I’m a leaning libertarian, but I do believe in access to state-sponsored education (K-12) and healthcare. Keyword being access, not mandate. I believe that education unlocks the door to opportunity and shouldn’t be denied anyone who wants it (that includes making it financially inaccessible). Access to healthcare at least provides the opportunity for you to be able to make a living. Once you have tools and ability, you can stand on your own 2 feet.

Well said. And I agree on almost every point.

I asked the question about Jim Crow because it is the most common retort to libertarianism and limited government. People will argue that in the absence of a powerful central government - systems like Jim Crow and apartheid would have continued unchecked and the only remedy is large central organizations like the UN or the US Federal Government. It is the single best “trump” card in the big government arsenal.

However…
What they fail to address is the possibility of an equally evil and destructive large central government coming to power without an even larger government to offset its abuses. They assume that large central governments are superior to small local ones because of the historical issues like Jim Crow and apartheid. They fail to mention the powerful central governments like Maoist China who murdered over 50 million people. Which leads me to the following question…

What if the U.S. had not been a republic of separate state governments and it was instead centralized and run by the men who brought us Jim Crow? What would the remedy have been then?

The idea of large central government revolves around the belief that large powerful governments will always be run by morally superior people. What if they aren’t moral? What happens if they are corrupt and they have unlimited power? Then what?

First I would point out that Jim Crow and (South African) apartheid are both poor examples for your argument, because both were highly dependent on government-enforced discrimination. Why were laws passed codifying racism? Because some people were not racist, and would have otherwise chose to integrate, and the racists didn’t like that, so they wielded government power to stop it. What other possible explanation could there be for creating such laws?

Free competition actually punishes racism, because it necessarily decreases the size of your potential market. The benefits of free trade have long driven disparate groups to cooperate economically who otherwise wouldn’t want anything to do with each other. This is why racists must resort to laws to stop it from happening.

Second I ask you to examine the basic premise of your question. To what do you compare my proposal? Has government-enforced integration been successful? Do we have racial equality and harmony?

I would argue that government-enforced attempts at racial equality have actually perpetuated racism by giving various groups new reasons to resent each other. And we still unfortunately have a black underclass. By many measures black communities are worse off today than they were 50 years ago, particularly if you consider the destruction of families and the incarceration rate.

Racism is a problem of hearts and minds and culture. You cannot make it go away by government fiat. You can only drive it to take new forms. It’s illegal to discriminate in hiring. Yet my high-tech employer, like everyone else in the industry, has few minority employees. Housing discrimination is illegal, yet there are very clearly white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods right here in Boston, ground-zero of the abolitionist movement. Segregation lives on in new forms.

Culture trumps law. It always has and always will. Attempts to solve cultural problems with laws always fail unless they’re accompanied by genuine cultural shifts (in which case the law is superfluous anyway). Many of the things we’ve been taught to consider victories of law (like the end of child labor) were actually cultural and economic shifts, and the law eventually caught up with the culture. Or for another example, slavery in America was steadily losing economic ground and would have withered on its own with or without a terrible war. That’s why every other major slave-owning power managed to end slavery peaceably: cultural and economic shifts made it happen. The laws followed.

I also ask you to consider human nature. The very idea of human nature was long out of fashion, but it’s finally getting attention again. Humans do have a nature, and it is not infinitely malleable. One aspect of human nature is a desire to associate with people similar to ourselves. This isn’t a moral statement, it’s simply a fact that must be considered. If you look at historical examples (Hoppe describes a few), you’ll see that racial integration has long been a feature of the more cosmopolitan merchant classes, but almost completely absent among the majority of people.

This observation doesn’t contract my earlier assertion that economics drives people to cooperate with others. Indeed, this is why the merchant classes have long been the ones who are most comfortable integrating with other cultures. Given free trade, most people are quite content to buy and sell to very different people, but they’re still likely to choose to live among their own kind. Thus you get economic integration, which encourages peace, despite the continuation of distinct cultures.

Finally, I ask you to consider the hazards of giving any government enough power to try to combat discrimination. Why should we believe that the people in government are any less greedy or racist than the population at large (especially in a democracy where it is the population at large choosing the rulers)? If we empower government agents to examine and approve every private transaction for its effects on diversity, do we not give them control over the very heart of economic and social life? How can they, mere humans themselves, be trusted with that power?

I think eventually immigration policy will catch up to reflect this new reality and there will be unrestricted movement amongst most countries in the world. Immigration controls like we have today aren’t sustainable.

Just to play ‘devils advocate’ for the sake of discussion. While Mr. Hoppe says, “people are truly free to do as they wish with their own property and to self-organize their own communities” others would say…

When people were allowed to organize their own societies based on freedom of association, we got “Jim Crow” laws and apartheid.

I am curious how you or Mr. Hoppe would reply. Who would insure the private local organizations do not violate one’s personal freedom?

Hans Hermann Hoppe addresses this in his book, “Democracy: The God that Failed” (highly recommended). If people are truly free to do as they wish with their own property and to self-organize their own communities on a private basis, national immigration becomes a non-issue. The question isn’t whether anyone has permission to cross a border, but whether they can find a community or business that will welcome them, or employ them, or sell to them.

Hoppe goes on to argue that under the present system, in which we lack freedom of association and wealth is forcibly redistributed, the best we can hope for is that the state implements some kind of immigration control that approximates the decisions that would have been made by individuals in the free scenario. This is clearly problematic, but his arguments made my own thinking on this topic more nuanced.