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Title: The Libertarian Case FOR Serving Sarah Huckabee Sanders (and Other People You Disagree With)
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Reason
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Published: Jun 26, 2018
Author: Nick Gillespie
Post Date: 2018-06-26 05:43:59 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 1241
Comments: 30
My colleague Robby Soave has already published a libertarian defense of refusing to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Over the weekend, Sanders and her party were bounced from the Red Hen, a restaurant in Virginia. The restaurant's owner said "this feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals." Well, sure, knock yourself out. The doctrinaire libertarian defense of the owner is pretty straightforward: A business owner should have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, good, bad, and stupid. (Note: Such a position is not the law of the land due to various antidiscrimination laws). Just as an anti-gay cake baker should be able to pass on making a wedding cake, or a racist can refuse service because she doesn't like the skin color of a potential customer, the Red Hen's owner should be able to kick out this or that customer just because. Those arguments make sense, I guess. But I think the decision to withhold service is usually illiberal and damaging to civil discourse, which, like property rights, is also something we should value as libertarians. Unlike many of my Reason colleagues, I don't get too bothered with laws that mandate equal treatment under the law at businesses that are open to the public. If you want to be a private club so you can discriminate for x or y reason, go right ahead. But there is a social value in saying that businesses that claim to be open to the public will not be allowed to exclude individuals or groups unless they are being specifically disruptive. It's one thing to kick out a rowdy party of women at a restaurant. It's another to refuse to serve women at all. Libertarians are quick to point out that capitalism works to break down prejudice and bias precisely because everyone's money is green. The profit motive can trump tribal, political, or ideological prejudices. Once a racist, a homophobe, or a NeverTrumper starts working side by side with or serving the object of their scorn, it's quite possible that meaningful conversation will take place. Who knows, people may even find common ground and start building out from that toward a better, more-inclusive society? There are also questions of proportion here. As press secretary, Sanders is an habitual liar (that is the job of a press secretary, regardless of who she serves), but she's also not, I don't know, Henry Kissinger at the height of the Vietnam War, or even Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser credited with engineering the controversial family-separation policy talking place on our southern border. From a strictly pragmatic level, did the bouncing of Sarah Huckabee Sanders do anything to undermine Trump's support or policies? No, of course not. If anything, it simply hardens the hearts of his supporters. It's no secret that Donald Trump is the troll in chief, an expert hand at making people who disagree with him act like total jerks. Time and again, for instance, the media gets blinded by its Trump Delusion Syndrome and makes serious mistakes (most recently, consider the case of the girl that wasn't separated at the border). Nobody wins in a pissing contest but everybody ends up getting wet, right? In the wake of the incident, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), surely one of the least-impressive members of the group that Mark Twain called America's only native criminal class, has called for a non-stop campaign of public shaming of anyone associated with the Trump administration. "For these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they're not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they're not going to be able to stop at a gasoline station," she dreams. Good luck with all that, Rep. Waters. America is already staggering under the weight of every goddamn thing we do being hyper-politicized. One of the creators of Twitte just apologized for eating a Chick-fil-A, for god's sake. If you want to actually change somebody's mind, you're far better off using unexpected opportunities to demonstrate essential humanity to your enemies and opponents, rather than fulfill stereotypes. Perhaps it would have been a smaller story (or none at all) if the Red Hen owner had taken a few minutes at the end of the meal to sit down with Sanders and explain the nature of her grievances with various Trump policies. I suspect that sort of treatment would go farther than kicking Sanders the hell out. As with most things, of course, this all really just life imitating Seinfeld. Here's a clip from an episode in which Jerry clears out a restaurant by forcing customers to find out whether the owner agrees with them on the issue of abortion. It's very funny, but I know I don't want to live in this sort of world. Photo Credit: White House Nick Gillespie is the editor at large of Reason and the co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (2011/2012). Her money is green, and you can talk to her while she's chowing down.
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#1. To: Deckard (#0)
This is exactly where I am on the subject: open your doors to the stream of commerce, serve anybody who walks through that door unless they are being specifically disruptive. I think the law should be that. It IS that already, for the people who walk through the door who are racial, ethnic or religious minorities, or either sex. It is mostly that way, in most states, for sexuality. Right now the law lets businesses exclude Republicans or Democrats, but if this sort of thing becomes a trend, the law will need to change to include political affiliation as a protected class.
Gosh. "It's quite posible" that meaningful conversation will take place? Well, we have decades of experience under anti-discrimination laws. Any meaningful conversations taking place with women, blacks, gays, the disabled, the elderly, and all the other protected species? Things getting better? Or worse? Who in their right mind would strike up a "meaningful conversation" at work with a black person, a homosexual or a woman and risk a harassment suit or being fired? Good ol' Libertarians. Big on theory, lousy on real life.
