(some rant from somewhere)
Libertarianism may have failed your African Americans, or your vision of them, but it serves me just fine.
The significance of the death of Aaron Schwartz will ring hollow in 'the black community' because there aren't very many black Americans who are employed in the highly entrepreneurial software industry. But for those of us who are, we recognize how much of the progress of this industry - in fact the entirety of Apple's new fortunes exist in spite of government's failure to understand the basic principles enabled by the emergence of new business models. Copyright is a regime solely enforced by a hidebound set of laws which protect sluggish old industries. And yet through Creative Commons, GPL and even no rules, publishing with 'legal' proper attribution, the software industry has grown tremendously with a minimum of friction. But the death of Aaron Schwartz reminds us that zealous political enforcement of old, terrible laws is just a matter of business as usual for government bureaucrats.
Like war, the Civil Rights Movement and those various legislations enacted because of them, tends with the passage of time to take credit for all of the changes in society. And it is generally accepted by everyone on the Left and Right that the Civil Rights Acts of the 60s are wholly responsible for black American economic progress and the destruction of the Jim Crow south. And yet even as we look to black history for stories of inspiration or even to our own family history, we know that greatness has been achieved without the benefit of weak or strong state government. I think too many people are losing a grip on the understanding of what makes people free - it is their own willingness and ability to fight and adapt to change, not their ability to find the proper spot some legal regime creates for them. Many critics of the Speilberg's Lincoln made loud points about 'black agency', that thing that must give credit to many who invent rather than the few who speechify and pass laws.
Most people never consider it, but the highest per capita black American income is found in the state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire has always been a Republican state. My grandparents were the beneficiaries of no particular Civil Rights legislation. By the time those acts were passed, their children had already grown up and left home. They did not live in the Jim Crow South but in New England. My great grandparents knew their fortunes were better served and left North Carolina before the turn of the century. Whenever I am told about the depredations of the Jim Crow South, the Southern Strategy and any of that old news, especially when it involves Barry Goldwater I ask myself the following simple question. If the Jim Crow South was so bad, why didn't black people just leave? We all know the irony of Juneteenth, but did it really take 100 years after the end of the Civil War for black Americans to be free? Yes, if they sat around in Mississippi waiting for a government solution to exercising their Civil Rights it took 100 years. So it comes as no surprise that men like Tiger Woods grew up in a state like California, where no chattel slavery ever existed, or that the first black President of the USA did not grow up in the South. And of course Goldwater's own state of Arizona, like Goldwater takes false blame for racism. Nobody has ever been lynched in Arizona.
My point is simple. You can't have it both ways. You can't call black America itself a nation of millions AND a 'black community'. And guess what, there have been, since 1960 17 million new black Americans added. That's millions and millions and millions of people who don't stay put.
At some point you have to realize that if only 5% of black Americans are happy with Libertarianism, that's 1.85 million people. So I want you to understand that number in a way you never forget. That's 9 times as many people as were on the Mall when MLK did his most famous speech. If 1.85 million black people walked by you and told you you don't know what the hell you're talking about 8 hours a day it would take you more than 6 months to hear them for 3 seconds each. Chances are, however, they would each have as much to say as I do which means you'll grow a beard.
I don't even know anybody from Mississippi.
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