Can There Be Only One Race?

I'm old enough to remember this 1960s Lay's Potato Chips commercial. (Hell, I'm almost old enough to remember when plays were in black and white!)  In the commercial a man (Bert Lahr, the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz) faces a challenge from the devil, who has a bag of Lay's: "Bet you can't eat one." "That's absolutely absurd," Lahr says; of course he can eat one. After enjoying the chip he says, "I'll have another," to which the devil says, "Oh no. I said just one. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha...."

Admittedly, this is a long and winding road to my point: there can't be only one race. Most people believe that human beings come in different genetic models: black, white, Asian, and a couple more. (Of course one can believe this without hating anyone.) But biologists and geneticists know better. There are no significantly distinct genetic groups of human beings that correspond to skin tone, hair texture, or other such visible features. Individuals within one grouping of superficially similar persons can have more genetic variation among themselves than they do with individuals in other superficial groupings. (We all are of African ancestry, though for some it's more recent than for others.) As Barbara and Karen Fields discuss in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, the idea of race grows out of the discriminatory practice of racism, not the other way around. In other words, the double standard people used in the treatment of others itself generated the justificatory concept of race. It's like witchcraft.

Does it follow from this that, as humane people like to say, there's only one race, the human race? I don't think so. In this case 1 = 0. Leaving aside the biologists' technical genetic concept of race (which has nothing to do with appearance), a concept of race would be useful only for making distinctions. But if there is only one race, then by definition, there are no distinctions to make. Therefore, one equals none. 

We already have a perfectly good biological category for distinguishing human beings from other animals: species. So we have no need for the category of the human race. "Race" is worse than superfluous. It's dangerously divisive.

Black History Month?

If a Martian social scientist were to visit America, he surely would assume that Black History Month had been concocted by racists. And he'd be right -- for a racist qua racist need not bear ill will toward a particular group. What makes someone a racist is the very concept of human groupings, in this case, persons of African ancestry. In other words, what all racists have in common most fundamentally is the scientifically baseless idea that the species homo sapiens is divided into three (or more) segments that differ significantly at the genetic level. Like so many things we "know," this one ain't so.

The myth of race is what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call "racecraft," and yes, they do mean to analogize it to witchcraft (Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life). What most people, benevolent and malevolent, mean by race could not differ more from what biologists mean by race. As the Fieldses write:

Race in today's biology is not a traditionally named group of people but a statistically defined population: "the difference in frequency of alleles between populations (contiguous and interbreeding groups) of the same species." Unlike the units of bio-racism, these populations are not held to be visible to the naked eye [emphasis added], or knowable in advance of disciplined investigation. [Link added. The internal quote is from Anthony Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetics.]

Racecraft saturates the language of even well-intentioned people, which is why the Fieldses' book is so damn important.

TGIF: The Tyre Nichols Atrocity

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols literally at the hands (and feet) of several Memphis police officers might be a source of cognitive dissonance for some people. But before we get to that, let's begin at the beginning. 

To start with the moral basics, the officers who initiated force against Nichols, a 29-year-old father, and the others who joined in once the assault was in progress, had no apparent reason to believe Nichols posed any danger to them or the public. Judging by the body-cam video, the first officers to stop and approach Nichols's car were exceedingly hostile from the start. It would be wrong to say they escalated the situation -- rather, they appear to be in high confrontational mode from the get-go.

Some might say that Nichols failed to comply with the officers' angry orders to get out and on the ground as they pulled him from his car. From the video, it looks more like Nichols was shocked and disoriented by what was happening. "What did I do?" he asked. He didn't strike the officers; he asked a question. I suspect that police culture doesn't cotton to such impertinence even when a suspect appears unthreatening. Yes, he ran away when he got the chance (and was soon caught and brutally punched and kicked again), but that was after being assaulted, tased, and pepper-sprayed. Watch the videos from the police body cams and pole-mounted surveillance camera for yourself. They're not easy to view.

Simply put, this has all the looks of an atrocity by members of the now-"permanently deactivated" SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, who knew they were being videoed.

The sheer brutality will confirm many people's beliefs about the police. But there are problems with what many people think they know. As the saying goes, we often know things "that ain't so." Here's where the dissonance sets in.

