All Episodes
Previous Next
March 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:51
150 Racism and the Free Market

What effect does a truly free market have on racial and cultural bigotry?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, one and all.
It's Steph.
It is 8.37am.
On... Ooh, let me just keep adjusting.
Always have to adjust the volume.
I do not know what gremlins attach themselves to my computer and headset system overnight, but every single morning, it seems, I have to adjust the volume.
I don't know why that is, but computers sometimes seem to be outside the laws of physics when it comes to adjusting their own properties.
So, I had a couple of suggestions about shows.
They were all great, and I will get to them all, I do believe.
But one is going out to... It's an unbelievably white shout-out to a gentleman or lady who posted saying that they were having conversations with a Marxist who said that libertarianism was racist.
And now Marxists are pretty good at calling just about anything racist, because that's sort of what they've gotten down to.
So they've gotten down to calling everything racist simply because nobody really believes them on any other issue.
Now again, Marxists, I think, are very good at analyzing foreign policy, at trying to shine a light on the black gulping bloody moor of imperial foreign policy as practiced by most of the Western countries, whereas all we get from state schools is propaganda about how wonderful at trying to shine a light on the black gulping bloody moor of The Marxists will actually look at it in, I think, some pretty good detail.
The other thing that the Marxists are good at, in my humble opinion, is when they talk about capitalism, they're talking about something quite different.
And it's something that we and the Marxists can get together equally and criticize, which is a form of state capitalism, which is sort of a contradiction in terms.
It could also be called mercantilism.
But basically what it means is when you have the government and the corporate interests getting together it is always to the detriment of the consumer.
What Noam Chomsky calls private tyrannies is what happens when you get manufacturers getting together with the state to either do union busting as happened in the 1930s in the States or To do price-fixing, or to keep competitors out, or to do trust-busting a la what happened to IBM in the 70s, and what happened to Microsoft in the early noughties, early 2000s.
This kind of stuff is what happens when state power and private interest get together.
Now, as far as all of that goes, I still would far prefer for capitalists to have their hands on the guns of the state than for the military-industrial complex, because although they may use it to sort of shaft the consumer, I would much rather get shafted as a consumer than drafted to fight in a foreign war.
So, from my opinion, it is much better to have capitalists in control of the state, although it is infinitely better to have no state.
So I remember when I was taking my class on the rise of capitalism and the socialist response taught by an out-and-out Marxist, I think the last one that I ever met, this would be in the late 80s, and he assigned us a book to read on how bad it was when The capitalists and the state people got together.
And, of course, I was a free marketer back then.
I was not an anarchist.
I was many, many years away from becoming an anarchist.
That's a relatively recent phenomenon.
So we had our disputes, as you can imagine.
And when I read this book, he eyed me as I came into the room to give a report.
And his face went twelve different shades of green when I said that I agreed with it completely, because we'd really had our battles in class.
And I agreed with it completely, but for him, of course, the solution was for the state to take over everything.
And I said, well, when there's an overlap between public and private power, which is used for the corruption of those outside both of those spheres, in other words, the general citizenry, then it seems to be entirely a proven case.
And what it has done is further recognize that we need a separation of state and economics, just as we needed a separation of church and state, so that this sort of stuff doesn't happen.
I started to imagine that it happens when there's some overlap between economic concerns and the state, that it won't happen when there's a complete overlap between these two things.
In other words, when the government owns everything in the communist model, I think is quite a dangerous notion and very much unsupported by any kind of evidence.
It's like saying, well, this cancer is really harming your body right now, but after it takes over your body completely, everything will be fine.
And I mean, in a sense, it's true.
Except that it's sort of fine because you're dead.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about racism and libertarianism.
Now I know, I'm fully aware, I've already done a three-part on race and the state.
And that was really focused on the relationship between the state and racism.
How racism is often caused, or racial differences or racial problems are caused and exacerbated by state policies.
This is a little bit different because what I'm going to talk about is what the free market does about racism.
And I'm going to simply talk about it frankly, and I'm going to use terms like black.
I don't know if it's in vogue or not, but I use the term white.
And if I use the term white without offense, I'm sure I can use the term black without offense, and I'm sure I can use the term Asian without offense.
And if you do have offense to it, I apologize, but it's nothing that I am trying to do to denigrate any particular group.
And I'm sure that after podcast 12 million, I will get the moral courage together to stop having caveats and to assume that everybody trusts my motives.
But that hasn't quite occurred for me yet.
Because I never know when somebody just emails one of these around.
So they don't have the history of sort of what it is that I've been talking about.
