Joe Patrice, at Above the Law, has a post up detailing an incident in South Carolina where a restaurant discriminated against a group of black people by refusing to serve them.  All well and good.  However, Patrice then uses this incident as a springboard for criticizing the libertarian solution to such a problem, which is to let the free market work, as Milton Friedman talks about here (around the 3:50 mark):

Milton Friedman on Discrimination

Patrice’s analytical reasoning is very fuzzy throughout.  First, Patrice references Justice Roberts’ quote that “[t]hings have changed in the South” to imply that the reasoning in the pre-clearence decision was flawed.  However, the conclusion that we should draw from the fact that Patrice is posting this story is that, indeed, things have changed.  If this were a normal occurrence, it wouldn’t be news.  That fact that such a blatant act of discrimination took place only stands out to us because there is now less discrimination overall.

Second, Patrice says:

For the record, this is reason no. 378 why libertarianism makes no sense. The manager invoked her free market right to deny service. When confronted with systemic racial animus, libertarians resort to the canard that, barring any legal Jim Crow barrier (as Richard Epstein notes), free markets will not discriminate. But they do. Like here, where someone actually turned down the business of 25 customers to satisfy 1.

It is Patrice who is invoking a canard.  He has pointed to one incident (he later reaches back to a lawsuit against Dennys in the 1990s), and one which is noteworthy for the rareness with which it now occurs, and tries to use that to disprove the thesis that markets act as a corrective force to discrimination.  Not only is this an absurd proposition, but Patrice manages to misunderstand the nature of the libertarian argument.  No libertarian would ever allege that free markets automatically end discrimination in each and every instance.  That would be absurd.  It would be just as absurd as arguing that by having laws against discrimination on the books that means that there is no discrimination wherever those laws exist.

What the libertarians do argue is, by-and-large, people who discriminate on a non-rational basis will lose out in the long-run to people who don’t because those who don’t will be able to take advantage of irrational mis-pricings and benefit themselves in the marketplace at the expense of those who discriminate.  Does this always and everywhere hold true at every instant?  Of course not.  You could have a town of 500 racists in a remote Southern town who agree amongst themselves never to patronize a new restaurant, and thus drive it out of business.  In that case, the fee market solution won’t work because of the insularity of the situation.  However, as Friedman lays out towards then end of the clip, free markets generally are a force for less discrimination.

Brian Beutler, writing in Salon, has a piece called “The Right’s Black Crime Obsession.”  What to make of this column?  It is muddled from beginning to end.

According to Beutler, “[c]onservatives, particularly white conservatives, feel a burning urgency to find a racial counterweight to the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s shooting… the argument that things like background checks and an assault weapons ban are appropriate ways to reduce the likelihood of another Sandy Hook-style massacre, and anecdotal justifications for indiscriminate policing of dangerous neighborhoods.”  He then goes on to say that these things cannot be done because they “require projecting motives or details or both into tragic events, to create false dichotomies between shootings perpetrated by whites and blacks.”  I will argue that it is quite the opposite – it is the left that has projected a false narrative to ignore reality.

Beutler talks about the shooting of Chris Lane, a young Australian gunned down by three teenagers in what may have been a gang initiation or may have been simply because they were “bored.”  Lane says:

The conservative media, including Fox News, repeated the claim that the Oklahoma suspects were all black. But this turned out to be a toxic mix of racial bias and wishful thinking. You almost wonder whether the people whose ulterior motives led them into error like this actually lamented the fact that one of the suspects happened to be white. It would be so much more convenient if that weren’t the case.

Talk about projection, not to mention tone-deafness.  Beutler simply projects right onto Fox that the organization wished that all of the perpetrators had been black.  Where is his justification?  He has none, other than his own bias.  Next, he reveals a supreme example of cognitive dissonance.  It turns out one of the suspects was white.  Fox has corrected its error.  Meanwhile the left liberal media repeatedly skewed George Zimmerman’s race to fit a narrative.  Even though he would normally be considered Hispanic, many on the left came up with the term “white Hispanic” to describe him so that the case would have a white-on-black element to it.  It was a horrible racialization of the situation that persisted throughout the trial and there was no excuse for it other than a political motive.

Beutler continues in obliviousness with this: “George Zimmerman wouldn’t have shot Trayvon Martin if he hadn’t been profiling by race. And even if he had been, the shooting feasibly wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been legally allowed to carry a handgun and didn’t think he was empowered by law to take matters into his own hands.”  While I grant that Beutler has a point that the incident might not have occurred if Zimmerman wasn’t able to legally own a handgun (Zimmerman, by all accounts, was a law-abiding citizen) Beutler is completely off base and is doing exactly what he accuses the right of doing, projecting, when he says Zimmerman shot Martin because of race.  No such evidence was offered a trial and I have yet to see any evidence, whatsoever, that Zimmerman was racist in anyway.  The injection of race into the Zimmerman case came from the liberal media, which in some cases knowingly and deliberately altered facts (in particular the audio tape) to make the incident look racially motivated.