Five officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder and other serious offenses. Others, including three onlooking fire department paramedics, are being investigated and have been dismissed. The street demonstrators who are demanding accountability may have missed the reports. Or they can't take yes for an answer. Never let the facts get in the way of a good slogan: "Accountability now!" Should the cops be lynched? (Other cops who killed citizens in recent years have been convicted and imprisoned.)

This is accountability is good, but prevention is needed too. Police departments must examine their hiring and training procedures in order to exclude bullies and bullying tactics as much as humanly possible. Police should not be taught that they are an occupying army. It would help if they were not furnished military gear by the national government and if they did not think of themselves as paramilitary rather than civilians. Moreover, offending police officers must not be able to take refuge in things like qualified immunity. You and I are liable for the damage we do, even unintentionally. So should the cops be.

As noted, the SCORPION unit, set up to focus on "high-crime spots," is now history. Such things exist in other American cities. Forming the unit presumably was well-intended because, throughout the United States, most violent crime occurs in a relatively small number of areas, largely lower-income black and Latino communities. As Rafael Mangual, author of Criminal (In)justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, points out, if you were dropped into a random location in America, chances are you would land in a low-crime area. Note who would suffer from a reduction in policing in high-crime areas: the poorest, most vulnerable Americans; they would be black and Latino. That's probably why, when polled, black Americans overwhelmingly oppose shrinking the police presence.

It thus seems reasonable for the police to focus on where the crime is: resources are not unlimited. But that shouldn't be a carte blanche for cops or -- and this needs more attention -- national and state legislators, who tell the cops what to treat as crimes. The police problem would be far smaller if governments did not prohibit drug use, manufacturing, and sales. That's because a "war on drugs" is necessarily a war on consensual transactions, which have no complaining witness. That fact prompts the police to use tactics -- undercover operations, reliance on dodgy informants, no-knock raids -- that create sure-fire conditions for violent confrontations and lethal errors involving innocents. (See the Breonna Taylor killing for an example.) In sum, terminating the drug war (and other wars on vice) would reduce the number of potentially dangerous contacts between the police and lower-income people, as well as improve the quality of the remaining contact. It would also rid the drug trade of the thuggish gangs that run black markets. Prohibition kills. (Much else must be done: for example, end occupational licensing and barriers to small-business formation, and let lower-income kids escape the government's schools.) 

Here's another possible source of cognitive dissonance: the Nichols case shows us what we already should know. Police brutality is not about race -- it's about police brutality. Nichols was black, but so are the five dismissed and indicted officers. Two of the three fired EMTs are black. One white officer is being investigated, and another cop under investigation has yet to be identified. The Memphis chief of police is a black woman. It is hard to see how this is a racial atrocity. Logic will be twisted to make it appear so, but it will not wash. To attribute the black cops' conduct to white supremacy is to deny them agency -- which strikes me as patronizing -- not to mention racist.

To the extent we have a police problem, it's everyone's problem -- but especially lower-income people no matter their skin tone. They have more contact with the police than higher-income people. Lighter-skinned lower-income people are also beaten, shot, and killed by police, but they apparently aren't newsworthy in our race-distracted era.

To see how wrong the Black Lives Matter narrative is, read this paper by Zac Kriegman, the top Reuters data analyst who was fired simply for showing his bosses that their crime coverage was wrongly premised on BLM's narrative, which is unsupported by the data. (Kriegman wasn't refuted; he was summarily dismissed.) The historian Barbara Fields, coauthor of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, asks if you really cared about police brutality, why would you lead white people to falsely believe that only black people need to fear the cops?

Next, as bad as police aggression is, its frequency should not be exaggerated. Dishonesty is a bad policy; it discredits efforts to reduce that aggression as much as we can. In 2022, says Mapping Police Violence, about 1,100 Americans (of all colors) were killed by police, most of them by firearms. That's down not up over the last several decades. (The Washington Post says the shootings alone numbered 1,096.) That's all killings, including justifiable ones. The number of killings of unarmed Americans is in double digits (about 40 in 2020), although unarmed people can be dangerous too, especially when they reach for a policeman's gun. The 1,100 figure is nothing to be complacent about, but perspective is necessary.

