I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
If anything, it's the opposite: I think race relations in the South were made much better by the CRA forcing everyone to get along.
ReplyDeleteTrue, under the proviso that "government restrictions" = history.
ReplyDeleteI generally agree with you, and if Tucker had meant that racism originated from government, he would be wrong.
ReplyDeleteBut even non libertarian academics like Michelle Alexander have documented how the war on drugs has lead to mass incarceration, which results in poverty, in the black community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The urban renewal programs of the 60's destroyed thousands of black businesses and redesigned neighborhoods in a manner that eliminated the self policing functions performed by neighbors and stores.
You acknowledge this.
http://gene-callahan.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-did-urban-crime-rates-drop-last-20.html
Walter Williams' the state against blacks is a fascinating examination of the affects of occupational licensing laws and their origins.
Rent control and zoning deincentivize new apartment construction, while government programs meant to alleviate black poverty, like busing and affirmative action, harmed blacks. Busing removed black control over local schools and was based on the racist assumption that blacks could only succede in an environment with white children, and affirmative action programs placed black students in academic environments that they were not prepared for and that did not prepare them for the world.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/
A valid criticism is that the government was responding to public opinion, so a reduced government would have made no difference because the dominant attitude is racist. I disagree with this. But thinking that the government played no role in creating racial tension is a notion as utopian and baseless as anarcho-capitalist screeds.
"No role"? Who here said "no role"? Anybody? Anybody?
DeleteNot sure who you are addressing, Bob.