right seethes with the desire to destroy their enemies, liberals seem to just want to score a few temporary points with their rivals.

It would be nice if the media gave up the “let’s try to catch them in a hypocrisy” angle for “jesus, these people lie and flip-flop all the fucking time, let’s stop taking their words seriously.”

This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person’s rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us.

Oh cool, so privileged whites have been playing the “we’re oppressed whenever non-whites are given a tiny nudge toward equality!” card for a long-ass time.

Actually, I recall seeing a political cartoon from the late 19th century which showed a black man standing on a pedestal, with a caption claiming that that’s “the custom” in DC. Privileged majorities just can’t stand seeing their power chipped away at, even in tiny ways that don’t begin to genuinely threaten their privilege.

This is yet another case that shows that these people who purport to idolize the Constitution don’t really understand it. Much of the Constitution is there because the founders understood that the majority is apt to take away the rights of minorities. The majority of people in the South liked Jim Crow and they supported efforts to keep it.
So, if a restaurant had actually desegegated they would have lost almost all of their white clientele and would have been harassed, perhaps violently. Thus the majority made it economically disasterous to serve blacks. Since this is what actually happened, I find it amazing that libertarians pretend it wouldn’t happen and wouldn’t have continued.

I lived in Detroit in the 60’s.  We rented a house on a block that was all white at the beginning of the year, and almost completetly changed over to black in the course of the year, with the help of real estate agents calling to say “they’re coming”.  My mother would say “Who’s coming?”,  “you know, they’re coming”.

When there is a class of people who are not allowed by law or by custom enforced by law, e.g. racially restrictive covenants in deeds, then the market is not free at all.  Doing away with Jim Crow laws, by federal legislation and law suits pursuant to equal protection, made the markets MORE free than they had been. 

If you want to make a fat-cat conservative really sputter, draw him into a discussion of anti-trust laws.  He’ll likely complain about government interference with big mergers.  You can point out that the government’s duty regarding anti-trust is to ensure that the market in the proposed merger industry remains (relatively) free from anti-competitive control by a monopoly.

The wonders of free market theory are that it can explain anything. There is literally no evidence that can’t be tortured enough to fit in the Procrustean bed of free-marketeerism. And since you’re always trafficking in counterfactuals (because there’s never been and never will be anything that’s is a truly free market), you can never be proven wrong!

H. L. Mencken noted in his writings that weren’t published until long after he died that his African-American neighbors, no matter how reduced in circumstance, would grow flowers or do something else to make their house look a little better, while many Caucasian-American neighbors would do nothing of the sort.

What a man of another and superior stock almost always notices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (a) their incapacity for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade, in the fine arts or in what is called learning—in brief, their general incompetence, and (b) their invariable effort to make up for this incapacity by putting some inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by force. The Frenchman, I believe, is the worst of chauvinists, but once he admits a foreigner to his country he at least treats that foreigner fairly, and does not try to penalize him absurdly for his mere foreignness. The Anglo-Saxon American is always trying to do it; his history is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage against people who have begun to worst him. Such movements would be inconceivable in an efficient and genuinely self-confident people, wholly assured of their superiority, and they would be equally inconceivable in a truly gallant and courageous people, disdaining unfair advantages and overwhelming odds. Theoretically launched against some imaginary inferiority in the non-Anglo-Saxon man, either as patriot, as democrat or as Christian, they are actually launched at his general superiority, his greater fitness to survive in the national environment. The effort is always to penalize him for winning in fair fight, to handicap him in such a manner that he will sink to the general level of the Anglo-Saxon population, and, if possible, even below it. Such devices, of course, never have the countenance of the Anglo-Saxon minority that is authentically superior, and hence self-confident and tolerant. But that minority is pathetically small, and it tends steadily to grow smaller and feebler. The communal laws and the communal mores are made by the folk, and they offer all the proof that is necessary, not only of its general inferiority, but also of its alarmed awareness of that inferiority. The normal American of the “pure-blooded” majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.