Police make 10 million arrests every year in a country of over 330 million. So let's not exaggerate the problem. What we cannot truthfully say is that it's police open season on a certain group of Americans. Are black men killed disproportionately? Black people make up 13 percent of the American population and by that benchmark are overrepresented among victims of police killings. But is that the right benchmark? Kriegman writes,

The correct benchmark for measuring bias in police use of lethal force is the number of high risk encounters for each group, and not the population of each group.... [O]n average, violent crime rates are dramatically higher in predominantly black communities than they are in predominantly white communities.... Therefore we should expect there to be more encounters in those communities for the purpose of achieving entirely legitimate and laudable policing objectives.

When we use the appropriate benchmark, Kriegman writes, "the supposed anti-black bias disappears completely, and possibly, even reverses." (By analogy, men make up almost 50 percent of the general population, but over 90 percent of the prison population. Does that prove the criminal justice system guilty of misandry? Not if you use the proper benchmark: the population of people who commit violent crimes.)

As I've suggested, policing could be improved in various ways through better screening and training, and full transparency and accountability. It's got to happen -- and soon. Poor policing harms the most vulnerable in two ways. It directly victimizes people through police brutality, and it indirectly victimizes people by leaving them at the mercy of street criminals. Both ways are intolerable.

Yet we should understand that no matter how much better policing could be, it won't be good enough. The reasons are simple: policing today is a monopoly of governments, and it is politicians who define the crimes that the police are mandated to combat. We all know what coercive monopolies produce: shoddy products and services at unnecessarily high prices. We certainly need policing because some people will be inclined to have their way by force. To get better policing, then, we must insist that the politicians and bureaucrats step aside and let competitive free enterprise -- with full transparency and accountability -- deliver high-quality and affordable services, just as it has done with the other services it delivers.

TGIF: Our Age of Character Assassination

I am not one for romanticizing the past because in every alleged golden age you find grumblers looking longingly to some earlier alleged golden age. Nevertheless, our own time has earned its share of criticism. For example, we live in a time when, for many, character assassination is the preferred way to rebut the people they disagree with. Why bother to painstakingly refute positions you dislike when instead you can accuse their advocates of one vice or another?

It's not only easier; it's also a twofer: you (seem to) discredit the position and you perhaps ruin its advocate. So if he speaks again, he'll have less and maybe no credibility.

To be sure, the ad hominem argument has long been recognized as illegitimate. No matter how vicious an advocate might be, merely pointing that out was regarded as a poor substitute for refuting what he had to say. At least most people once thought so. If there was a golden age, it must have been when you couldn't say to your debate opponent, in effect, "Your mother wears army boots." But that age is gone. It probably has something to do with social media because everything somehow does. But how do we get back to a more reasonable form of discourse?

Today the leading form of ad hominem attack is to accuse a person of bigotry. What packs more punch than branding someone as intolerant or prejudiced? No one wants to be thought a bigot -- not even bigots. We all at least intuit the injustice of judging individuals by incidental memberships like race, ethnicity, or sex because individualism is so morally appealing.

Let's remember that being accused of bigotry does not simply mean disliking an entire category of people. For many who level the charge, it also means favoring -- whether the alleged bigot knows it or not -- legal disabilities, prison, or even death for every member of the category. It's as though every alleged bigot is, psychologically, a coiled spring ready to pounce when circumstances permit. It's apparently logically impossible to be a prejudiced pacifist, although I can't think why. You don't have to like a person or his group to see that he has rights and that collective guilt and punishment are wrong.

Examples of ad hominem attacks are familiar to anyone who pays attention. Note the disconnect between what someone says and what he's therefore said with absolute certainty to be. A critic of affirmative action must be a racist or a misogynist. A critic of Israel's atrocious treatment of the Palestinians must be an anti-Semite. Someone who says that men can't really become women and women can't really become men must be "transphobic," a pseudomedical word for bigot. In each case, it simply couldn't be otherwise; no alternative, good-faith explanation for the position is even conceivable. Any explanation proffered is marked down to guilt-ridden defensiveness. In fact, those who hurl such accusations with promiscuous abandon are likely hoping to force their targets into that unflattering pose.

