Oh, but it's perfectly plausible to have a high quality analytic brain and be a die hard Red - John Desmond Bernal, J.B.S. Haldane.
Being a communist was a bit more excusable the farther back in history you go, and also a bit more excusable for people whose intellectual accomplishments were unrelated to philosophy and economics. A great mathematician can be a religious nut, a great philosopher cannot be. For a person of my time and my predisposition for curiosity in all fields of knowledge to be a communist would indeed signify a cognitive disorder of some sort.
Sure, without the state there won't be a law that declares slave ownership legal ( so it won't be "institutionalized") but slavery doesn't need state's authority to back itself, all it needs is a sufficient economic incentive and guns - hmm, this reminds me of a certain utopian project that I know of 
, just without the Rights that are supposed to be respected when the state isn't here anymore.
The Non-Aggression Principle is self-sustaining in a sufficiently advanced society because the vast majority of people (who control an even greater majority of wealth) benefit from NAP and are thus willing to defend it. The only people willing to defend the economically dysfunctional institution of slavery are a few backward plantation owners. Slavery might have been economically beneficial prior to the industrial revolution (see also my theory on evolutionary emergence of Rights), but after that it remained profitable only in a handful of agrarian pockets and held in place only through government force.
Sole social tradition that always has an ammount of potential violence backing it is enough to make a society remain discriminatory, not necesarily the state, but the state, when it is present, can work against that tradition using law if it is run by the right men. Indians happened to be slave owners as well without any concept of institutionalizing it.
If it violates NAP then it is a state - whether it waves a flag or simply puts an arrow in your back doesn't change its fundamental nature.
Yes, today maybe, when racism is seen by majority of Westerners as at least shamefull ( and that thanks not to free market but to people like MLK for ex. ), so it poses a possible threat to the company's reputation.
We are not talking about building a time machine and
going back a few thousand years to fight slavery while it was still profitable - and, frankly, I'm not sure I'd want to, because many of my Jewish or Slavic ancestors (the etymological source of the word "slave") have been slaves at some point in history, and without the institution of slavery they wouldn't have been taken alive but
killed instead. Slavery becomes unbearably shameful as soon as it stops being economically beneficial, which is when the relative value of mindless labor decreases due to agricultural innovation or industrialization. Racism is always shameful, and it is always economically destructive to prejudge individuals by the accident of birth rather than individual merit. As society advances, economic necessity makes all "rational economic actors" equal in their negative Rights (NAP), and non-violent racism is simply ostracized out of relevance.
But for most time in reality there is no sufficient pressure on shareholders to go in the direction of ostracism. The cases of Sullivan Laws and disinvestments in apartheid South Africa show that the private enterpreneur is the last to join the boycott ( because why would he deliberately stop the cash flow if he isn't yet pushed to the wall ? ), he simply tags along if he is forced by the public opinion or by the government itself and the results are also mixed at best. Rothbard argued against such actions in the name of black workers' economic wellbeing. So if there is an excuse not to boycott ( because that would hurt those that it's suppose to help ) then what is left to do? Keep making money with the racists hoping they will one day stop being racist on their own.
South Africa would have been a very different place without government force. The "whites" would have still dominated economically, on the basis of the technological and other advantages they were able to bring with them from Europe, and they would still be able to buy up large amounts of land and other resources and hire "black" labor at "sweatshop" prices, but they would not be able to institutionalize those class differences. A "black" entrepreneur who preforms better than his "white" competitors would become wealthier than they are, and he would have the added competitive advantage of consumer bias on his side if the majority of consumers for his products / services were not "white". Social mobility would also be higher due to absence of legal monopolies (ex. diamonds), patents, land ownership restrictions, and other "laws" that perpetuated the racial inequality. There would still be private institutions (ex. neighborhood associations, schools, businesses) catering to a specific "race", but there would be mixed-race institutions as well, with the latter gradually gaining a competitive advantage as social attitudes begin to change. Most importantly, young men like Nelson Mandela would turn to something much better than Marxism and violence in their struggle to attain economic advancement for themselves and their communities.