The whole “the free market would correct discrimination if black people would just be patient for a couple more centuries” thing rests on a criminal ignorance of history and economics.  It assumes that:

1. Jim Crow-era segregation was all about businesses refusing minorities’ money, for which the divine Free Hand would slap them down.  Not true.  More often, it was about giving minorities substandard product and gouging them for it.  Jim Crow meant you could be charged twice what a white customer was charged and you couldn’t do a thing about it.  It meant eating sandwiches of cold kitchen scraps at a card table in a back room and being charged the same as the whites eating hot meals up front.  You know those lunch-counter sit-ins?  Most of the counter owners were perfectly happy to take black people’s money.  They just wanted the black people to eat in the kitchen or out in the parking lot.  That was the entire point of the sit-ins, that the protesters wanted to be served at the counter!

2. You can’t make extra money from white customers by shutting out black customers (or else making them invisible, see above).  This is obviously untrue, since it still goes on today in real estate; plenty of white people will pay huge premiums to live in an all-white neighborhood and send their kids to all-white schools.  Black people are a minority with less money; white people are a majority with more money.  If what white people want is to shop, dine, and live in a black-people-free environment, and they’re willing to pay extra for the privilege, can you expect to make more money with an all-white or mixed-race business?

3. People always act according to perfect economic self-interest, untainted by personal desires and prejudices.  This is the huge, obviously goofy lie that distorts all Libertarian policy.  Even in a situation where it was in a business’s interest to treat black customers fairly and equally, a significant number of business owners would still happily sacrifice a little bit of profit to stick it to a black guy.  That’s what money is for, after all.  Spending on the things you really want.

...but really, most people who spout this nonsense don’t really think the free market will correct discrimination.  They think it will create more severe discrimination, which they can then blame on minorities (and women, and gays, and handicapped people—remember, Rand Paul is also against wheelchair ramps) being naturally inferior.  Or they don’t care one way or the other, and it’s just part of the ongoing giant Libertarian tantrum over the cruelty of being forced to participate in a functioning society.

If you want to make a fat-cat conservative really sputter, draw him into a discussion of anti-trust laws.  He’ll likely complain about government interference with big mergers.  You can point out that the government’s duty regarding anti-trust is to ensure that the market in the proposed merger industry remains (relatively) free from anti-competitive control by a monopoly.

Free-market conservatives and libertarians like to champion small businesses as the real drivers of our economy (mainly because they grasp at some level that most Americans don’t relish the thought of a society owned and operated by gigantic, soulless corporations), but then turn around and defend Wal-Mart because it allegedly drove out all the mom and pop stores through superior competitive practices, which is a moral standard they hold in veneration.

Basically they have it in their heads that BIG GOVERNMENT is the only thing that can stand in the way of the free market. The concept that a free market is by no means in Wal-Mart’s best interests, or the best interests of the oil companies, or any number of other industries that rely on monopolization, consolidation, and/or collusion, causes them no small amount of cognitive dissonance.

But that’s because, as we all know, their REAL moral standard is what puts money in the hands of the wealthy. Wal-Mart is defended because it makes the rich richer. The rest is rationalization and an attempt to convince yourself and everyone around you that the rich deserve their riches, and if you’re not rich it’s your fault anyway.

MiddleageLiberal, marketplace “freedom” and competition are things conservatives love to talk about.

They don’t actually love free markets and competition, they just love talking about them.  (They’re the exact same way about budget deficits, morality, and The American Family…)

Actual competition in the marketplace is a problem.  What if you’re competing with some other firm(s) in some lucrative segment of the market, and you lose?  What if their product is better, the price is lower, or both?  What if the market finds you lacking?  That could be unprofitable.  So freedom in the marketplace is to be discouraged…which leads to monopolies.

Monopolies.  Very profitable, and they hold the potential to remain profitable for decades.  Look at DeBeers for an example of a firm that profitably kept a stranglehold on their market for well over 100-years.  Even if they are no longer a monopoly in the diamond market since 2000 (...maybe, so they claim…), they had a good long run.  Microsoft still clings to their de facto monopoly, despite the occasional competitor nipping at their heels.  Good money! 