We're all familiar with the possible consequences of the charge when it sticks: withdrawal of invitations, harassment, confrontational protests that sometimes turned violent, dismissal from jobs and loss of livelihood, and boycotts. The threat of severe retaliation has made many people think it's better to remain silent on sensitive issues, which is part of the accusers' intention. Topics have virtually been declared off-limits to discussion. This is intolerable in a society that lays claim to liberalism in the best old sense. The climate of discourse has become so toxic that even the New York Times is worried about it.

It's not only what you say in the present that can get you in trouble. A once-innocuous quip spoken in the distant past can be dug up and used against the speaker in the present. There's no statute of limitations, no forgiveness. This can be especially perilous for comedians, many of whom live on the edge and try to make their audiences uncomfortable. The present is dangerous enough -- Jerry Seinfeld and others find college campuses to be as humorless as quicksand -- now the past has to be worried about.

Bigotry is not the only charge that can tarnish the innocent. Vying for the top position, at least since 2016, is the charge of being a Russophile. Donald Trump only needed to say, "Why can't we get along with Russia?" to find himself accused of being Vladimir Putin's "puppet" by his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during a presidential debate. Could you have predicted that? (For the record, Trump's log of anti-Russian moves was rather long; unlike Barack Obama's, it included lethal weapons for Ukraine.)

Now, with Russia's deplorable invasion of Ukraine -- however provoked it was by U.S. presidents -- it may be risky to be seen on the subway reading Doctor Zhivago or carrying a Rachmaninoff CD. A Russian orchestra conductor in Germany was fired. The virtue-signaling intended by such culture-canceling is obviously idiotic, just as it was during World War I when school districts stopped teaching German and during Iraq War I when because of France's opposition, French fries became freedom fries. Really.

Another favorite smear is science denier. Question the orthodoxy about climate change or the proper response to Covid-19 and that's what you're bound to hear. Somehow it's been forgotten that real science, including public-health science, thrives on challenge and debate. The actual science deniers are those who seek to stifle debate.

The consequence of the indiscriminate use of these disparaging charges is that they are defined down. If everyone you disagree with is a bigot, Russophile, or science denier, then people who actually qualify for those epithets get a free pass. Remember the boy who cried wolf.

TGIF: Racial Polarization Is Poison

Be they "left" or "right," those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a vigorous disagreement over issues or even basic principles. That's fine. Rather, I mean something dogmatic, obsessive, and fanatical, in which virtually everything in the world is seen through a single lens and everyone is expected to act and speak in a certain way, with stern consequences for the noncompliant.

It can happen in politics, but it is becoming especially common with race, where some would have us interpret virtually everything through a racial prism. This is more than simply unfortunate; it threatens what the ancient Greek philosophers and later philosophers such as Spinoza -- whose 389th birthday (Nov. 24, 1632) we marked this week -- held to be the good life for human beings; it's the conception of life in which being virtuous is seen as constitutive of happiness, or better: eudaimonia, and not separate from happiness or merely means to it.

Racial polarization threatens this not just in the obvious way, namely, with the potential holds for violence. I'm thinking of the more subtle way: through the narrowing and undermining of all sorts of social cooperation.

Formulators of the original (classical) liberalism, which has been refined into the libertarian political philosophy, took to heart what the Greeks and their intellectual descendants emphasized, namely, that we human beings are inherently social animals. Some went even further to note that, as reason- and language-bearing creatures, we thrive best when surrounded by people who exhibit their rationality in the fullest sense, not only as a tool to judge means but ends as well. Only in such a milieu can we live in ways most proper to rational animals, that is, with reason always in the driver's seat. This entails, among other things, dealing with people through argument, persuasion, and consent rather than command, manipulation, and force.

A key way that social existence promotes individual flourishing is cooperation, which augments our otherwise weak individual capacities. While no collective brain exists, liberal society creates something analogous to it. As a result, we each gain access to an incredible volume of knowledge -- moral and otherwise -- any morsel of which we might never have thought up or encountered while living alone or in small groups during our limited lifespans. The marketplace of ideas is an example of this process that benefits us all beyond measure. In this day when free speech and free inquiry are increasingly under assault from reckless elements left and right, this would be good to remember.

