"dave weil" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 16:44:56 GMT, wrote:


"dave weil" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 08:45:57 GMT, wrote:

When any business
with a racist policy started losing business or saw other businesses
gaining
on them as competitors because of their racism, I think things would
have
changed on their own without government intervention and weakening of
the
meaning of private property.

It didn't change for over 150 years on its own. It didn't change even
after a civil war. What makes you think that the marketplace would
have adapted? I see no substantial evidence of this being true.


Plessy vs. Ferguson for one.

How did the assertion of "separate but equal" facilities before the
turn of the 20th century change businesses' discriminatory practices?


That was not the reason for the case being brought, it was to challenge an
unjust law.

\The problem with your theory is that when you disenfrancise a whole
segment of the population, their economic influence (the very
influence that you claim as a "force for good") is virtually nil.

It would not be only those who are disenfranchised that would be able to
apply pressure, as I stated in the original response.

Well, it didn't work for over 150 years. Once again, I have to ask you
for any evidence that the marketplace on its own would have changed to
allow blacks to, say, dine with me in a restaurant?

Segregation did not exist in all states, eventually capitalism and the
search for new markets would have brought it to an end. That plus the
pressure from groups opposed to segregstion.

The Civil Rights
movement didn't even really get its start until after the government
intervened.

Then why did they intervene?

Nashville was the home of one of the first lunch counter
revolutions and that didn't happen until half a decade after Brown vs.
Little Rock Board of Education (or whatever it was called).


If
you can't even afford to apply financial pressure on a business to
change their policies that snub you, how much change do you think is
going to happen?

There were never anything but impoverished black people before the Civil
Rights movement?
No doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.?

Very few. The exception doesn't prove the rule. Booker T. Washington
happened at the turn of the century and yet, in 1956, blacks still
couldn't attend institutions such as Ole Miss and Alabama (to name two
of the most prominent such institutions).

Would you do business with a known racicst?

You're preaching to the choir here. Do you think that your
grandparents did business with known racists? The answer to that is
absolutely.

You don't know my grandparents.

They couldn't have avoided it (at least institutionalized
racism).

In Seattle, they could very easily.

If it weren't for government intervention, you would still be in the
same boat as your grandparents.

So you say.