If you have the monopoly in your market, then monopolies are the best thing ever, being best for the stockholders, consumers, and the whole nation.  Nothing is more efficient than a good monopoly. 

If you don’t have the monopoly in your market, then monopolies suck, doing great harm to consumers and the nation.  Monopolies are terribly inefficient, and we need to do everything we can to end them…

I like MikeEss’ argument.
If the Free Market® will neatly solve the segregation problem, then they must have examples.
After all, isn’t a century enough time for the Invisible Hand to work its magic?

One thing I’ve come to understand dealing with libertarians is that they imbue the free market with godly powers, and they believe that free market results are inherently moral results. They really do have a theology built up around the whole concept. So, when someone comes along and says, “the free market has some flaws,” they take that as affront in the same way that a Christian is offended if you say, “Jesus was wrong about some things.”

Naturally, another way that libertarianism mirrors religion is that the free market’s morality conveniently aligns with whatever they want it to, same as god turns out to be a Republican.

Well, there’s also the pesky fact that capitalism funcions by paying workers less than the value that they create and for that reason it’s really helpful to have an underclass that’s disempowered and, as a result, willing to work for cheap. That’s why slavery was so appealing to the business heads; that’s why undocumented workers today are actually a feature, not a bug, of our current immigration policy. Discrimnation, along with all ofthe degradation and disempowerment that accompanied it, is/was supportive of capitalism. (I think that letter writer was more correct than s/he realized in that regard.)

Incidentally, I grew up in a very cozy suburb that was overwhelmingly white. By local ordinance, home owners and real estate companies were prohibited from putting “For Sale” signs on their lawns. My parents, who were not what you might call “out” racists, defended the intended result of keeping the neighborhood white by saying that their property value was at stake (I last heard my dad make that argument probably some time in the 90s). This kind of thing has not gone away.

remember, Rand Paul is also against wheelchair ramps

Oh cool. In that case, we should also remove all stairs. If you can’t scale the walls of a high-rise with your bare hands, you aren’t competitive enough for our free-market society.

1972.  My parents put their house in an all-white neighborhood of NW Oklahoma City up for sale.  One of the first couples through to look at it was black.

A cross was burned on their lawn that night.

So much for the free market.

One thing I’ve come to understand dealing with libertarians is that they imbue the free market with godly powers, and they believe that free market results are inherently moral results.

There are actually some conservative Christians who seriously believe that the invisible hand of the free market is in fact the invisible hand of God, and they think any government interference is subverting God’s will.

Incidentally, neoclassical economic theory does not preclude discrimination in a completely free market. If white people are willing to pay more to play golf at an all-white club or live in an all-white neighborhood, that’s considered to be a rational decision that benefits both supplier (by giving a higher price) and buyer (by allowing them to indulge their racism). Customer racism? Absolutely no problem. Now classically, this may be a problem in the labor market, because by refusing to hire lower-priced workers, such as minorities that suffer from wage discrimination, a firm will make itself non-competitive and go out of business. However, firms have only rarely actively engaged in discrimination, and have exploited the wage gradient that minorities that are discriminated against have, quite happily. Thus, the free market has no bearing at all on discrimination and won’t reduce it. Companies will keep underpaying minority workers, who will be limited in earning power and will keep shopping, eating, and renting in places that don’t discriminate in order to allow white people their prejudices at a higher cost. Minorities won’t buy into those businesses and neighborhoods because in the absence of labor regulations (part and parcel of the sacred free market) they won’t make enough. This is labor economics 101, which is why I don’t expect anyone who holds the free market as an ideological demi-god to understand it. It really is pretty frustrating, though.

The short version: Economics is not a proxy for morality, and economically efficient outcomes are not moral outcomes. It’s best not to confuse the two.

This is happening *now*. When I rented a house in BALTIMORE (we’re talking about BALTIMORE CITY, 61% black), in the Greektown neighborhood, my Greek landlady was delighted to rent me the place because every other renter she’d had come look at the place had been black, and she didn’t want to rent to black people. “Nothing against black people,” of course, it was about the neighbors and preserving their property values!