The benefits of the broadest possible social cooperation are also abundant in the material realm. The early liberal political-economic thought demonstrated that living in isolation was to live in abject poverty. No one was better at pointing this out than Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French liberal. In the opening chapter of his unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote:

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [any] man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else....

We should be shutting our eyes to the facts if we refused to recognize that society cannot present such complicated combinations in which civil and criminal law play so little part without being subject to a prodigiously ingenious mechanism. This mechanism is the object of study of political economy.

If this was true in 1850, what would Bastiat say about our time? Think of all the things we have access to in the developed world, even those of modest means. (The people of the developing world want the same, which shows the cruelty of so-called climate policy, which would raise the price and reliability of energy.) The point which shouts from Bastiat's passages is that we have much to lose if social cooperation were to break down or even narrowed. Society is exchange, as the liberals hammered home on many occasions. "Society is concerted action, cooperation," Ludwig von Mises wrote in his grand treatise, Human Action, which he was tempted to call Social Cooperation, another name for specialization through the division of labor and knowledge.

Need more be said about the threat from racial and other deep polarization? To invoke another original liberal, Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. The fewer the people with whom to cooperate, the more primitive the division of labor. And the more primitive the division of labor, the poorer we are. That should require no elaboration.

When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn't mean that America's history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can't be taught and discussed frankly. They must be. But the cost will be unspeakably severe if frank conversation about the past and even aspects of the present transmogrify into polarization, hatred, and distrust.

Good people everywhere should speak out against polarization. Think about what we all have to lose. And once it's lost, there may be no getting it back.

TGIF: Defend the Enlightenment!

The libertarian philosophy is embedded in Enlightenment liberalism. This is clearly seen in its commitment to free inquiry (reason) and free speech, the full realization of which, I argue, requires complete respect for individual rights, including property rights.

Unfortunately we live at a time when those values are increasingly under assault from from a variety intellectuals and activists despite political and cultural differences among themselves. We hear prominent people ask--and it's really an assertion disguised as a question--whether free inquiry and free speech are really all they have been cracked up to be in light of the American condition. This seems to be a change even from the recent past, when question like that would likely come only from the most authoritarian fringes of the left and right.

Advocates of individual liberty and the rich patterns of cooperation that liberty generates have reason worry. Nothing good would be gained from restrictions on those Enlightenment values--regardless of whether the restrictions came from the government or private sources. Nothing good at all.

Whatever one's fears about the state of American culture, it is difficult to see how stifling inquiry and speech could improve matters. Whether one is a left-collectivist who believes Enlightenment values lock in white male supremacy or a right-collectivist who believes those values have allowed the left to control the culture's commanding heights, the crushing of true liberalism can only lead to disaster, eventually for everyone.

You need not be a libertarian to see the point, and fortunately we see nonlibertarians all around the political spectrum expressing dismay about the new disparagement of free-wheeling inquiry and uninhibited expression of its findings.

This is not rocket science. Squelching speech does not make alleged bad thoughts go away. On the contrary, it may give them an illusion of legitimacy they would never have achieved in open discussion. When a subject becomes taboo, even good-faith people may reasonably ask, "What are the self-appointed censors so scared of? Does the forbidden claim have merit that I've overlooked?" How does that help the censors beat back ideas?

The value of the open competitive marketplace of ideas is so obvious that it ought not require repeating. We learn through the contest among ideas. The way to defeat an assertion is not to suppress it, but to rebut it. No idea is so dangerous that it has to be banned from the marketplace. A free society cannot tolerate thought police, whether political or private.

To cherish the intellectual marketplace, one only need realize that even someone who is thoroughly wrong about a particular matter or event (and perhaps even ill-intentioned) could contribute to our knowledge by stumbling on an overlooked truth. We just never known who might be the one to set the record straight in some way. (The leftist Norman Finkelstein has admirably made this point many times.)