Finally, Beutler brings into his narrative completely irrelevant facts.  He weaves both “stop-and-frisk” and “stand your ground” laws into his explanation of the Trayvon Martin incident, in effect arguing that the existence of “stand your ground” and “stop-and-frisk” policies were indirect causes by creating an “environment” where such a tragedy could happen.  It is a bizarre argument since Martin’s defense was straight-up self-defense, legal everywhere, and “stop-and-frisk” is a tactic only available to police and has absolutely nothing to do with private citizens.

Beutler’s attempt to shoehorn both the Lane and Martin incidents into a narrative about the evils of legal guns is, simply, bad analysis.  He starts off with unfounded assumptions, is unable to prove his case and ends with irrelevant data.

Margaret Carlson writes in Bloomberg today that she wishes the Supreme Court members who threw out the formula used in the Civil Rights could see the new movie The Butler.  Why is that?  Because she finds it powerful and moving and hopes that if those justices see the movie they will be emotionally swayed and thus realize the error of their ways.   Carlson writes:

The justices need to focus on some of the movie’s vivid, and most stomach-turning, scenes. They will see respectable white citizens of my parents’ generation spitting at, pouring hot coffee on and beating up young blacks — and in particular the son of the butler of the title — as they try to do the simple things in life: have a Coke at a lunch counter, drink at a water fountain, go to school. Try to tell the children of those civil-rights pioneers that we’re so beyond discrimination that we no longer need the rules to ensure that states (mostly Southern ones) don’t put into effect latter-day versions of the literacy test.

This is a very sloppy argument.  Carlson could easily have pointed to actual events along the lines of what she describes above, but instead she chooses to use The Butler to bolster her case since it’s the hook for her article.  The problem is that The Butler is a work of fiction, particularly its most racist parts, as documented here and here.

Leaving that issue aside, Carlson’s column still doesn’t hold much water.  She alleges that many of the acts aimed as verifying voter eligibility are designed to restrict voting rights.  She dismisses, without a thought, the idea that states are passing voter identification laws in order to ensure that only those eligible to vote actually vote.  (In Carlson’s view, there is no problem with voter fraud).  As I have pointed out before, we require ID to get on a plane, enter a federal building, buy Sudafed, drive a car and enter a bar.  Is it really beyond the pale to require some minimal amount of assurance that a person casting a vote is eligible to do so?

Carlson does provide two examples of voter ID laws that she finds egregious: Texas and North Carolina.  In the Texas example, Carlson complains that a concealed-carry gun permit can serve as a form of ID but not a student’s ID.  Clearly, she has not thought this through because, if she had, she would realize that having a gun permit count, but not a student ID, makes perfect sense.  The gun permit is issued by the state, is a government form of ID and the requirements to obtain such and ID are under the control of the government.  A student ID, however, is not a government-issued piece of identification, so why on earth should it be elevated to the same level as a gun permit?  Most amusingly, Carlson links to another article on the Huffington Post about the Texas law (which highlights Democrats’ unhappiness with the measure) that mentions Texas included in the new law a way for voters to obtain FREE identification cards.

The overarching problem with Carlson’s narrative is that she is arguing the Supreme Court was wrong to invalidate a part of the Voting Rights Act, which itself is a violation of federalism and the separation of powers.  The Voting Rights Act’s legitimacy rests on the assumption that a violation of federalism is permissible, for a period of time, to correct a violation of federal rights.  If you buy that logic, and it is at least reasonable, then the Voting Rights Act cannot continue in perpetuity.   It can only continue as long as there is evidence that the states subject to the Act are violating the federal rights of their citizens.  The formula in place in 1965 did not reflect the realities of 2013.  Moreover, the Supreme Court did not say that states were completely free of the Act, all it said was that if the federal government is going to violate federalism per its authority under the Act it must do so based upon current events, not events that happened 45 years ago.  Carlson and those who want to keep the old formula implicitly, if not explicitly, state that the South today is every bit as institutionally racist at a governmental level as it was in 1965.  That is an argument which cannot be sustained on facts, only appeals to emotion.

Another piece about what I find to be the single most disturbing theme in the entire Obama administration.  This time, from Jeffrey Anderson at the Weekly Standard.  There isn’t much to be said, other than the administration’s view that it can simply choose which laws it will enforce is beyond its authority and by failing to enforce the laws it demeans the separation of powers and the basis for our political system.

In reference to Obama’s legacy potentially being one of failure, Ron Fournier writes in the National Journal today:

Actually, it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t be his legacy. History judges U.S. presidents based upon what they did and did not accomplish. The obstinacy of their rivals and the severity of their circumstances is little mitigation. Great presidents overcome great hurdles.

In Obama’s case, the modern GOP is an obstructionist, rudderless party often held hostage by extremists. So … get over it. His response to The New York Times is another illustration that Obama and his liberal allies have a limited—and limiting—definition of presidential leadership.

