tolerating unequal outcomes

[lordbt]

But thing is that you didn't criticize the use of the state you criticized the use of emotion over reason; you are backpeddling now. In one case you attacked the use of emotion over reason and on another you defended it. Is it too much to ask that you at least a little consistent?

Thats actually a fair point, kermit. To be clear, I dont think refusing to hire liberals because they are liberals is a particularly rational thing to do and would certainly qualify as letting emotionalism overwhelm your reason.

 

[lordbt]

Yeah and it worked much more effectively in an agrarian United States, that's the point. For an industrial united states we have done much better with more progressive ideas than those of the Guilded Age.

I don't generally point to the pre-civil war era as a good example of libertarian philosophy because it was legal to own people.



With the emergence of the industrial revolution and the lack of a good system to help people work within it the Guilded Age gives us some of the most stark examples of excessive capitalism ever.

You just have an unrealistic view of reality. What do you honestly think the first factories that emerged from whatever age preceeded the Guilded Age were going to look like? Did you expect them to have air conditioning, forty hour work weeks and 21st century equipment?

It's a more modern example than the Guilded Age which you seem fine discussing. So, why not regail us with how your philosophy would have done away with such things, or, you could tell us how wonderful they are.

If you don't wish to discuss it I shall simply consider the point conceded.

If you wish to discuss other examples I suggest:

Loan sharks, bonded labor contracts, poor/unsafe working conditions, sweat shop labor, and shipping jobs to dictatorships to take advantage of lower labor costs

Pick one. What do you thnk I have all day?

A more impassioned defense of child labor and poor labor conditions I have never seen.

Thanks, except that is not what I did. Maybe you could explain why children wound up in factories. Were parents just mean back then, or was there another reason?

Having to choose between squalid factory conditions and starving sounds like the kind of liberty I can get behind. No, economic coercion there.

that those were the options available at the dawn of the industrial revolution is not the fault of the industrialists. In fact, the industrialists offered an alternative to starvation. How is that a bad thing?

What this signifies is that if left to their own devices the people who were running industry in the Guilded Age would perpetrate terrible conditions on the people who work for them.

That was the reality of the times. They didnt perpetrate anything.

And yet somehow states that do not take such an absolute right to property as you would like, the modern mixed economies, don't all seem to be under the thumb tyranny.

Weird how that works.

That we arent a full blown tyranny does not mean that there arent tyrannical laws.

It's logical if you think similar conditions will yield similar results.

Except there is 150 years of industrial evolution between then and now that you like to pretend hasnt happened.

Your choices can be limited by limiting the number of options available.

That YOUR choices are limited is not the fault of the employer that is actually giving you an option that would not exist in his absense.

If enough power in the society you live in is accumulated in the hands of few enough people, or the people who have wealth agree on how to treat those without wealth, you will see your choices dwindle down to nothing.

Except that has never happened and never will in a free market, so you caqn drop the scare tactics.

You should save your quips for arguments I actually made.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[lordbt]

One wonders why the classes of people who recently enough lacked any form of economic recourse would be against such a philosophy.

You know, small segments of society like women.

You know, I just got through saying that if government backed legal discrimination had taken place a government remedy was necessary, so I dont understand your point. But yes, the incompetent the lazy, and the parasites of society have nothing to gain whatsoever from a society based upon individual rights and liberty. They would actually have to take the burden of their own survival on their own backs and not the backs of others.

 

[JustABit]

My position is that since you have no right to work for me in the first place, I am not violating your rights by not hiring you. And if I am not violating your rights, the state has no right to interceed on your behalf.

This topic wasn't about state intercession or state granted rights, this was about the morality of exclusion. If all harm is immoral and exclusion is a form of harm, then exclusion is immoral. If you disagree that exclusion is a form of harm, that's fine. I don't really expect you to agree. But I repeat, ask the person who's being excluded whether or not they're being harmed, and see what type of responses you get.