Blacks?
That not a Libertarian case. That a social argument. The Libertarian position is that the owner has the freedom to serve or not serve someone. The reason is immaterial. The arguments for or against are immaterial.
Why? What if all the liberal customers in the Red Hen restaurant walked out because the owner seated Sarah and her family, never to return? And they told their friends. And they picketed the restaurant? You're going to force a private business to take actions they deem detrimental to their business, maybe to the point of shutting down?
Here's another one from October, 2017: "Members of Bedlam coffee shop in Seattle, Washington, kick out Christian customers after realizing they were posting graphic pro-life messages within the community prior to entering the establishment." “I’m gay. You have to leave,” owner Ben Borgman said in the video. Yet another example of homosexual "tolerance".
Yep. Do it all the time. There are things more important than people's personal convictions about things. The economy for one.
The economy? Which you are perfectly happy to shut down because there are things more important than people's personal convictions.
Nope. I am willing to shove aside individuals with dysfunctional convictions that serve to chop up the economy and massively raise social tensions. Example: hotel owners in the South back in the 1960s, who wanted to hold the line against selling rooms to traveling blacks. You will either sell the rooms without a fuss to whatever race comes through the door, or somebody else will occupy that niche in the economy that you wanted to occupy. You do not have the right to earn a living in business and enforce racism. You will choose. If you want to eat, you will drop the racism in business. Otherwise, go die of hunger. If businesses don’t want to serve Republicans, that’s not illegal. Perhaps they can put up signs: “No Republicans”, things like that. A little bit of that here and there will be tolerated, but if it starts growing to a whole movement of people, like segregation in the South, then it will have to be crushed out by the police power of the state, just like segregation was. We can tolerate a little bit of bigotry in business, as long as it is localized and cranky. But once something becomes a major movement that actually impairs a significant population, which Blacks and Republicans are, then you have to take away the right to do that, and crush a few bigots in public as an example. Businessmen fall in line pretty quickly after a serious display of power like that.
Is that what your fake Jesus whispered in your unwashed ears?
I'm sure there were many business in the South in the 60's that went out of business because they served blacks, not because they refused. But that's OK with you. Freedom of association? Never heard of it. "If businesses don’t want to serve Republicans, that’s not illegal." But only if it's a little bit. If it's a lot, then it is. Your logic astounds me.
So far, the only stories I've read dealt with businesses that were localized and cranky. Yet you objected to them. There was no tolerance on your behalf. Again, your logic astounds me. And if one baker refuses, one florist refuses, one restaurant refuses -- aren't the 20 others who WILL do business with the protected species? Didn't Sarah and her party go right across the street to another restaurant which DID serve her group?
With the rigid enforcement of universal service to blacks, the option of Southern customers to boycott restaurants that served blacks meant: eat at home. What actually happened was that the bigots who would boycott a restaurant that served blacks no longer had the option of finding a restaurant that only served whites - because the authorities would close all such restaurants. So, the net result was that everywhere had to serve blacks, and the bigots lost their abiility to control the situation by taking their business away. If they wanted to eat out, it would be in a restaurant that served blacks. You can’t mollycoddle bigotry on a large scale. Small scale idiots you can ignore. But when it becomes a trend, a melting pot country like ours has to crush out the resistance to universal access. It makes for better commerce and better social relations. Yeah, the bigots suffer. At home - because there’s no place they can go without blacks being served there too. Fuck ‘em. Let them grow up or let them eat at home for the rest of their lives.
In general, I object to bigots. I am willing to tolerate them in their private clubs and political organizations and other stuff they do at their own expense. But the stream of commerce needs to be open to everybody. When I roll through a one horse town at 1 AM and there’s one gas station open and I need gas, I need the law to COMPEL that operator to sell me gas, whether he wants to or not, unless I am doing some bad act to him or his station. Otherwise I could be stranded in the dark on account of his opinion about something. That doesn’t work. In a diverse, mixed country like ours, if you want the privilege of making money in the stream of commerce, you must serve everybody. If you’re too bigoted to do that, you do not have the privilege of being able to open a store and serve the stream of commerce. People have the right to walk into any open store and buy stuff. The store owner has no right to make money off of the American economy if he is going to selectively exclude people based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, religion. And if political affiliation becomes a thing, which it might, then that too will have to be something that the law protects.
Nope.
