Ohio Catholic schoolteacher fired for being gay

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That's hilarious, man. You equate me not arguing with you, with you wining the argument. And not only did you claim that you won the argument, but at the same time asked why did you claim it. Priceless! Thanks.

@ CSBurks- there are some types of discrimination that are justified, I will grant you that, but all else being equal, I feel the "right to not be discriminated against" is as real as any "property right" or any other right you could care to mention.

@ both of you: I don't have much faith in the democratic process, but I think it would triumph over markets producing morality. If a business provides a better or cheaper service than its rivals but discriminates against black people, it will triumph. Coca-Cola and McDonalds are known to be highly immoral businesses that do things much worse than discriminating against people. The custom of homophobes could probably support some businesses that made homophobia their USP, particularly in parts of the US.

And I disagree with that quote generally. I suppose that's the left-right divide in a simplistic nutshell- right wingers tend not to trust the government, left wingers tend to.

Did I say I won the argument because you've stopped arguing with me? (which you really haven't) You've failed to defend any of your points, failed to successfully attack any of mine, and are making a big show of abandoning the argument. I don't need to say a damn thing. Honestly, I never did.

I can provide a lot of evidence to back up my distrust, can you justify your credulousness?


Here's a little bit about public choice theory, which explains a lot of my positions and is as close to a governing philosophy as I have.

An obituary of a leading proponent of the theory that explains a bit about it:


Noted investigative reporter Radley Balko explains how public choice theory informs libertarianism:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/0 ... e-agitator

The Wiki explanation of the whole thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

Seems to me pretty obvious that you equated it. Any denying this is a lie.

Yon man is right.

Whilst I agree that public choice theory is a problem, isn't it a very different problem to the one you are claiming exists?

You say "the government is not to be trusted with power as it will use it to do bad things".
Public choice theory says "the government will do what is popular in order to stay in power ahead of doing what is right".

Put simply, if the government ever makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of ability to do a job, then that policy will be deeply unpopular and they will be voted out. If the government ever tries to extend restrictions on speech which prevent groups like Westboro from operating in the UK to, say, banning criticism of the BBC/PBS, or banning songs with profanity, then the government will be voted out. If the government required all emails to be read by a government official and scrutinised heavily under the pretence of "anti-terrorism", they would face widespread non-violent protest and would be voted out.

With groups which are not directly politically accountable, like police unions... well, they don't have a motivation to do much other than make their job easier and increase their pay. Whilst those things may be bad for the public, they aren't disasters.

Public choice and popularism often lead to bad policy and bad government. A good example is immigration in the UK, where even the Liberal Democrats are having to churn out anti-immigration rhetoric to keep up with the popularism of UKIP. That's unrelated to people allowing the government to have power though. This is what differentiates dictatorships from democracy.

Well, you were able to piss me off, I give you that. So if you want an argument, you'll have one. Just don't expect me to hear that I'm arrogant and not bright and abstain to make the same remarks to you. To be continued...

I only work with what you give me. If you don't want to be called arrogant, don't act arrogantly; if you don't want to have your intellect questioned, don't act in the manner of the unintelligent. Pretty simple stuff, really. Remember, you did charge into a thread spewing insults and making unsupportable generalizations and assumptions, so you shouldn't be so surprised that you weren't met with flowers and accolades.

Sort of, like most things, I don't just swallow the idea whole, but I did incorporate a lot of the ideas of public choice theory into my personal philosophy. The big one is that government employees and agencies become constituencies unto themselves, and warp the functioning of the state by pursuing their own ends, the principal/agent problem writ large.

Take the drug was, a disastrous policy that has ruined millions of lives. Most people, if led by the nose, can see that in this case the cure is worse than the disease, and yet we don't just continue the policy, we escalate it. Why? Because a lot of people have a lot of money tied up in it, from the DEA who's entire existence hinges upon continuing the policy, to the police officers and their unions, the private prisons, the prison guards and their unions, the criminal attorneys and their bar; all these people owe their living to continuing a policy that chews up people and spits out wrecks, and so the system is never changed. Imagine if we ended the drug war tomorrow, what would all these people do with themselves? They've invested their own lives into this "profession", and now they'll fight tooth and nail to preserve it, no matter what the human costs to others. They're all just junkies and gangsters anyway, right?

Let's talk about a public sector unions for a moment, namely the teachers, police, and prison guards. Do you think any of those unions have the best interests of the public their members are supposed to by serving at heart? What is the public good in making it all but impossible to fire incompetent or even criminal teachers, dirty cops, or abusive prison guards? In the latter case, who do you think has routinely agitated and voted for more and more draconian minimum sentencing laws for less and less serious crimes, even as the real downsides to mass incarceration have become increasingly clear? Can you think of anything more cynical than locking people up for money? Putting children at risk, for cash? Hiding the worst abusers of the color of law behind a blue wall of silence and a phalanx of union attorneys, no matter how egregious the misconduct? Don't even get me started on prosecutors and the rest of the "justice" system, I'm on enough of a tear as it is.