So I have to put a couple of caveats in just a little bit.
Racism is something... let's just say it's a preference for one race over another and there are occasions wherein this occurs in a way that we don't criticize too much.
So, for instance, I watched the movie Prime recently with Meryl Streep and Uma Thurman and some skinny little guy and what it was was something that I've experienced.
One of the few pieces of direct racism or exclusionism that I've experienced is The fact that Jews want their daughters or their sons to marry Jews.
So they're not so keen on having them date outside, you know, they call it the faith, but it could be the culture or whatever.
And I mean, this isn't true only of Jews.
It's just the only one that I've experienced was a girl that I was interested in and we had a great time in university, but I just could never get her to go out with me.
And it turned out that I was entirely naive.
I knew she was Jewish.
I just didn't know that it mattered that much because I went out with a Jewish girl in high school.
And it didn't seem to matter.
But it was very much because I was a non-Jew.
Now, of course, I didn't know my own family lineage at this point, otherwise I could have trotted out my history and maybe bagged me a date or two, but I'm sure I wouldn't have used it for that.
Never in a million years.
I'm a man!
All we do is be upfront.
That's a preference that occurs, of course, and that's something that's discussed in this movie, Prime.
And as I mentioned before, I've known a Jewish woman who was told that if she doesn't marry a Jewish man, then she's continuing the work of Hitler by decimating the Jewish race and so on.
But that kind of bigotry is definitely alive and well in the Jewish culture.
I I'm not sure the degree to which it's alive and well in other cultures, because although I've had quite a rainbow dating history, I'm not sure that I've ever experienced hostility based on race from other groups.
I'm just going to run through it in my head.
Chinese girl, Indian girl, Asian-Indian girl.
Japanese girl, Jewish girl, a mulatto, a half-black, half-white girl, and she was great.
Oh, gosh.
Russian, Ukrainian, British.
Anyway, I've gone out with lots of women from lots of different cultures, but I don't think that I ever faced any opposition based on race or ethnicity, except from this Jewish girl.
Just that once.
Again, I'm not saying it's even that common with the Jewish culture, but it definitely is there.
So there's that kind of preference.
Now, I don't know what the free market is going to do about all of that, except erase it over time.
And I'm not even sure that it's going to erase it completely over time, because there are enormous financial benefits.
from having a uh... an ethnic background in terms of business and so for instance my boss says jewish and a great guy and He has an enormous network of mostly somewhat Russian, but a lot of Jewish friends and business compatriots and so on.
So, for instance, when he's job hunting, he doesn't have to stick his resume on Monster or Workopolis and cross his fingers.
He can make about 500 phone calls to people who can make 500 phone calls to someone else.
So there are real benefits in being part of an ethnic culture.
Now, those benefits could definitely be recreated in other spheres for sure i mean you could have a libertarian club where everyone got together and so on It's not something that I can see being completely erased, ethnicity, by the free market.
So that kind of preference will always exist.
Now, it will be less likely in a pure anarchic society.
It's very unlikely that these sort of cultural, religious, social stereotypes and irrationalities will exist.
Not because the market will erase them, but more because it's less likely that we are going to achieve an anarchic society unless we continue to take real swings at this acidic irrational fog of cultural and religious and social preferences and racial preferences as well.
So that's something that It is important to understand that these two are probably not going to be co-joined.
Market anarchy and strong bigotry are very unlikely to be co-joined.
I'm not sure what the cause and effect is going to be.
I have a feeling that we're going to take a good swing at the irrationalities of these preferences and that's going to open up the window or the door to get to market anarchy which is going to finish them off.
Of course, as you know from if you've known anyone who's an immigrant, and of course, I didn't mention that I dated a Greek girl, because I married the Greek girl, the best woman on the planet, lucky me.
This generational, intergenerational experience of immigrants is that the first generation arrives and lives in this isolated time-warp cultural bubble, like one of those little snow globe figures with locked in water from 1962.
Because, and I've known this from a couple of families of women I've gone out with, and of course my current in-laws, that they come over from Greece in 1962, and they hang out with other people who came over from Greece in 1962, and what happens then is that they stay in 1962.
Douglas Copeland, who's not a writer I like at all from a philosophical or worldview standpoint, I find he's rather ghastly.
But he can be quite funny at times, and one of the things he has in All Families are Psychotic is he has men who sort of stop their development in terms of their tastes in a certain year, and so he says, you know, I'm Doug, I'm 1962, I like this, that, and the other, and it's quite well done.
Although, deeply, deeply cynical.
And his worldview and his plots are pretty horrendous, but he can be Quite funny at times.
