Civil Rights Acts: Violations of Individual Liberty or Proper Exercise of Commerce Power

[edonate]

The law school's Federalist Society invited Bob Barr to speak today at the law school. His topic was government growth versus individual liberty. Recently I've been reading about Barry Goldwater and his opposition to the civil rights act way back around (I believe) Kennedy's assassination. For those of you who don't know who he is, Bob Barr was the presidential candidate for the libertarian party.

Barr said that whenever a power is given to the Federal government it is taken away from the individual. I don't see any problem with that statement, but I'd ask anyone that is going to comment to assume that for the sake of the discussion I would like to set here.

The civil rights acts benefit minorities by imposing restrictions on race/gender/color/national origin discrimination. For example, the fair housing act was a part of the civil rights of 1968 and it eliminated discrimination the above discrimination with respect to housing, like renting, selling, or financing homes. There are many different 'civil rights acts of XXXX' and each one contains provisions with respect to discrimination.

I asked Mr. Barr a question, and I assumed that the libertarian party's stance was against the civil rights acts. I wanted to know how he would reconcile a stance against the civil rights acts with the benefits that those acts have provided minorities in the United States. To my surprise, Mr. Barr said that he was not against the civil rights acts but he was in favor of them and found that they were an appropriate exercise of police power. Now, Mr. Barr was wrong in that they were passed based on the police power, they were in fact passed under the commerce power. I do not know how big of a difference that makes.

My reasoning that the civil rights acts impose on individual liberty is that people cannot freely choose who to sell their homes too. I am not condoning discrimination, I am however pointing out that if an individual really wished to discriminate then he would not have the liberty to do so based on any of the characteristics mentioned above. A number of questions come from that, and that is where I wanted Barr to go with it.

1. The community re-investment act obligated banks to give loans to X, Y, or Z people based on their economic situations, in other words, banks were forced to give people who would not have otherwise been approved for loans. Banks were forced to give home loans to certain people who would not have otherwise been approved for a loan but for those acts. What similarity does the Fair-Housing act have with the community re-investment act? Is the community re-investment act a child of the fair housing act (in the philosophical, slippery slope sense)

2. Suppose people from Imaginaryland generally have religious practices that include sacrificing animals. A family from Imaginaryland wants to buy a house. Ignoring credit - related problems, is it a violation of a civil rights act to not rent them a home because they are from Imaginaryland? Does that violate your individual property interest in the home you were trying to rent if you are obligated to rent it to them?

3. Assuming it is a violation of individual liberty, what other remedy is there to avoid discrimination without an imposition on individual liberty?

4. If the goal of government is to secure individual rights then laws against murder and rape make sense because they protect the individual's right to his life. The criminal does not have a right or individual right to the victim's life. However, in the case of the civil right's acts the individual with the home does have a property interest in the receiver of his home, and the buyer/renter does not have a property interest in the home yet the law implies one. Is discrimination a moral judgment call? And if it is, is it the place of the government to say who can and cannot discriminate?

5. Barr mentioned that the Federal Government's commerce power was growing out of control. If the civil right's acts were properly passed under the commerce power then are they a proper use of the commerce power or is it an improper taking of an individual's property interests?

(Note: I'm using the fair housing act as my primary example, I think some of the other CRA's may be harder to fit into this structure.)

Edited March 4, 2009 by EDonate

[Chris Grieb]

EDonate; Senator Goldwater opposed the Civil Right Act of 1964 because he believed that was an attack on private property. He and Ayn Rand were against the government discriminating on the basis of race but felt that while it might be wrong for business to discriminate it should not be against the law. Goldwater had helped end the segregation in Arizona Air National Guard. I believe he also ended discrimination at his department stores.

I have heard George Reisman discuss that under capitalism discrimination would become unpractical. I believe that Walter Williams has said much the same thing.

[John Tate]

If everyone discriminated against blacks I would suddenly be at an advantage every time I hired one, and so on. Discrimination in free-markets seems to be short lived. If nobody sold houses to blacks, I'd have a sudden advantage in real-estate just by opening up to that market. The argument for discrimination laws rarely seems to be about actual discrimination anymore and instead that simply "blacks don't have enough." As if some economist working in Washington should decide how much blacks are entitled to own.

Barack Obama can be said to be a flaw in Government discrimination. It gave him too much (power)! Others it has given to much credit. The state makes things for worse later by making them far easier now.

Civil rights really does just delegate the task controlling property from private affairs to public affairs. Every single program that delegates the private to the public, hands decisions from the people who relatively have the best input on how to handle them over to people far away who will slowly but surely fuck everything up.

Although the division of labor and property can be extremely annoying when it discriminates against people - without that mechanism the system turns into a disaster. I hope people will actually learn that this time. With the system of property and division of labor we can easily handle discrimination. If a business avoiding hiring blacks was to open in an area where lots of blacks lived, and a competitor opened up, it could crush them just by hiring the nearest labor (mostly black) which would have initially have a cheaper labor cost. Once people bare the burden of not getting those cheaper labor rates, they will stop discriminating also, and suddenly blacks have a wider labor market to them. Suddenly because one guy broke convention and hired them, taking advantage of the fact that blacks were an untapped resource of labor, making them cheaper, the other factors of the market that follow suit quickly outstrip the oversupply of black laborers on the market, and the magic hand of Adam Smith waves a wand of diversity and blacks are suddenly of an equal value to whites relative to skin color and can compete in terms of skills.