Comments Elsewhere

Roger Young: “In the process, we have lost freedom of association but gained the chains of race quotas, egalitarianism, and ethnic cleansing of Southern culture.”

You did leave out that minor part about the decline of lynch law and the obliteration of State-enforced racial segregation.

As for the rest, race quotas are illegal under current antidiscrimination laws. But you are aware, aren’t you, that in a free society employers and schools should have every right to impose strict race quota schemes if they should deem it useful?

As a side note, “ethnic cleansing” is a word with a real meaning that you are systematically pissing on in order to melodramatically engage in bullshit Dixie identity politics. Real ethnic cleansing involves, among other things, forced physical removal and mass killing; the word was coined by reference to the Nazi policies of “cleansing” areas of Jews, Slavs, and other undesirables during the Holocaust. What you are complaining about is people hurting some white Southerners’ fee-fees by complaining about well-known symbols of slavery and Jim Crow. To hell with that.

Roger: “To top if off, we now have our money stolen from us to pay lazy bureaucrats to take off work and march in goofy parades in his honor!”

Be serious. Would you rather have your money stolen to pay government bureaucrats to punctiliously work in their government offices? I’d rather just not have my money stolen at all, but if it is going to be stolen, I desperately wish it could go towards keeping every government agent in the country doing nothing but making goofy parades.

Roger: “The only thing to ‘celebrate’ on MLK Day is that he’s dead.”

No matter how sleazy you may think that Martin Luther King Jr. was, it could not possibly have been the sort of thing that would make him deserve to be murdered. Which is what you propose celebrating. Is that really the sort of schadenfreude that you want to indulge in?

Mike Tennant: “The results of his crusade, furthermore, were increased centralization of power in Washington and decreased freedom for states and individuals.”

Decreased freedom relative to what? It’s certainly true that antidiscrimination law has infringed on individual freedoms over the past 40 years. That’s why it should be opposed, on libertarian grounds. But talking about “decreased freedom” involves a comparison between the conditions before and the conditions after the civil rights struggle. And the only way that anyone could possibly claim that the civil rights movement decreased individual freedom from State violations of rights would be to completely ignore the massive and inhuman daily rights-violations committed in order to enforce the government-sponsored Jim Crow caste system. The daily assaults on individual freedom perpetrated against any and all Black individuals in, say, Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia, in the dark years from the 1870s to the 1970s are now mostly gone, and it is in no small part thanks to the long years of dangerous and painful organizing work by people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and others that it was accomplished. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’ve accomplished a hell of a lot more for the defense of individual rights in the real world than everyone in the contemporaneous libertarian movement put together.

As for the “freedom” of state governments? God, who gives a damn? States don’t have rights to infringe. Individual people do.