But you can force integration at gunpoint, can't you? And how is that working out? Your touchy-feely, end-justifies-the-means scheme isn't working. It breeds inequality and resentment, and you can't pass laws against that.
So much so, that you're willing to have the government take away their freedom of choice and punish them for being bigots. And by doing so, everything will be right with the world and we'll all live happily ever after. Save me from people like you. "When I roll through a one horse town at 1 AM and there’s one gas station open and I need gas, I need the law to COMPEL that operator to sell me gas, whether he wants to or not" Because this is all about you and your needs, right? What if ALL the gas stations were closed? Should the law allow you to wake up an owner and COMPEL him to sell you gas?
The resentment was always there. Different groups don’t like each other. The Irish hate the English, and the English look down on the Irish. Protestants hate Catholics. The neighbors all hate the Russians, and the Russians hate each other. Lots of people hate the Jews. The Whites hate the Whites, by group - all of the bloodiest wars of all came out of Europe - and Whites, Blacks and Hispanics get along relatively poorly. This country is composed of a variegated mass of races, religions, ethnicities, and politics, and these different peoples don’t get along overseas very well at all. Here, it’s better, a bit, because the tendency towards outright warfare has been tamped down by force. Slavery wasn’t ended by persuasion, it was ended by half the country overrunning the other half with armies, leaving about a million dead when all was said and done. The attitudes did not change, but the physical reality did, because of brute force. For all of the nastiest divisions, white/black, white’indian, the differences have not been solved by touchy-freely. They have not been SOLVED at all. Rather, the tensions have been tamped down by force - armies, big police forces, the threat of litigation and loss. THAT is what kept the warring parties apart long enough for the gradual process by which the natural social mixing, and eventual intermarriage, drains off the poison. Since we have all of the nations of the world here already, and every stripe of individual, with more coming every year, and we have to get along as best we can, we have to tamp down the discrimination. It’d be swell if we could do that touchy-feely - fewer bruised toes and broken heads that way - but we’ve never managed to persuade bigots to stop being bigots, so we’ve always used hard power: police, military, courts, prisons, fines - all of the implements of coercion available to the state to keep the melting pot going, always against the will of a substantial portion of the population. Given the options, I think our forebears have gotten it pretty much right, and that we should continue amain. My view of this is more touchy-feely than Sherman’s Army, certainly. It’s on a par with Ike’s touchy-feely when he mobilized the National Guard to move the governor out of the schoolhouse door. Inequality and resentment are inevitable. They will not go away. But relative social peace is achievable, as long as it is backed by visible armed force, which it always has been. I believe we should remain on that course and not let the bigots win, ever. We are still in Europe seven decades after World War II ended. We can enforce the law in our own country forever, as long as taxes will pay for police forces, courts, prisons and the National Guard. And if that means that a certain number of bigots have to be bitter and rail in anger - and have to be suppressed - forever then I am more than willing to maintain police-force Reconstruction for the next ten thousand years, or forever, if that is necessary. Murder never goes away, and bigotry may not either. So you point a gun at the criminals and bigots until the end of time. You never give up and let them win. Never. Touchy-feely? My mind is as hard as any bigot’s.
What if, what if, what if....Waaa. Waaa waaa Yes, it IS about serving my needs., and the needs and opinions of the majority of Americans, who have decided that yes, we will beat down the bigots and force them to serve everybody.. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to go into business. Stay home. Plant turnips. Go into business, and you’re going to serve everybody who comes in the door peaceable. You have objections. This has been litigated on the battlefield. It has been litigated at the ballot box. It has been litigated in the courtroom. Time and time again. Your side lost. You will never be persuaded. But you will obey. And that’s ultimately what matters.
Only if you believe that relative social peace is achievable only by visible armed force. Relative social peace is more readily achievable with a merit- based social system, rather than quotas. Relative social peace is more readily achievable by allowing protected species to voluntarily segregate, rather than by forcing integration. Relative social peace is more readily achievable by discontinuing destructive federal social programs.
My side won in those cases not involving a protected species. Those people you can discriminate against to your heart's content. Now tell me that doesn't lead to resentment against the protected species. In a nation that prides itself on equality.
I thought your goal was relative social peace, not subjugation.
Quotas are illegal. People economically aggregate already, and in housing they segregate culturally; but enforced segregation is not acceptable. Which federal social programs would you have us eliminate? Social Security? We need it. Medicare? Need it. Medicaid? Need it. Food Assistance? Need it. Unemployment benefits? Need them. Public Housing assistance? Need it. Public school subsidies? Need them. Disability? Need it. There is no major federal social welfare program that we do not need, and we should properly fund all of them.
