Randoms of the day

Apparently I need to be reading Scott Adams.

Don’t refer to a black lady as a "black lady."

Are these two more race-baiting posts from Bryan Caplan? The posts go nicely with Derb’s essay from today, in which he says: "The human beings who populate the economist’s—certainly The Economist’s—imagination are mere tokens. They have no allegiance to nation, faith, family, or the huge old inbred extended families we call races. Still less do they exhibit features so evident to those of us who live outside great universities: pride, stubbornness, folly, misplaced loyalty, and the occasional irresistible urge to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. They are not biological entities at all."

3 Responses to Randoms of the day

  1. dearieme says:

    Your quotation from the Derb’s essay reminds me of Wilson’s remark about socialism: “Nice theory, wrong species”.

  2. Handle says:

    The way to deal with Libertarians on immigration is to remind them that they supposedly favor nearly pure freedom of association and property rights – that is, the members of any group, organization, partnership, etc.. ought to be permitted to decide for themselves with whom they will interact, and the owners of real property ought to be able to determine, for themselves and according to their own subjective values without government coercion the identity and circumstances under which others are permitted to enter. Immigration policy is just the extension of that principle of the freedom of choice to the large group of voting citizens and the large property of the national territory.

    Sometimes they make racial exceptions – but these are basically asymmetric (‘natch) and so incoherent. Ask them if they think the government should be able to ban or otherwise regulate a private institution’s affirmative action admissions or hiring policy.

    That’s probably what a Reactionary government would do – turn the EEOC into a “No AA” prosecutor, creating 4/5ths rules that give rise to presumptions of unlawful discrimination whenever “holistic” decisions deviate too much from SAT scores and GPAs and so generate reasonable suspicion. Can you imagine it?

  3. Alrenous says:

    Looks to me like Caplan’s self-deception filters are showing wear. Probably time to pick up a replacement. (Only applies to the gilded age post.) Or: his subconscious is race-baiting himself. Realizing the relevance of the race angle is only one step away, for both the psychological and economic relevances. Properly maintained crimestop activates long before that point.

    Being a right-anarchist is relaxing. Immigration simply isn’t an issue. Who gets to immigrate to a land? Whoever the owner of the land says. Unless that owner is me, I don’t worry about it.

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