I wanted so much to buy that place and then sell it to black people. But by the time I was ready to buy, my family had outgrown the house.

This happened in the year 2000.

I can’t remember the details, but in one town when a bunch of peopled signed a petition to desegregate the schools, the local newspaper printed their names, addresses and phone numbers as a “public service.” Suddenly the small grocer couldn’t get his deliveries, the carpenter’s jobs dried up, etc. etc.  These were not rich people who could afford to weather the storm; their livelihoods were suddenly at stake.

I’m sure that all over the South (and not just the South, of course, but that’s where racism was the most institutionalized and official) there were people of good will who would have been perfectly happy to do business with blacks, live in integrated neighborhoods, but who were simply afraid to.  Or if they were willing to take the risk for themselves, were afraid of what might happen to their family and friends.

Long before I met her, my mother-in-law founded and ran one of the first integrated Girl Scout troops in Alabama (maybe the very first).  There were crosses burned on the lawn more than once.  She told me it was a terrible dilemma, having to decide between what was obviously right, and possibly putting her home and family (husband, four kids) at risk.  Ultimately she kept the troop going, with the support of family and friends, and the unwelcome attention faded away (it was a college town, which helped), but it could easily have gotten much, much uglier.

I have never had to face anything that required that kind of moral courage, and I’m not at all sure how I would stack up.

There are actually some conservative Christians who seriously believe that the invisible hand of the free market is in fact the invisible hand of God, and they think any government interference is subverting God’s will.

Makes sense. That also helps explain some of the people who consistently vote against their own economic interests. Once you accept invisible sky daddy, then that invisible hand must be his, and if that invisible hand is repeatedly smacking you around, well then you clearly deserve it. Or you at least have to take it, just like Job.

“Once you accept invisible sky daddy, then that invisible hand must be his, and if that invisible hand is repeatedly smacking you around, well then you clearly deserve it. Or you at least have to take it, just like Job.”

...after all, if you’re really a good Christian, but poor and slapped around by God’s hand, you’ll get your reward in the afterlife.  So don’t worry, just accept your place.

Meanwhile, the economically well-off, good Christians or not, will take their reward now, thank you very much…

In about 1984 or so, a mixed-race couple moved into our otherwise lily-white, very posh neighborhood. My parents pitched a fit about it in private but were of course too genteel to say anything in public. When sixteen-year-old me called them out for being racists, my mother answered, “I don’t care about their color; it’s what they do to the property values!”

The next year, my mother’s employer hired a young black woman. After about a week, my mother said: “And you know what the funny thing is? She really works!”

This is happening *now*. When I rented a house in BALTIMORE (we’re talking about BALTIMORE CITY, 61% black), in the Greektown neighborhood, my Greek landlady was delighted to rent me the place because every other renter she’d had come look at the place had been black, and she didn’t want to rent to black people. “Nothing against black people,” of course, it was about the neighbors and preserving their property values!

I wanted so much to buy that place and then sell it to black people. But by the time I was ready to buy, my family had outgrown the house.

This happened in the year 2000.
Comment #30: Alara J Rogers on 01/20 at 04:02 PM

Of course 61% Black isn’t across all neighborhoods.  Greektown <> Edmondson Village <> Park Heights, etcetera.

A friend of mine is Jewish, has a stereotypically Jewish name, and “looks Jewish.”  He bought a house in the Canton neighborhood in Baltimore maybe 20 years ago, but it would never have been possible had he not had friends in the neighborhood speaking for him.

The owners put the house on the market one morning, he went over that same morning, made the offer, they accepted, it was off the market in an hour or so.  It was all closely scheduled so that no one else had a chance to try to buy it.

And no doubt the same thing is going on today.

There are actually some conservative Christians who seriously believe that the invisible hand of the free market is in fact the invisible hand of God, and they think any government interference is subverting God’s will.

I don’t suppose citing Matthew 6:24 would help?