Moreover, it's important that the intellectual marketplace--like the commercial marketplace and for the same reasons--not be rigged by the state in any way. All intellectual products should have to compete in a just (that is, rights-respecting) arena. Force is to be barred. But that's all that needs barring. Now may the best ideas win.

This does not mean that the common-sense rules of respect needn't be observed or that those who violate the rules should never be called to account. But it does mean that toleration is also a virtue when directed at offenders. We are rightly uncomfortable when people lose their livelihoods for saying the "wrong" thing in the "wrong" way. It is difficult to confine this kind of punishment to only the worst offenders. Boomerangs have a way of coming back at you.

Does an open marketplace guarantee that the truth always always wins right away? Of course not. But it's the best chance we have of rooting out error in the shortest time. The market certainly beats any imaginable alternative, which would have to be one form or another of authoritarianism. No thank you.

It's in the nature of ideas, as with all tools, that they can be used for good or ill. Stifling discussion because bad people may capitalize on fact can hardly be grounds for shutting down the intellectual marketplace. One could think of no surer example of the cure being worse than the alleged disease.

It's time for all true liberals, whatever their differences, unite to defend free inquiry and free speech.

Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., ruled 6-4 that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans workplace discrimination on the basis of various categories (race, religion, color, sex, etc.), by implication also covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (i.e., homosexual and transgender persons). The case was really two cases, one involving the county government, the other a private company.

The ruling has brought the usual conservative gnashing of teeth about unelected justices' making law rather than doing their proper job, interpreting law. Note this delicious fact: the majority opinion was written by Justice Neil "But" Gorsuch, Trump's first pick for the court.

If I am asked what I think of the ruling, I will say this: I favor repeal of Title VII (and other parts of the law that restrict private persons), but I also favor the ruling. That will strike some as incoherent, but it's not.

Gorsuch wrote, "An employer who discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees necessarily and intentionally applies sex-based rules." He noted that the employers "seem to say when a new application [of a law's language] is both unexpected and important, even if it is clearly commanded by existing law, the Court should merely point out the question, refer the subject back to Congress, and decline to enforce the law’s plain terms in the meantime. This Court has long rejected that sort of reasoning."

That seems right: sexual-orientation discrimination is sex discrimination -- even if those who wrote and voted for the bill did not understand this. We often fail to see implications of the positions we hold. (Pointing that out was Socrates's occupation.) In the case of legislation, why should we be bound by the narrow understanding of its authors and those who voted for it? Thomas Paine would call that being ruled by the dead.

Most people don't understand that in the 18th century, free press meant freedom from prior restraint, not freedom from ex post punitive action by the government. Should we have stuck with the narrower meaning? I don't think so. (But conservatives might.)

I say all this as one who rejects the state and its monopoly court system. But as James M. Buchanan liked to say, we have to start where we are. Sorry, abolishing the state isn't on today's menu. So what do we want that we can have? And what do we do?

Of course I would repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act as it applies to private persons. I despise bigotry and invidious discrimination, but we don't need the government to fight it. On the other hand, such discrimination by governments ought to be banned. The 1964 act struck down state Jim Crow laws, which mandated racial discrimination in both the private and government sectors.

But repeal of that law is not on today's menu either. Yet that should not keep us from applauding the court for recognizing the clear fact that sex discrimination includes sexual-orientation discrimination regardless of what some political hacks might have thought in 1964. (Maybe they just didn't think.)

By the same reasoning, good-faith libertarians should oppose removal of individual categories from Title VII. Who would favor striking out race or sex from the list if it were proposed on ostensibly libertarian grounds? Not I.

TGIF: Defining Anti-Semitism, Threatening Free Speech

In May the benign-sounding Anti-Semitism Awareness Act appeared before the U.S Congress “to provide for consideration a definition of anti-Semitism for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities.” 