I am not ignoring it, I just dont see evidence for it. But if you are arguing that the state is corrupt and corruptable, you wont get disagreement from me. And if the mob overreaches? In other words you want control. If you cant gain it through honest means, you seek to use force. I get that.

I totally agree that the state is corruptable. And it is a huge problem if people overreach. What I would ask is, what role do you think economics and money take in state corruption? And if you think it has a role ( maybe you don't, my question is sincere ), would you think those influences would disappears from society once the state disappears rather than just finding the next most convenient outlet?

Don't pretend your system isn't about force. As individuals we don't live in a vacuum, we're affected by our neighbors. The only thing you're doing is replacing state coercion with market coercion. Disagree? Then tell me what happens if a person owns a nice home, and his neighbor sets up a coal plant and fills the area with smog, noise and a horrible view? Does the coal plant shut down? ( infringing on the coal miner's right to do what he wishes with his property ) Does the person who owns the home move? ( the coal plant owner has imposed his own will on the value and quality of his neighbor's property ) Does the coal miner offer the home owner recompense? ( How do you agree on what suitable recompense is? The value of the property to the home owner may have been much better than what the market dictates, and either way he's still being imposed upon by the plant owner. )

There's no solution that doesn't involve an application of force.

I want control? Of course I want control over things that affect me. Who doesn't? What are you trying to say, that exerting that control via democracy is dishonest? Get real. There's nothing that suggests the free market is more or less honest than a democratic state when it comes to exerting influence on the world. It's just a different means of distributing power.

No, its coersion and you advocating force to relieve others of property that rightfully belongs to them so you can use it for your own ends is theft.

Are you familiar with the fallacy of "begging the question"?

I have yet to run across a reasonable scenario (which yours isnt) that has wekened my support for human liberty or individual rights.

I know the hypothetical I put up isn't reasonable. That's why I put in the disclaimer, "I'm not saying this is what will happen under Libertarianism". I was curious as to whether or not there was any point at which you would be bothered by an inequality of distribution of resources.

Thank you for dodging. Would you like to try answering the question again? Although I suppose I know the answer, given other things you've written.

Also, it's incredibly biased to think your position is the only pro human liberty position. Pretty much everybody wants to maximize freedom, it's one of our cultural values. What we disagree on is how to achieve it.

Its about envy and really nothing more. You see people with more than you think theys should have so you elect into power people who will take it from them and transfer it to you.

Then I'll just throw back at you that your position is about justifying greed. You want to rob from society without giving anything back, you recognize the free market lets you do this without restraint, and it's really nothing more.

Disagree? Good. Because then you can understand how silly your own comment is.

What confounds me is that either you aren't bothered by seeing impoverished people, or that you can't understand that people are bothered and want to fight for impoverished people using all tools at their disposal.

 

[lordbt]

This topic wasn't about state intercession or state granted rights, this was about the morality of exclusion. If all harm is immoral and exclusion is a form of harm, then exclusion is immoral. If you disagree that exclusion is a form of harm, that's fine. I don't really expect you to agree. But I repeat, ask the person who's being excluded whether or not they're being harmed, and see what type of responses you get.

It doesnt matter what they think. They have no right to work for me and the decision whether to hire them or not is mine and mine alone.

 

[JustABit]

It doesnt matter what they think. They have no right to work for me and the decision whether to hire them or not is mine and mine alone.

You misunderstand. I'm not trying to say that you should be forced to hire these people. I don't know how I can make this more clear to you - the topic I was responding to was "ethics of discriminatory hiring". Specifically you said, "If i hire bricklayer over you simply because I prefer his politics and outlook on life, there is nothing unethical in that".

My contention is that if exclusion is harm, and harm is immoral, then this is indeed an unethical act. Whether or not you the person has a right to work for you is another, separate matter.

