01-28-2017, 12:47 PM
(01-28-2017, 11:41 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-28-2017, 11:28 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-28-2017, 07:47 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-28-2017, 03:34 AM)Galen Wrote:(01-27-2017, 06:30 PM)taramarie Wrote: and when i say infringe on others rights i mean other Americans rights. Say in the case of the religious baker who did not want to serve gays. That is what i mean. But dismiss me if you want. I know what i stand for.
A libertarian, other than Gary Johnson, would say that was his right to choose who he does business with. I would say he is being stupid but again libertarians in general don't see any particular need to protect the stupid from themselves. Customers can also choose to boycott this baker over the issue and libertarians wouldn't have any particular problem with that either.
Prior to the awakening, especially in the south, overt blatant prejudice was hard wired into the culture. People of color could not stay in many hotels, eat at many restaurants, use many sanitary facilities, drink at certain water bubblers, etc... The sit in at the Woolworth lunch counter where blacks were refused service became a symbol of this sort of behavior. The Supreme Court and various laws passed by Congress made this sort of overt prejudice illegal. Many have come to understand that if one offers a service to the public, one has to provide that service to the People.
This wasn't because the businesses wanted to segregate nonwhites, though. It was because the Democrats had passed laws requiring segregation. Most businesses would have preferred not to have to go to the expense of separate facilities.
Do you have a source on that? From all accounts I've red on the time period, bigotry far outweighed profits on this issue. One followed the tradition of segregation or one lost one's white business. The desire to keep bigot business was a much more dominant economic motivation than the cost of maintaining the extra facilities.
I thought it was well known that segregation was enforced by law, but here's a source. It's not a great source, so if you are skeptical about such laws, we might have to find a more reliable one:
These laws meant that black people were legally required to:
• attend separate schools and churches
• use public bathrooms marked “for colored only”
• eat in a separate section of a restaurant
• sit in the rear of a bus
http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/era...gregation/
For a successful business owner, bigotry can't outweigh profits; if you don't make a profit, you go out of business. Based on discussions with people who ran businesses during that period, white bigots weren't enough to sustain a business, and they made more money on the black customers anyway; thus why they had segregated lunch counters rather than merely having all white restaurants. And of course if businesses would have voluntarily segregated anyway, why would a law be needed?
Note that all white restaurants continued to be legal if they were organized as membership clubs. They didn't become common because there weren't enough bigots to sustain them - or at least, not enough bigots willing to put their money where their mouths were.
Market forces would have done a fine job of equalization, if they had been allowed to operate without government interference.