They claim that Jim Crow was government interference, so it wasn’t a free market, but IF it had been a free market truly, then segregationist businesses would have eventually faded away. - BlackBloc

Of course it’s quite, shall we say, odd for people to say this and then complain about Federal laws whose main function was to get rid of that “government interference” known as Jim Crow.

Of course it’s quite, shall we say, odd for people to say this and then complain about Federal laws whose main function was to get rid of that “government interference” known as Jim Crow.

Silly, the free market corrects itself! You don’t need more government action to fix the government action that caused or contributed to the problem. Think about it!

(Yes, it was sarcastic.)

“I don’t suppose citing Matthew 6:24 would help?”

It might, but only if you were considered a proper authority on the Bible.  However, citing that verse in an attempt to show that even their God looks down on the pursuit of money would backfire, regardless of your qualifications, because it would reveal you as a CommiPinkoSocialist who hates rich people and therefore must be ignored…

No black person would even think of moving to my neighborhood.  And I find that sad.  It’s a beautiful place filled with trees older than the houses, green and living.

The free market gave us Crocs.

‘Nuff said.

One stupid thing about this is that Demand is explicitly held to be irrational in economic theory—economics states that people want things because they want them, and WHY they want them is a matter for other social disciplines.  That’s actually one of the places where econ and sociology/history/anthropology join together.

Anyways, if a community is united enough in its desire to cause harm to a person or group of persons, that desire will be reflected in their demand, leading to the retaliation against businesses that catered to black people discussed above.

Progressives often forget that conservative sadism is a value.  They can and will sacrifice economically to be sadistic in the fashion which they view as right and good.

Progressives often forget that conservative sadism is a value.  They can and will sacrifice economically to be sadistic in the fashion which they view as right and good.

But of course. They do this all the time. See: red states attempting to turn away federal stimulus dollars even when they can’t afford basic services like police. If even a single one of those dollars goes to someone who’s not already rich, it’s not worth it!

(It’s a well-known irony that the toughest, manliest, most proudly self-reliant states are the biggest drains on the federal economy. It’s not like red states are opposed to sucking on the teat of federal subsidy. But the stimulus was a big public issue with lots of buzzwords and news coverage, so as a matter of “principle” (ie votes) the red state governors who most needed it had to oppose it. And if that means more jobs will be lost and services will be cut and any hope of reaching economic stability in the foreseeable future will be vaporized, that’s just the price we pay for being manly and self-reliant. When those mooching, freeloading, latte-drinking blue staters are getting their jobs back and returning to fiscal sustainability, and the manly, self-reliant red staters are still drawing unemployment and watching their towns go to shit with basic government services breaking down, those liberals will be sorry… somehow… for some reason…)

I ended up on a teabagger comment thread last week and was astounded at the stupidity there as they described California as a net drain on the US economy and federal coffers… Ugh.

#16 Also, it assumes that black people had equal access to work, training/education, credit and discretionary cash. Blacks weren’t being paid the same for the same work, they were being shut out of certain jobs/schools entirely, unions wouldn’t take them, etc, etc. Even the few who went to HBCUs and became professionals were restricted to black clientele. Their customers had much less money, so they had to charge much less. If a group is discriminated against as workers the cost of discriminating against them as customers is significantly reduced.

Actually Punditus, demand is considered to be rational and unquantifiable - it’s not that economists can’t work out why people want the things they want, it just really doesn’t make any difference to our analysis, so we* don’t care. Of course, that’s a serious flaw in the model, since in fact demand is often irrational (For example: 1% of Crocs wearers find them rational footwear to wear while gardening. The other 99%... well, I’ve actually no idea. However, neoclassical economists assume they have some reason or other.) The problem with this, of course, is that once again Economics is not Morality and should not be confused with it. Whether a person is driven to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood from irrational racism or rational concern for property values, and whether the are willing to pay extra and the seller sells at a premium, this does not make the underlying racism (which is what ultimately drives property value concerns) any more moral or desirable.