Create the Department of Homeland Security; think they'll ever decide that the homeland is pretty secure, they can all just pack it in? Create a massive healthcare bureaucracy; think they'll ever go "you know what, if we simplified this process, we could save money and hire less people"? You see it in the private sector too; witness MADD becoming less of an anti drunk driving organization every year and more of an alcohol prohibition one, as they've been too successful in their advocacy and keep looking for new crusades to fight to justify their paychecks. I fully expect that if the NRA ever "won" the gun control debate so forcefully and crushingly that I really didn't have to worry about new gun laws, they'd still try and frighten me into supporting them with scare stories of new laws being readied for the moment to pounce.

See where I'm going with all this? It's not as simple as bad people will come to power and abuse the system, it's that in creating the system in the first place, you're all but assuring that abuses will happen as the people chosen to run the system pursue their own interests over those of their principals, no ill intent even required. It's just the nature of people, they'll always pursue their own ends, and you need to be very aware of that whenever contemplating an expansion of government or government power. Doing is much easier than undoing in this case, so the utmost care must be taken before acting.

Neither have you truly defended your points. All your arguments boil down to slippery slopes that people who don't share your obsessive hatred of government do not accept as valid. People who don't share your views also don't accept "I'm sticking to my rigid principles of absolute property rights no matter what the consequences, because hey, unlike you at least I'm consistent" as a valid argument. In summery this whole thread is pointless.

Okay, my problem with the libertarian argument is that it seems to miss the forest for the the trees. The assumption is that if a business decides to discriminate it can be viewed as an isolated "bad apple" and appropriate action can be taken by individuals without resorting to any kind of official legal framework. The problem is this view is ignorant of history where discrimination is hardly ever a case of "bad apple" individuals but something much more systemic.

If you happen to be black and the whole class of business owners decides "we're not going to hire any black people" you are pretty much screwed and have no recourse against campaign of disempowerment against you. If nobody will hire me because I'm the wrong race that is an existential threat to my very existence because without work I cannot eat and in a modern technology based society I have lost the skills to go back to foraging in the bush. Now I know people are going to cry "but that's not a realistic scenario", but the problem is it actually is a very realistic scenario historically. It's exactly what happened in apartheid South Africa. It's true that there were laws forbidding the hiring of blacks, but it turned out that merely repealing those laws wasn't enough as the minority of white owners still acted systemically to keep black people out of certain jobs. Positive coercion in the form of anti-discrimination laws was necessary.

A business that intentionally excludes a certain part of its customer base should fail due to inefficiency. Unless of course people prefer to keep the company of their own race, as evidently was true in the south in the 1960s. Is that still true today? I don't know, but I would imagine that it is. The Civil Rights Act didn't change human nature, after all. But if there is a large enough portion of the population that prefers segregation, enough to make it economically advantageous, then why should we force them to integrate? Logically, if I was worried that they needed to be stopped it would be because their way was advantageous, but then I would want it too. I think such exclusive beliefs tend to be self-defeating. So my answer is that I'm not worried by the potential of racist businesses, but I am worried by human nature. And restricting property rights to combat bigotry is fighting fire with fire, both are detrimental.

Forgive me if I don't take your word for it. I will also note that I spelled out the reasoning behind my positions, which few if any other posters felt the need to do, and have provided multiple examples supporting my ideas.



Again, I'm not going to take your word for it, for any number of reasons. Can you actually point to an argument I've made in this thread that fits your statement? I pointed out to another poster that I can support my beliefs and challenged him to do the same, but I think that's about as close as you're going to get without some serious logical contortions.



I'm not surprised that you'd show up to mischarcterize my views, but again, unless you're prepared to support your claims with evidence and argumentation...

Also, every thread is pointless by that metric, which is why I view it more like casino gambling; I'm not here to win anything, just to enjoy myself.

All rights are derived from property rights because you own your body.

Quite. And judging from his response, he is either trolling or just unaware that his arguments are worth zero. I loss count of the number of times he either misinterpreted my points, made strawmen or even was completely unable to understand a text.

But let me ask you the following, Dox, before proceeding to the discussion itself. This may seem unrelated, but I'll get there. You know those table saws that cut wood? They cause about 3000 accidents where a finger has to be amputated per year, in America. There was a guy who invented a technology that is able to completely stop the saw at the moment it is about to cut a finger, saving it without even a scratch. Now what happens is that the saw has to be repared after that and it costs $60. (This is all true, btw). So do you think the legislators in America should pass a law forcing businesses who work with these saws to use this technology (or some technology equivalent to it in terms of safety)? Or do private businesses have the right to do what they want?