For example, I have the right to eat the food that I buy, but if I see a person dying of starvation, it would be unethical of me to not share. His need to eat doesn't necessarily trump my right to the food, but it would still remain unethical of me to let him suffer. Of course this is made under the premise that inflicting or allowing harm is immoral.

 

[lordbt]

You misunderstand. I'm not trying to say that you should be forced to hire these people. I don't know how I can make this more clear to you - the topic I was responding to was "ethics of discriminatory hiring". Specifically you said, "If i hire bricklayer over you simply because I prefer his politics and outlook on life, there is nothing unethical in that".

My contention is that if exclusion is harm, and harm is immoral, then this is indeed an unethical act. Whether or not you the person has a right to work for you is another, separate matter.

For example, I have the right to eat the food that I buy, but if I see a person dying of starvation, it would be unethical of me to not share.

If I dont hire you, I dont hire you. You not are somehow harmed because that decision--which is mine to make anyway--was made in some fashion you dislike.

 

[JustABit]

If I dont hire you, I dont hire you. You not are somehow harmed because that decision--which is mine to make anyway--was made in some fashion you dislike.

And I already said above, I know you're going to disagree with the premise that exclusion is a form of harm.

But it's not up to you to make that determination. It's something that can be measured and examined by looking at outcomes. Your blanket assertion that it does no harm carries no more weight than a blanket assertion from me that it does cause harm. We get nowhere. So, since you insist that it does no harm, show me good evidence. ( Edit, doesn't need to be empirical )

*edit, I also think it's pretty well established in economics literature that employment discrimination is harmful when it has no bearing on performance. Even you've admitted as much, by recognizing a person is harming his or her economic interests. You only need to extend that idea a bit to realize that that harm also extends to people who are dependent on the hirer.

 

[iluvatar5150]

To the extent to which government law, regulation or action is responsible for discrimination, there almost certainly has to be a government remedy. But if I dont want to hire women, or blacks, or jews, or whites, or italians or Christians or Muslims or people with blue eyes, that is my business, not younrs and not the states. So long as I am not violating anyones rights, the state has no moral authority to step in and use initiate the use of force against me.

According to the law, that kind of discrimination IS a violation of their rights. Legally, you as an employer don't have the right to make employment decisions on the basis of someone's race, gender, or religion.

-Dan.

 

[variant]

You just have an unrealistic view of reality. What do you honestly think the first factories that emerged from whatever age preceeded the Guilded Age were going to look like? Did you expect them to have air conditioning, forty hour work weeks and 21st century equipment?

It's not that they are outside my expectations, it is that they indicate that producers working within the free market don't necessarily care about the conditions of those who work for them.

If that isn't a take home message from history for you I am not sure what if anything I can do for you in terms of observing reality.

Pick one. What do you thnk I have all day?

I asked you to pick one, since you hand-waved the example I picked.

You know, since you say this stuff doesn't happen.

Thanks, except that is not what I did. Maybe you could explain why children wound up in factories. Were parents just mean back then, or was there another reason?

It is exactly what you are doing. You are expounding upon the virtues of having people so free they need to work as children in squalid unregulated conditions.

The reason? Despair. You'll find that taking advantage of others despair is the common theme in the examples.

that those were the options available at the dawn of the industrial revolution is not the fault of the industrialists. In fact, the industrialists offered an alternative to starvation. How is that a bad thing?

They are indeed entirely responcable for how they treat others, excepting of course where they MUST treat people poorly in order to succeed. In that case the completely free market often traps people who want to succeed into systems where you race to the bottom in terms of morality.

If we accept your notion that none of this can be helped in any case, that the people who benefit most from the industrial revolution, and those driving the planning and implementation of it are not at all responcable for the conditions it brings, that they are not responcable for how they act towards those who did not immediately benefit from that major social change, then what exactly happened to change these conditions?

We of course know that these conditions did not persist, and we know why they did not persist, and we know who fought to keep them going and what justifications they used.

They sounded like you. People justifying their position.