* At least, neoclassical economists (of which I’m actually not one) don’t care. The concern for motive and assumption of rationality in heterodox economics is very different. However, I’m sticking to a neoclassical framework here because, first of all, that’s where the free-market ideology is strongest, and second of all, that’s all anyone ever learns in the Microeconomics course they were forced to take in undergrad, so that’s the basis most people argue from.

Piator, you are right: it is ALWAYS time to slam Crocs.

This is happening *now*. When I rented a house in BALTIMORE (we’re talking about BALTIMORE CITY, 61% black), in the Greektown neighborhood, my Greek landlady was delighted to rent me the place because every other renter she’d had come look at the place had been black, and she didn’t want to rent to black people.

The funny thing is that the neighborhood is becoming more and more heavily Latino, these days.

I should have used the word non-rational.

But that’s the point—the market can’t correct for what people are willing to spend money to do.  The market can only reflect that fact.  That’s the purpose and point of a market.

Matt Swartz of Baseball Prospectus* tried this last year on Jackie Robinson Day, including laments about how a lack of “free entry” of firms was the true culprit for baseball’s lack of integration.  My recollection was that he recieved quite the smackdown, but it doesn’t look that way upon further review.  If he tries it again this year, I’ll be sure to refer him to G.D.‘s piece.

* Swartz is very much the exception at Baseball Prospectus.  In fact, I’ve been meaning to plug Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks’ podcast Up And In, which has featured:  Indie music, video games, NHK broadcast sumo wrestling, cooking (mostly meat oriented), Mexican Coca-Cola, a list of excellent Netflix streaming movies, and the ever popular segment “What Are You Drinking”.  Plus, one half of the team is also from Texas and now lives in Brooklyn.

This article gives you an idea of the kind of subjects they discuss beyond talent evaluation, though as the list above attests, they also have a lot of goofy fun.  Highly, highly recommended.

Anyone who claims that the “free market” is some sort of stand-alone immutable force that functions in a Deus-ex-Machina fashion; instead of something that clearly operates within the context of a civil society, its cultural baggage and its legal structure is:

a) hopelessly dumb/ignorant

b) blatant in their intellectual dishonesty

c) all of the above

Once upon a time I had the patience to explain there was neither logical reasoning nor empirical evidence that would support assertions like “The free market will solve X automatically”. These days I just shake my head and mentally lower my expectations about the future of the human race.

Oh cool. In that case, we should also remove all stairs. If you can’t scale the walls of a high-rise with your bare hands, you aren’t competitive enough for our free-market society.

One of the most jaw-dropping moments of Paul’s appearance on Rachel Maddow was when she asked him how handicapped people were supposed to hold down jobs if buildings had no handicapped access, and he said they should just apply for work in businesses located on the ground floors.  He really should have suggested scaling the walls.

It was all pretty funny until he got elected.

“Jay Nordlinger, as I noted yesterday, suggested that Martin Luther King would have regretted badmouthing the radical right that pushed Barry Goldwater to win the 1964 Republican nomination, and the reason in Nordlinger’s mind is that Goldwater’s rejection of federal laws against segregation were “classic liberalism”.  This comment makes no sense on its face”

It should be noted that before Goldwater was against it, he was for it. In fact, LBJ had the audacity to use Goldwater’s pro-civil-rights stands against him in the South during the 64 race. Old segregationist die hard, I guess.

But this also tells us that Goldwaters opposition to much of the 64cra was disingenuous. It was not classical liberalism. States Rights was a ruse. The major tell for me was that Goldwater opposed Brown vs Board. There’s no way to justify that on philosophical grounds.

But States Rights provided plausible deniability, and Norlinger not realizing this means he hasn’t read any serious civil rights history. To make him feel better, I would note that Goldwater was not alone. In 1957, JFK voted to send Ike’s CRA to vicious segregationist James Eastland’s (Democrat from Mississippi and early supporters of Kennedy’s presidential campaign) notorious Senate Judiciary Committee, where it was promptly gutted.

JFK of course would never vote against a CRA. He was a northern liberal. But it is behind the scenes, in the early and largely unreported votes, where this man killed civil rights. He would claim that he believed in senate procedure. Procedure was his states rights. Needless to say, JFK-LBJ took the deep south (sans the Harry Byrd 3rd party victories)

Goldwater was not principled, i say as a RWinger myself. He pulled a Kennedy. Which is to say, he practiced evil.