I agree with Rothbard that boycotting a country is counterproductive of helping its people, but that is the tragedy of statism - the government terrorists always use civilians as human shields. It's like
Churchill's decision not to bomb the Nazi death camps - there are no good answers to this. The mistakes that have led up to the Nazi death camps were
made in years prior, especially when other countries closed their borders to the refugees
(ex) - all governments prop up each-other, and if you can create a gap and keep it open then all governments will eventually fall. Imagine what would happen if a country in Africa achieved Anarcho-Capitalism, which means not just the absence of government but a culture where NAP is almost-universally recognized, its violators are routinely brought to justice, and other governments are unable to invade because their public opinion wouldn't allow it, and because invading a country of well-armed and freedom-loving individuals is a lot more difficult than simply conquering an existing government. There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant or a refugee to be turned away from an Anarcho-Capitalist society: if you can pay your way or otherwise attain (ex. private charity) a place to live then you have the Right to stay. Such a country would not only accept all of Hitler's refugees (thereby also diffusing the future situation in Palestine), but it would compete with South Africa for regional economic leadership, sucking in its brains and capital, no matter their "color", until South Africa would be forced to reform!
Again, in a world where the majority drifts away from racist views and that is not some predetermined, unavoidable course of things. Actually the period of rapid industrial and trading growth on the brake of XIX and XX century was accompanied by the triumphant march of „scientific racism”, very in synch with social darwinist tendencies of that time.
In my mind it is the defenders of anti-racism laws that sound the most racist: "black people are inferior and therefore compassionate Mommy Government has to protect them from reality". When the pro-"affirmative action" socialists mention things like "scientific racism" it's almost like they're afraid that those theories are on some level true! I am very confident that they are not. In my own personal experience I've worked with a number of "black" people very closely, and I was very impressed with their competence and work ethic, which with some individuals was much superior to my own. I also have studied cultural factors that influence an ethnic group's performance (especially from the point of view of my own Ashkenazi ancestors), and I firmly believe that there are absolutely no relevant genetic factors that make one "race" or "ethnicity" different from the next - it's all about culture, and by that I don't mean the tribal culture of one's ancestors but the cultural patterns that exist in society today. Things like the "affirmative action" laws have done a lot more harm than good, and they have done much to keep the "black culture" of America relatively dysfunctional, dependent, and self-destructive. Freedom and achievement comes from individualism and self-reliance, not collective entitlement and handouts made possible through government force!
Industrialization and (relative) capitalism are what ended slavery, which has been practiced from the dawn of the agricultural revolution but failed to scale to the industrial age. The use of race-differentiated slavery was the last desperate attempt to preserve this vile institution, but it was only made possible by the technological differences between the European and African cultures of the time, with cultural misunderstandings being very difficult to maintain when human beings work together. Southern slave-owners tried very hard to keep their slaves in ignorance, but they couldn't escape the fact that there were free individuals of African descent who were well educated and articulate and no different culturally from a "white" "gentleman" of that era. It took government-imposed borders,
laws prohibiting education of slaves, and other restrictions to maintain the illusion of "half-ape Negroes" for as long as it lasted. Obvious lies like "scientific racism", much like the "global warming" hysteria of the present day, cannot stand one minute of objective scientific scrutiny! Those lies are only made possible by the cause of science being hijacked by government-controlled academic monopolies, which are functionally biased to produce "findings" that benefit the state!
Imagine if Germans won the war, Holocaust remained a secret, and The Third Reich became a country like any other, just with racist albeit non - genocidal regulations, spreading through most Europe and the steppes of Russia.This country would be a significant economic player in the world, without the need to deal in bussiness with any "non - Aryans" if they streched their racial classifications to embrace all Whites as "Aryan". Their economy could very well grow, despite and in parallell to the evident social backwardness of their worldview.