No big deal? Let us see.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Separation, Not Association, Requires Force

Whenever I write about Palestine, Israel, and Zionism -- especially when I point out that American Reform Jews en masse gagged on the thought that America was not their "homeland"; they insisted they were Jewish Americans not American Jews -- I am lectured on Facebook about how "keeping to one's own kind" is a natural inclination and that inclusion, not exclusion, requires aggression. We shouldn't be surprised, then, that alt-right-types who may dislike Jews nevertheless respect their expressed desire to live among themselves in a Jewish State. Why wouldn't the alt-right take this position? Israel is a (pseudo)ethno-state. It is identitarianism run amok.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: How the US Created Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble

Calvin Coolidge Signs Bigoted Immigration Act of 1924

Shlomo Sand, a remarkable scholar who studies how "peoples," including the Jewish people, have been invented through myths propagated by court historians and politicians, makes a startling yet obvious connection in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel (2014):

In fact, it was the United States' refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept the victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East. Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established. [Emphasis added.]

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Trump versus the World

According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, somewhere President Donald Trump, instead of saying, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries…. We should have more people from Norway.,” said, “Why don’t we allow more people from shithole countries to come here? They need a decent place to live and work and succeed. Their rulers hold them back. The Norwegians don’t need America as badly. After all, Norway ranks 25th in the Index of Economic Freedom. Let’s be compassionate toward the world’s poorest and most subjugated people. Besides, we’d also benefit from their coming to America.”

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: Tribalism and Economic Nationalism - Cut from the Same Cloth

I have no idea what goes on in Donald Trump’s head, but I can imagine a connection between his refusal to renounce the support of alt-right white identitarians and his rejection of globalism — that is, the freedom of people to trade across national boundaries and to move, consistent with individual rights, as they see fit.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Can We Finally Understand the Three-Fifths Clause?

Considering how often the original Constitution's three-fifths clause is invoked in the fight against racism, you'd think people would look it up. Its point was not that African-American slaves were three-fifths human. How could it be? The slaveholders wanted them counted as five-fifths human! The clause related to apportionment for determining the states' representation in the new House of Representatives. Naturally, the slaveholders wanted slaves counted as whole persons because that would maximize the slave states' political power. But because of push-back by the Northern states, the slaveholders had to settle for three-fifths. It was a compromise from their demand for five-fifths. Zero, which the abolitionists would have wanted, was not a live option.

The flaw in the slaveholders' position was that they wanted captive African Americans to be counted as whole persons only for representation purposes. The abolitionists wanted them counted as whole persons in every respect; that is, they wanted them freed.

The Ferguson Distraction

Ironically, the shooting death of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown by white Ferguson, MO, police officer Darren Wilson is a distraction from the racist police brutality that ravages America.

Whether or not Wilson shot Brown unjustifiably, and whether or not Brown provoked the shooting by grabbing for Wilson’s gun, the police — and the government officials who employ and arm them — are a big problem in this country. (The Eric Garner chokehold killing has none of the ambiguity of the Brown case.)

Unfortunately, it takes a shooting such as the one in Ferguson to spotlight the problem. And that presents its own problem. The claim that the police are routinely dangerous to innocent people — mostly blacks and Hispanics — appears to stand or fall with the headline case of the week. But that can’t be the correct way to judge the bigger issue.

Read it here.

Ferguson, continued

Any analysis of Ferguson and police brutality that falls short of anarchist is bound to be inadequate. The root of the problem is top-down centralized monopolistic (dare I say socialistic?) law making and enforcement.

Ferguson, continued

Turning the Michael Brown case into something it's not serves only to discredit the movement against police abuse and racism.

Ferguson

In shootings by police, fully independent and public adversarial inquiries should be conducted. There's no getting around the fact that in such cases, the prosecutor is also likely to be the de facto defense counsel.

Good editorial in the New York Times.

TGIF: "The Police Force Is Watching the People"

Political philosophy — the libertarian philosophy included — can take you only so far. The libertarian philosophy provide grounds for condemning aggression, that is, the initiation of force, and along with some supplemental considerations, it identifies in the abstract what constitutes aggression, victimhood, and self-defense. But the philosophy can’t identify the aggressor and victim in particular cases; relevant empirical information is required.

Read TGIF here.

TGIF: In Praise of "Thick" Libertarianism

I continue to have trouble believing that the libertarian philosophy is concerned only with the proper and improper uses of force.

Read the rest here.

Op-ed: Mandela Wasn't Radical Enough

He led the effort to end the evil apartheid system, but he left in place the corporate state. It's all here.