The next year, my mother’s employer hired a young black woman. After about a week, my mother said: “And you know what the funny thing is? She really works!”
Comment #34: felagund on 01/20 at 04:32 PM

My father (now dead) had a similar brand of racism.  He believed, a la Linus Pauling, that black people were inferior as a race.  But he always (as far as I could observe) treated black people he encountered in his neighborhoods and business with amiable fairness and respect.  The ones he dealt with were always the exceptions to the rule.  He was an engineer and I will forever be a little mystified at why he never internalized his empirical experiences.

@Comment #52: Shaenon on 01/21 at 03:10 AM

It was all pretty funny until he got elected.

Planet Earth has a horrible sense of humor.

My father (now dead) had a similar brand of racism.  He believed, a la Linus Pauling, that black people were inferior as a race.  But he always (as far as I could observe) treated black people he encountered in his neighborhoods and business with amiable fairness and respect.  The ones he dealt with were always the exceptions to the rule.  He was an engineer and I will forever be a little mystified at why he never internalized his empirical experiences.
Comment #54: MiddleageLiberal on 01/21 at 12:06 PM

Sounds a lot like my dad, also an engineer, also now dead. 

The stuff he would say about Blacks as a race, and to Black civil rights activists on TV, hurts to think about, even now.  But when he was talking to someone who was Black, even a guy I was dating, he was perfectly nice and seemed to think those particular people were exceptions to the rule.

Which is to say I’ve heard the phrase, “one of the *good* ones,” more than enough times in my life.

My dad is the same way as 54 and 56. I’m guessing it stems from a) the fact that it’s not really socially acceptable to treat black people like shit anymore, at least in explicit ways, and b) the fact that some people cling to stereotypes and the usual scapegoating of minorities, but just aren’t mean enough on a personal level to take those feelings out on individual black people they know.

My dad always treated black people the same as white people, but he was also convinced that most black people - presumably all the ones he didn’t know - were useless, unemployed gangsters. I think one reason a lot of racists who deal with black people on a daily basis don’t manage to dispel their inner racism is that race essentialism has gone out of fashion in the last few decades in favor of a “oh there’s nothing genetically wrong with [race], it’s just their culture that causes them to act that way” mindset. Which is still racist, naturally. But it provides an easy out for the cognitive dissonance.

Triplanetary: Oh cool, so privileged whites have been playing the “we’re oppressed whenever non-whites are given a tiny nudge toward equality!” card for a long-ass time.

Since Reconstruction, at least. Replace “non-whites” with “race-traitors” (AKA abolitionists), and they’ve been doing it since the early 19th century.

I think it’s to handwave the widespread social inequities that still exist. If we deserve it because most of us are defective, it means that there’s nothing deeply wrong with our society that may require action to rectify, or inspire unease wrt: the place your group currently occupies in society above ours, the shaky foundation that that hierarchy was built upon and if the individuals that it holds aloft would be able to retain their status if America ever gets closer to becoming a true meritocracy.

As I like to say: stuff like segregation can never happen in a truly free market because the second it did happen the market would immediately correct it eventually some day, and if it did happen who are you to question the market’s Panglossian wisdom anyway.

Not only is this “free market” thing a cover for racism and privilege, it would also get you to flunk Econ 101. When you’re in the favored class, perpetuating discrimination is economically rational the same way that price wars are rational for supermarkets or other businesses responding to new market entrant. Sure, you lose some marginal profit, but you gain the huge monopoly/oligopoly rent of being the only game in town and having favored access to resources.

I always heard the “property values” arguement when I was young (70s).  I’m still amazed people would even venture that as my younger brother was very obviously mixed racial.  As most adults don’t think about what they say in front of kids, so I probably shouldn’t be.

It’s good to see Conservatives have come a long way in the last 45-50 years.  They at least stopped using “Negro” in casual conversation.