... Well, on my end of the discussion, I don't much care how people choose to define the words they use, as long as they are not being misleading or deceptive

... Maybe. But what makes you think that the left we are interested in connecting with is "the political 'left'"? I think "the political 'left'" are a bunch of

... Jefferson was neither a libertarian nor a Democrat. He wasn't a Democrat because the Democratic Party did not, in any meaningful sense, exist in 1800.

... Well, in my experience, libertarians who supported Ron Paul's presidential campaign have often tried to "defend" him against libertarian critics by

... If politics demands mendacity and moral cowardice in the face of popular prejudices, then the best choice for him to make is to stop trying to win at such

... This is an argumentum ad populum. Popular ideas are not always right, and right ideas are not always popular. Certainly, if you advance just about any

mythago:

Rad Geek @60, then you also know that Caplan’s shitty article (and its equally shitty follow-up) was a response to David Boaz’s dead-on criticism of Jacob Hornberger and similar-minded libertarians (Hornberger kinda sort backpedaled, a little bit, but god forbid he admit Boaz nailed him on seeing everything in terms of ‘what benefit does this provided to wealthy, heterosexual white guys’).

Yes, I’m familiar with the pre-existing intra-libertarian debate between Hornberger and Boaz. I don’t know Bumper personally but I am friends with people who have worked with him for years, so I’ve been hearing a fair amount of background and chatter about the whole exchange for a while now. Of course, the issue of the Gilded Age didn’t start with the intra-libertarian debate between Boaz and Hornberger, any more than it started with Caplan’s shitty article. (Kevin Carson, for example, has been criticizing romanticized accounts of the Gilded Age for years now; it occupies a major part of his first book.) Like I said, this is an existing and longstanding debate within libertarian circles., which is why I think it would be a mistake to set things out as if you had all the libertarians on one side “eulogizing” the 1880s, and non-libertarians on the other side calling them out for it.

Besides movie theaters and windshield annoyances, I also ought to mention sitting in on APA talks without having paid the registration fee for the conference.

Also, in my previous comment I meant to add: whether you’re raising the Rothbardian worry that Roderick raises, or the kind of worry that I mentioned in my comments will have some effect on what you can say about the choice of tactics. If the considerations have to do with the claims created, or not created, by a de minimis trespass, then it matters that the students in the sit-in movement maintained disciplined nonviolence (e.g., they went limp when the cops came to pull them away; they didn’t try to fight with the owners in order to stay). If you’re appealing to the Rothbardian considerations (which I think are also legitimate, although I bracketed them for the sake of discussion), it’s not clear that even matters. If the nominal owner is not a real owner, and has no right to evict, then the protestors would have a right to physically fight off attempts to force them out. Make of that whatever you will.

Mike D:

I’m sure you have a well articulated answer for this already, Charles, but can you explain how sit-ins were not trespassing, and did not violate the NAP?

Well, what Roderick said.

But also, even if we bracket the question about the legitimacy of ownership, I think that there’s a good case to be made that sit-ins are a legitimate form of social protest. There’s a long, complicated story about the various different moments of what was going on in a sit-in protest, and how this affects the rights of each of the parties concerned (business-owner, sit-in protestor, and the police called in to haul them off), all of which I’d like to take the time to work out in more detail, but for now, the tentative, short version is that I think what the sitters-in did was a form of de minimis trespass, like shoving ads under someone’s windshield wiper or smuggling your own gummi bears into a movie theater, which doesn’t count as an invasion of the rights of the owner unless you go on to use physical force to try to stay when the owner tries to make you leave.

No matter what the form of trespass, the owner of the property has a right to demand that they leave, and they have a right to have the protestors forcibly removed (within limits of proportionality) if they won’t. But if the protestors aren’t causing any lasting damage to the facilities, aren’t trying to physically fight the owners or the police in order to stay where they are, etc., then I don’t think that there is any act of force that would give the owners a claim for anything beyond the simple removal of the protestor from the scene. So my view is that sit-in protestors weren’t violating rights or moral duties by sitting down, and that lunch-counter owners weren’t violating rights by evicting them, but were violating a moral duty (while evicting was within their rights, what they ought to have done is to take the opportunity to abandon their stupid racist lunch-counter policy).

If the form of intrusion on the business’s property were more intrusive or destructive (e.g. by barging into closed shops or doing some kind of physical damage to the property or by physically blocking other patrons from sitting at the counter, or what have you), then my judgment on the matter might change. Of course, that wouldn’t change my view of the rest of the social movement (e.g. the organized boycotts and public pressure campaigns) that surrounded the sit-in movement.

12:31 PM: s not like if only the mean old racist authoritarian president of the CSA or whoever had said "alrighty I guess y'all can fraternize with coloreds if'n ya wanter" that segregation would've disappeared; it took the violence of the federal government to do that,

Well, except that Woolworth's lunch counters weren't desegregated by Title II.

They were mainly desegregated by the social and economic pressure created by the student sit-in movement and the boycotts that accompanied it. Years before the Civil Rights Act even existed. The Greensboro Woolworth's was desegregated in July 1960, and the Nashville Student Movement won a desegregation agreement from all the downtown merchants in Nashville in May 1960. If they had waited around for the Feds to show up with Title II, they would have been waiting at least four years. (Or, more likely, they would have been waiting forever, because the cultural changes created by their direct action were a major part of what made it even possible for later legislative actions to get through the Democratic Congress.)

1:12 PM: The protests were intended to force a change in corporate policy (which was ultimately successful), they were not aimed at changing laws.

I agree, which is exactly why it's a ridiculous example for Maddow to try to use to prove her point against Paul. The sit-ins are relevant to the conversation, but in exactly the opposite of the way that Maddow (and apparently also Paul, because Paul is a moron and a politician) seem to think: they are a remarkable example of how a grassroots social movement succeeded in dismantling segregation in private businesses without the assistance of federal antidiscrimination laws.