The Supreme Court . Capitalism and Conflict . Landmark Cases . Lochner v. New York (1905) | PBS

That was the reality of the times. They didnt perpetrate anything.

People justifying their position. People did indeed fight for the right to perpetuate such conditions. Change of course came when my side of the argument prevailed.

That we arent a full blown tyranny does not mean that there arent tyrannical laws.

True. Which is why we are constantly talking these things over.

Except there is 150 years of industrial evolution between then and now that you like to pretend hasnt happened.

Do I? Or have I just been looking at how it has happened and the roll government and society have had in shaping it into something better?

I'm of course criticizing the free market in the purest of forms that I can find it. I am not criticizing a free market with the checks we started to build into it when we became more reasonable about the matter.

That YOUR choices are limited is not the fault of the employer that is actually giving you an option that would not exist in his absense.

Right, when we ensure there is actually competition in the moderately regulated free market it is unlikely.

Except that has never happened and never will in a free market, so you caqn drop the scare tactics.Thanks for the advice.

Except in the examples I cited. And, the era I was talking about in all these posts. Read the case I cited about the bakers in New York and tell me there is no coercion in business practices.

And this one:
The Supreme Court . Capitalism and Conflict . Landmark Cases . West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) | PBS

 

[variant]

You know, I just got through saying that if government backed legal discrimination had taken place a government remedy was necessary, so I dont understand your point. But yes, the incompetent the lazy, and the parasites of society have nothing to gain whatsoever from a society based upon individual rights and liberty. They would actually have to take the burden of their own survival on their own backs and not the backs of others.

And here you have it again, people who don't agree with you are incompetent lazy parasites.

Of course my aim in promoting the protection of the most vulnerable in society from outright exploitation is just to get them a free ride.

 

[JustABit]

Except that has never happened and never will in a free market

And of course you have an example of a free market society that we should look at, as evidence that such a thing can't happen? You always ask others for evidence, where's yours? The closest analogue we have is the gilded age ( if you have others, by all means point them out ), and in that period there was a huge concentration of wealth and the people with that wealth did distort and influence the world around them, creating new social problems and introducing unrest. It didn't end in a new aristocracy, but what's also true is that the government took steps to attempt to control the power of the industrialists. We don't actually know what the outcome would have been, without that intervention.

You blame the gilded age market distortions on government. Just for argument's sake I won't dispute that. But where I should look, then, for a better and closer example of a laissez faire economics in operation? ( And don't provide an example solely inside of a single industry, because different industries operate under different conditions. ) If you can't offer something, aren't you just operating on wishful thinking?

 

[MachZer0]

According to the law, that kind of discrimination IS a violation of their rights. Legally, you as an employer don't have the right to make employment decisions on the basis of someone's race, gender, or religion.

-Dan.

Since when does the law give anyone the right to be my employee

 

[iluvatar5150]

Since when does the law give anyone the right to be my employee

Where did I say that it did? What the law gives you is the right to not be discriminated against for certain reasons (e.g. race, gender, religion, etc).

Lordbt assumes that he has more rights as an employer than he actually does. He ibelieves that he has the right to hire/not hire/fire anyone for any reason he choose, when in reality, the law says that he does not have the right to base his hiring choices upon those criteria. As an employer, Lordbt does not have as many rights as he thinks he has.

-Dan.

 

[lordbt]

Its not that they are outside my expectations, it is that they indicate that producers working within the free market don't necessarily care about the conditions of those who work for them.

If that isn't a take home message from history for you I am not sure what if anything I can do for you in terms of observing reality.

You have to put your criticism in context though. We are talking about the conditions in Civil War era America,not some hindsight induced dream world. Poverty, human suffering, child labor, poor working standards (by modern standards) were not invented by industrialists, they inherited them. Government had the entire history of the planet to upgrade working conditions and did nothing. Until the Industrial Revolution came along and made it possible.