This prompts the question, why does Fournier internalize the view (as many others have) that it is the GOP that is obstructionist?  After all, in our system of government, as it was conceived, it is the Congress that puts forth and passes legislation and the President’s power is supposed to be limited to approving or rejecting that legislation.  Therefore, it is at least as accurate — if not more so — to say that Obama is obstructionist in that he is thwarting legislation that Congress (or at least the House) wishes to pass.  The point here is that the word obstructionist, when it comes to legislation, is often used to pejoratively categorize the opposing side, yet there cannot be, by definition, obstructionism if the side doing the accusing were to cave in and accept the other party’s wishes.  Thus, Obama could end the obstructionism that Fournier decries if he agrees to accept all of the GOP’s policies.  Clearly, that is not the solution that Fournier has in mind, yet his writing indicates that he would like the GOP to do precisely this.  Obstructionism may be an obstacle to achieving one’s utopia, but Fournier and co. should bear in mind that a system of checks and balances only works because of the ability of the party out of power to obstruct the wishes  of the party in power.  Thank god for it.

David Axelrod has admitted that the size of government is so big that it is beyond the power of its top leadership to control it: “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.”  The question which Axelrod should now answer is whether that mean the liberals’ entire approach to big government is fundamentally unsound.  The logical conclusion to draw is that if government is so big that it cannot be controlled, then it should be structured along a smaller scale.  Of course, Axlerod is unlikely to support such a notion  He simply wants to excuse the failures of those running the government.  It is ironic that he has chosen to do so by, in effect, arguing that their entire approach is wrong, but cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of the Left these days.

The Washington Post has an editorial today titled “Mohamed Morsi’s betrayal of democracy.”  The subject of the editorial is a young Egyptian named Ahmed Maher, one of the “leaders of Egypt’s 2011 revolution” and part of the April 6 Youth Movement.  According to Mr. Maher, ““They lied, they broke promises, they killed members of April 6,” Mr. Maher said. Mr. Morsi’s government, he said, increasingly resembled that of former strongman Hosni Mubarak: “They only seek power.””

While the Egyptian leadership is clearly an authoritarian regime bent on dominating and suppressing those who oppose it, the choice of headline for the editorial is strange, as is Mr. Maher’s complaint.  They are also, perversely, unfair to Mr. Morsi.  You cannot betray what you don’t believe.  It was clear from the outset (and should have been so to both Mr. Maher and the Washington Post) that Morsi was never a democrat and had no interest in anything but power and promoting an Islamist state consistent with the tenants of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Both the Post and Maher express a stunning amount of Naivete in asserting that it could ever have been otherwise.  Mr. Maher can be forgiven for picking what he may have seen as the lesser of two evils (Morsi vs. former regime members), but to have backed Morsi on the premise that he was a man who believed in democracy was simply foolish.

Bloomberg has an editorial today entitled “Strongman Putin Is No Match for Corruption.”  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The editors acknowledge corruption is “an integral part of the state-based economic system Putin has built since he took power in 2000.”  Yet they also refer to Putin as “the anti-corruption campaigner-in-chief” and act as if he is serious about tamping down on corruption.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He is not only an enabler of the corruption which the editors decry, but is one of its chief beneficiaries.

The New York Times has an article discussing the bind that Obama is in due to his red line comment regarding Syrian use of nuclear weapons.  According to sources, the comment was made off-the-cuff by Obama in response to a question and never discussed previously.  This is what one source had to say:

“The idea was to put a chill into the Assad regime without actually trapping the president into any predetermined action,” said one senior official, who, like others, discussed the internal debate on the condition of anonymity. But “what the president said in August was unscripted,” another official said. Mr. Obama was thinking of a chemical attack that would cause mass fatalities, not relatively small-scale episodes like those now being investigated, except the “nuance got completely dropped.”

What I find interesting about this is just how much it reveals about Obama’s attitude towards foreign policy matters.  In my opinion, he has never given them much thought or cared much about them.  He came to office with very specific views about social policy and very undeveloped views about economic and foreign policy, many of which were ignorant.  In the extant case, he made a remark about Syria because he didn’t understand the nature of the regime and he failed to comprehend the fact that merely spouting off words to a dictatorial regime 6,000 miles away without actually taking concrete steps to make sure the regime knew he was serious would result in his being ignored.  Now, having been ignored, he has been backed into a corner by his own words.

The sad part about all of this is that there are still people out there who think that his has been a man who has done a good job of handling foreign policy decisions.  It is clear he has been anything but, and this is just the latest example.  International issues have always been a sideline or deviation for him from his main goal of social change.  The result is that America is less respected as a force in the world than it was when he came into office.

Here is an interesting article about using data analysis to determine whether a movie will perform well.  I remember first reading about using data analysis for analyzing movies in Super Crunchers, a book which I recommend that Ol Parker read, since he, like so many people in so many industries outlined in Super Crunchers, fears that his unique creativity/insights  cannot be replaced:

“This is my worst nightmare” said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” “It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

Mr. Parker drew a breath. “Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,” he said. “But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.”