My goal is relative social peace within a tolerably egalitarian society. I do not require economic equality or anything close to it (though I DO require substantial social welfare to prevent destitution at the bottom), but I do require that people be treated equally by the government and in regular commerce, and not suffer discrimination based on the common sense things: race, ethnicity, religion, skin color, disability status, veteran or military service status. What falls within and without enforced toleration of sexual orientation differences is still an open question; those other things are not. On those things that are not an open question, the peace is found by getting with the program. Where stubborn bigots remain who will not accept the result of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, peace is not found with them through any sort of compromise, any more than with any other Nazi- like thought pattern. They're evil, and they simply have to be outlasted. The old ones die and their ideas die with them. Severe pressure has to be brought to make sure that not very many of succeeding generations are successfully taught to be racial bigots, and that has largely been successful. Relative social peace on most things can be found through toleration. But on the major ones over which so much blood is spilled, the right answer is for assholes to stop being assholes, and if they won't, then they have to be subjugated - because their stubborn bigotry is defiance of the loss of their side in a series of bloody wars, and the victors - that would include me - are virulently bigoted against them. In other words, I don't care about the gays so much, but those guys who still want to put on white sheets and burn crosses will be persecuted to extinction by the government, and that's morally right in my eyes. They chose to be evil, like killers and arsonists. And they are put down by authority, like killers and arsonists. General subjugation? No. Subjugation of the racists? Absolutely yes.
It does lead to some resentment. But less than when people were left to their own accord. Left to their own accord, they voted for segregation and anti-miscegenation laws in the south, and they created redlining in the North. Those things did not go away because of persuasion. They were broken by force, coercion and punishment. In the process of doing that, sure, some people resent the tools used to do it, and think that perhaps it is time to scale it back. And perhaps it will be. But few actually join the KKK. People don't harrass interracial couples much anymore. Things have, in fact, gotten better. Most people have sufficient self-interest to understand that taking up the Stars-and- Bars and trying to justify the bad practices of the past is a quick trip to the trailer park and unemployability...and the very welfare system they decry as immoral, so they don't starve. And because of that, even those inclined to resentment do so passively and inertly. They don't organize. They don't vote that way. They just resent it, like they resent traffic jams or other inevitabilities of life. And then they get on with their lives and stay within the lines on racial matters, because that's what they need to do in order to get by in this society. And that's a good thing, because it works better than what we did in the past.
Ramadan dinner at the White House No one should be forced to bake a gay wedding cakes, or to perform an abortion. How would you feel if one of your dinner guests projectile vomited on you, because they saw Sarah Huckabee-Sanders stuffing her face? Perhaps that's what it will take to change your nanny-state authoritarian ways?
That's what blacks are doing today in schools and colleges. In addition, should we disallow things like BET, Black beauty pagents, the Congressional Black Causus, the United Negro College Fund, Ebony's Black Achievement Awards, the NAACP, black fraternities, sororities, and doemitories -- and another 100 or so exclusively black organizations?
I agree. And I agree. People should be forced to serve black people, people of different religions, people of different ethnic backgrounds, men or women irrespective of sex. As it stands, if people want to exclude Republicans from their establishments, or Democrats, or Independents who refuse to state a political affiliation, they have the legal authority to do so. If this starts to be a problem - and the way it is likely to become a problem is easy: "No Democrats" = "No Blacks", then political affiliation will have to be added to the list of things that businesses cannot discriminate against.