Tell me, how would Variant Industries est. 1866 have looked any different from those that you now criticize? Would you have employed children? Installed air conditioning (after you invented it of course)? Encouraged the unmionization of your own employees? Had a 40 hour work week? What safety measures would you have intitiated--keeping in mind, of course, the limited technology available for such things at the time. We are talking about the 1800's here where life was difficult for everyone. Industry did not create those difficulties, it created the opportunity to escape them. And as for your wonderful benevolent state riding to the rescue. Child labor laws didnt happen until the Depression. That would be after the evil Guilded Age had ended.

I asked you to pick one, since you hand-waved the example I picked.

You know, since you say this stuff doesn't happen.

We can use child labor since we are on the subject. Perhaps you think that prior to the Industrial Revolution children just played with toys all day. Take a look around the globe today at third world, non industrialized nations and tell me how wonder life is for children there. Do that and you will understand why children were ever employed in these early factories in the first place--unless you just attribute that to poor parenting and evil capitalists.

It is exactly what you are doing. You are expounding upon the virtues of having people so free they need to work as children in squalid unregulated conditions.

False. Once again you are using conditions endemic to non industrialized societies and blaming them on industrialization

They are indeed entirely responcable for how they treat others, excepting of course where they MUST treat people poorly in order to succeed. In that case the completely free market often traps people who want to succeed into systems where you race to the bottom in terms of morality.

If we accept your notion that none of this can be helped in any case, that the people who benefit most from the industrial revolution, and those driving the planning and implementation of it are not at all responcable for the conditions it brings, that they are not responcable for how they act towards those who did not immediately benefit from that major social change, then what exactly happened to change these conditions?

Again, you are blaming a pre-existing problem on industrialization and I am not going to let you get away with it. The conditions that existed in 1865 America were not the doing of industrialists. They inherited those conditions and that labor market and put it to work. That you, 150 years later, denounce their behavior and ignore the entire rest of human history is what makes your argument nonsensical.

 

[lordbt]

We of course know that these conditions did not persist, and we know why they did not persist, and we know who fought to keep them going and what justifications they used.

They sounded like you. People justifying their position.

The Supreme Court . Capitalism and Conflict . Landmark Cases . Lochner v. New York (1905) | PBS



People justifying their position. People did indeed fight for the right to perpetuate such conditions. Change of course came when my side of the argument prevailed.

What exactly am I supposed to draw from this case? That the state should be able to declare that a 60 work week is unlawful? I work more than 60 hours a week all the time. What gives you or the state the right to declare such things illegal?

I'm of course criticizing the free market in the purest of forms that I can find it. I am not criticizing a free market with the checks we started to build into it when we became more reasonable about the matter.

No, you are criticizing capitalism for using the means and conditions it found itself in in 1880 and giving a pass to government which had the prior 10,000 years to create a workers paradise and brought only misery, suffering and servitude.

 

[variant]

You have to put your criticism in context though. We are talking about the conditions in Civil War era America,not some hindsight induced dream world. Poverty, human suffering, child labor, poor working standards (by modern standards) were not invented by industrialists, they inherited them. Government had the entire history of the planet to upgrade working conditions and did nothing. Until the Industrial Revolution came along and made it possible.

Tell me, how would Variant Industries est. 1866 have looked any different from those that you now criticize? Would you have employed children? Installed air conditioning (after you invented it of course)? Encouraged the unmionization of your own employees? Had a 40 hour work week? What safety measures would you have intitiated--keeping in mind, of course, the limited technology available for such things at the time. We are talking about the 1800's here where life was difficult for everyone. Industry did not create those difficulties, it created the opportunity to escape them. And as for your wonderful benevolent state riding to the rescue. Child labor laws didnt happen until the Depression. That would be after the evil Guilded Age had ended.

Market systems existed before that point too so you obviously miss the point that we should expect abuses like child labor even in an industrialized society that makes them completely unnecessary. We should expect the people who profit from such abuses to want to continue to abuse their workers.