Once again, study history objectively. Germans saw WW1+WW2 as a desperate defensive struggle against the neighboring empires that were trying to destroy Germany - they would never accept Hitler if they saw history as you see it. Nazi racism was a pragmatic attribute not much different than the war
propoganda and
concentration camps in America. Racism has cost Germany dearly in their loss of millions of brilliant minds like Einstein, and the German scientists they did have were a result of cultural momentum from a less oppressive society of the past. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the contrast between Ayn Rand's vision of totalitarian dystopia as backward (ex.
Anthem) and the more competent dystopia like that envisioned by Orwell, and I'm coming ever-closer to the conclusion that only cultural momentum and foreign aid have kept places like the Soviet Union afloat for so long. If some remnant of Nazi Germany was around today, it wouldn't be much different from North Korea. And, once again - hellholes like North Korea or a Nazi remnant are only possible because other governments would prop them up, otherwise I'd be flying over North Korea right now and dropping leaflets (or iPads) calling for resistance!
Because them KKK are all about reading Toni Morrison and watching Bill Cosby, right? It depends who gets with the book to the young mind first - the liberal or someone with Turner Diaries in hand. Children of racists parents who live in a racist community and are being homeschooled possess an exactly zero chance of having their beliefs questioned, and when they have grown up it's too late, like racial version of the Matrix. If they went to a mixed school the chance would be a bit bigger of confronting what they were taught with reality and getting influenced by the literature that could save their minds from hate.
I'm sure some fraction of KKK members have come across Bill Cosby while flipping through the channels and couldn't help but reevaluate their opinions. You must also remember that the KKK was a shock reaction to the Federally imposed anti-Slavery laws and other political changes - things went a lot smoother in the countries where the government simply stopped supporting slavery, and the former slaves could bargain for compensation knowing the plantation owners couldn't keep them by force, and work their way up from there.
People do have a Right to be racist and to home-school their children, but those children do have the Natural Right to Emancipation, and of course they can reevaluate their parents' views after they are emancipated by default (ex. age 18), as I have reevaluated the values of the cultures that I have been born into quite completely. Being born into a crummy culture and then have to waste your 20s reevaluating everything sucks big time, but it is still a lot better than not being born at all, which what government-imposed violation of Parents' Rights leads to - fertility rates fall through the floor! You don't get to choose your parents, but there is only so much control they can have on you, and modern information technology makes the obvious a lot more difficult to hide.
Ahh, if it were so simple - destroy the welfare state and with it will die the idiots.
I didn't say that, I've said it does more harm than good. Much of the welfare state resentment and the entitlement mentality would go away with the transition to private charity, which can receive matching funds from the state as welfare is gradually phased out. Since private charity exists in a competitive environment, it would have to convince its supporters that it's a better reflection of their values and a more cost-effective means of achieving results than the other charities it competes with, which leads to innovation, community cohesion, and most importantly of all - greater interest in helping the "victims of poverty" help themselves, both individually and as a community.
Again, racism was doing very fine before anyone dreamed about welfare and the like. I seriously doubt that most white racists would cease to be racist if pro - minority government actions stopped. To them this is just a "civilized" excuse for hate that has a psychologically deeper, not unoften religion- like or religious per se grounding, LDS did not allow Blacks into priesthood untill the 70's. In my country there is a certain sociological phenomenon called "Jew - less antisemitism'', so this often has nothing to do with real, economic situation that the state could be blamed for.
None of this invalidates what I've said. Summing up: (1) people have a Right to be racist in their personal opinions and choices as long as they don't initiate aggression, (2) racism is irrational, economically destructive, and self-defeating, and (3) to use of government force under the slogan of ending racism is like trying to perform dental surgery with a chainsaw - it does a lot more harm than good.
Edited by Alex Libman, 31 May 2010 - 03:01 PM.