Should we? We probably should take a consistent public stance that the discriminatory nature of these organizations is incompatible with the goal of of eliminating black-white racism in America. At the same time we should acknowledge that the starting position of the all-black pageants is not the same as the original starting point when these things were developed. Had the dominant white society not done what it did to the blacks for so long, we would not be having these pageants. And had the white society not defended its asserted "right" to discriminate and segregate as long and as tenaciously as it did, new ethnicities would never have been able to latch onto the apparatus that was built to specifically address the problem of American whites' stubborn oppression and subjugation of American blacks. It is that: slavery, the Burning Times in the South, Jim Crow segregation and poll taxes and anti-miscegenation laws, that created the massive injustices that can only slowly be worked out precisely BECAUSE the blacks left slavery with no capital, no economic means of support. They were "free" only in the sense that a homeless man with nothing or a castaway sailor on a desert island is "free". And the white society closed back in around them with property rights and money and police power to make sure they stayed lowly. This wasn't really effectively addressed until the 1960s and 1970s, and things have gotten better since then. But the white racists have STILL fought a rearguard action, and the blacks, for their part, have recognized they need allies. So coalitions of others - American Indians, Hispanics, aggrieved women, the gays - have come together alongside them, in the shelter of the anti-discrimination laws which were only necessary in the first place because mean white fucks would not back off their bigotry. We got where we are today BECAUSE of slavery, Jim Crow, and the unyielding will of white bigots to not cede equality in any meaningful sense to the Blacks. And so the Blacks allied with the Indians, the Hispanics, the poor, the women, the gays, the abortionists - in short, the Democrats - in order to get their legal equality. In the process, those special considerations for blacks were extended to everybody else who allied with them who was a minority in some way. What did white bigots expect? That blacks would just sit there for another generation or two, utterly subjugated? Yes, they really did expect that. And they lost. In the process, they lost control of the apparatus of government, and they will never get it back again. So, the whites no longer speak with the ultimate authority. We are merely a plurailty, and a divided one at that. Now WE need allies too, and we're not going to find them on the basis of being "white". That's history. Where we are today is that there are indeed these black institutions, focused on blacks, that are relics of the age when blacks COULDN'T compete in white pageants or be in white clubs. The whites, for their part, never WANTED to be in the black institutions. So the law stripped away the whites-only business, but it did not focus on the black institutions. Still doesn't, for political reasons. And the white guy with a brain should understand why and not make that a battleground, because it's making Pickett's Charge to do so.
And given what is happening in Mexico now, going forward all of our present concerns are going to be gone with the wind.
Unlike many of my Reason colleagues, I don't get too bothered with laws that mandate equal treatment under the law at businesses that are open to the public. If you want to be a private club so you can discriminate for x or y reason, go right ahead. But there is a social value in saying that businesses that claim to be open to the public will not be allowed to exclude individuals or groups unless they are being specifically disruptive. It's one thing to kick out a rowdy party of women at a restaurant. It's another to refuse to serve women at all.
#2. To: Deckard (#0)
Once a racist, a homophobe, or a NeverTrumper starts working side by side with or serving the object of their scorn, it's quite possible that meaningful conversation will take place.
#3. To: Deckard (#0)
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), surely one of the least-impressive members of the group that Mark Twain called America's only native criminal class
#4. To: Deckard (#0)
The Libertarian Case FOR Serving Sarah Huckabee Sanders
#5. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
open your doors to the stream of commerce, serve anybody who walks through that door
#6. To: Deckard (#0)
#7. To: misterwhite (#5)
(Edited)
You're going to force a private business to take actions they deem detrimental to their business, maybe to the point of shutting down?
#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
There are things more important than people's personal convictions about things. The economy for one.
#9. To: misterwhite (#8)
(Edited)
#10. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
#11. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
If you want to eat, you will drop the racism in business. Otherwise, go die of hunger.
#12. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
We can tolerate a little bit of bigotry in business, as long as it is localized and cranky.
#13. To: misterwhite (#11)
#14. To: misterwhite (#12)
#15. To: A K A Stone (#10)
#16. To: Vicomte13 (#13)
You can’t mollycoddle bigotry on a large scale.
#17. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
In general, I object to bigots.
#18. To: misterwhite (#16)
(Edited)
#19. To: misterwhite (#17)
What if....
#20. To: Vicomte13 (#18)
But relative social peace is achievable, as long as it is backed by visible armed force, which it always has been.
#21. To: Vicomte13 (#19)
It has been litigated in the courtroom. Time and time again. Your side lost.
#22. To: Vicomte13 (#19)
"But you will obey. And that’s ultimately what matters."
#23. To: misterwhite (#20)
Relative social peace is more readily achievable with a merit- based social system, rather than quotas. Relative social peace is more readily achievable by allowing protected species to voluntarily segregate, rather than by forcing integration. Relative social peace is more readily achievable by discontinuing destructive federal social programs.
#24. To: misterwhite (#22)
I thought your goal was relative social peace, not subjugation.
#25. To: misterwhite (#21)
(Edited)
Now tell me that doesn't lead to resentment against the protected species. In a nation that prides itself on equality.
#26. To: Vicomte13, nanny state goons (#9)
#27. To: Vicomte13 (#25)
Left to their own accord, they voted for segregation
#28. To: hondo68 (#26)
No one should be forced to bake a gay wedding cakes, or to perform an abortion.
#29. To: misterwhite (#27)
(Edited)
In addition, should we disallow things like BET, Black beauty pagents, the Congressional Black Causus, the United Negro College Fund, Ebony's Black Achievement Awards, the NAACP, black fraternities, sororities, and doemitories -- and another 100 or so exclusively black organizations?
#30. To: All (#29)
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