What caused us to move away from such conditions?

What mechanism does the free market provide to get from there to here?

It was of course not the way such things were settled.

We can use child labor since we are on the subject. Perhaps you think that prior to the Industrial Revolution children just played with toys all day. Take a look around the globe today at third world, non industrialized nations and tell me how wonder life is for children there. Do that and you will understand why children were ever employed in these early factories in the first place--unless you just attribute that to poor parenting and evil capitalists.

My point is that child labor is unnecessary in an industrialized society, and it doesn't just go away because of the free market.

Yes I understand exactly why they were employed, capitalization on despair.

We have found a better way as a society. One you don't like, but it requires people who benefit from things like child labor to stop it. I can't and don't blame them for not immediately and dramatically altering their political and economic structure to meet the new complexity of society, it is exactly what we should expect to happen.

I can however blame you for wanting to remove most of that structure because you find it distasteful.

False. Once again you are using conditions endemic to non industrialized societies and blaming them on industrialization

You misunderstand again.

I don't blame the industrialization I blame the exploitation of those who have little choice in a so called free market. The process of industrialization makes the problem more intense but it also gives us the ability to move beyond the sincere exploitation.

The industrialization is not the problem the way people treat each other is.

Again, you are blaming a pre-existing problem on industrialization and I am not going to let you get away with it. The conditions that existed in 1865 America were not the doing of industrialists. They inherited those conditions and that labor market and put it to work. That you, 150 years later, denounce their behavior and ignore the entire rest of human history is what makes your argument nonsensical.

I am not. Your take on the issue is backward looking, mine forward looking.

I can look back on the last 150 years and see what happened and who made it happen and talk frankly about the conditions that existed before that and why they are bad.

It is a nonsense position to say that the way capitalism went forward in the guiled age was not the fault of the people running the show. Did it exasperate already existent problems? Yes. Do we still blame the market system and the forces at work for doing that? Yes.

Can we look to how these abuses were ended and learn how to build a better society?

Most certainly.

 

[variant]

What exactly am I supposed to draw from this case? That the state should be able to declare that a 60 work week is unlawful? I work more than 60 hours a week all the time. What gives you or the state the right to declare such things illegal?

That case is the argument for your position. We should all be "free" to work long hrs in squalid conditions for low pay.

No, you are criticizing capitalism for using the means and conditions it found itself in in 1880 and giving a pass to government which had the prior 10,000 years to create a workers paradise and brought only misery, suffering and servitude.

I prefer modern governments. You're going to be waiting a while if you want me to expound on the virtues of feudalism. They are significant improvements on what came before. You want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You blame all bad things on government, even the direct actions of people free to do what they wish. Who apparently inherited social strife and were completely unable to fix it using the mechanisms you wish us to implement.

What does this say about your preferred solutions going forward? You are going to inherit social strife, at what point should we expect the free market to sort it out? By what mechanism should we expect this all to work?

 

[MachZer0]

Where did I say that it did? What the law gives you is the right to not be discriminated against for certain reasons (e.g. race, gender, religion, etc).

Lordbt assumes that he has more rights as an employer than he actually does. He ibelieves that he has the right to hire/not hire/fire anyone for any reason he choose, when in reality, the law says that he does not have the right to base his hiring choices upon those criteria. As an employer, Lordbt does not have as many rights as he thinks he has.

-Dan.

The rights he claims are what we used yo call common sense

 

[Redac]

Where did I say that it did? What the law gives you is the right to not be discriminated against for certain reasons (e.g. race, gender, religion, etc).

Lordbt assumes that he has more rights as an employer than he actually does. He ibelieves that he has the right to hire/not hire/fire anyone for any reason he choose, when in reality, the law says that he does not have the right to base his hiring choices upon those criteria. As an employer, Lordbt does not have as many rights as he thinks he has.

-Dan.

It's likely he sees that as his natural right or part of his property rights, whether its currently permitted by law or not.