Microsurfs is a good book of his.
But anyway, enough cultural recommendations.
I will not get pulled into the undertow of the tangent.
Swim!
Swim!
So they stay in this cultural bubble from 1962 or whatever the year they came over in and they are no longer subject to the same changing influences that the sort of host culture is.
So Greece is much more liberal now and even the older people in Greece are much more liberal now because they've been in the stream of social change than my in-laws are now, or the parents of other people that I know, other girls that I went out with, whose parents came over, they stay stuck in this time bubble from long, long ago, and they then end up with no home at all, right?
So, if they went back to India, they'd be appalled, or if they went back to Greece, they'd be appalled, but they stay sort of in their own little huddle here of this time bubble from whenever they came over, and they really have no home, and the kids kind of pick up on this.
And the kids also don't grow up with the same early brutal influences which shape cultural beliefs, right?
These cultural beliefs aren't because people like singing the songs and eating the food.
These cultural beliefs are because you are viciously brutalized as a child if you decide against them.
So Christina, of course, when visiting Greek relatives about 10 years ago, was roundly condemned as not exactly a harlot but not exactly a saint for wearing shorts in the summer.
You had to wear a long skirt and maybe a suit of armor and a chastity belt, who knows?
But that kind of stuff is really common.
There's an enormous amount of rage and social hostility that goes, especially against children, into the forming of these beliefs.
It's not easy.
to get people to believe stupid things.
That's why it has to be so brutal and long-term to get them to do so.
So, that kind of bigotry tends to fade as the generations go on.
Even in our current system with, you know, publicly funded cultural renaissance festivals and, ooh, isn't it so cute, all those little pieces of fish on the dish that all this sort of love of Culture that people profess love of different cultures.
Ooh, we're multicultural.
It's like, ooh, we're schizophrenic.
Ooh, we're differently insane.
Everybody's insane, but in a different way.
We're like in an asylum without any particular categorization.
Not, of course, because I want one culture.
Because I want no culture!
I want the only culture to be around to be in petri dishes for the last capitalists finding cures to the last illnesses.
That's what I want.
That would be my goal.
But that stuff tends to fade away over time and there's no reason to believe that in a market anarchy society that that kind of stuff wouldn't fade away over time as well.
Because there is a time, if you prefer, for instance, if you're Jewish and you prefer to deal with Jews, that's obviously going to give you some scope in some sectors.
I mean, in the banking sector, financial sector, the medical sector, in the arts.
But if you want to do something that's kind of unrelated to all of that, then you're going to be a little hosed, because your contacts aren't going to get you very far, and there aren't going to be too many Jews who are in that kind of scenario or in that kind of world.
And so you're really going to be limited.
So it does kind of bind you down to existing areas of expertise within your cultural group, and you don't get to branch out very much.
And of course, even if you are a software entrepreneur who's Jewish, and you only want to work with Jews, the chances are you're going to have to hire a couple of non-Jews, even if they are to clean your office and answer your phones.
And that's going to cause you problems, because you're immediately going to have that, I only want to work with Jews, but I'm going to have problems if I need to hire anybody else.
Now, of course, what happens in that situation as well is you limit the pool of people that you're drawing from.
This is important.
I mean, this multicultural thing has some validity in terms of bringing different perspectives to the table.
So, if you're a Jewish guy and you're only going to hire Jews to work for you, well, I'm sure that there are at least a few talented non-Jews out there who might benefit your organization.
And I'm sure that the majority of people who apply for the positions, given that there are only 15 million Jews in the world, as far as I know, Oh wait, fifteen million and two.
I just got word in.
You're going to cut yourself off from a lot of talent if you're only going to hire from one particular group.
Now this is all assuming, and this is an important assumption to make, and it's not something you'll hear from politically correct people, of which I am scarcely one, but what if Charles Murray and the bell curve theory is right, and Asians are really smart, and whites, we're kind of okay, not too bad, and blacks, kind of not so smart.
You know, just sort of based on the basic IQ, which he claims is one of the few consistent things in your life from birth to death, based on the IQ configuration, your capacity within your mind to learn, to grow, and all that kind of stuff.
And I don't know how politically correct the IQ test is, but his theory, of course, is that if you normalize for IQ income disparities, C's, right?
So, Orientals will often have a higher per capita income than Whites, and Whites have a higher per capita income than Blacks, and he says that the spread is entirely based on... I shouldn't say... I shouldn't paraphrase him.
My understanding is that he says that the disparity in wages is largely explainable by disparities in income.
Now, he doesn't claim whether those are genetic or not, but he also claims that it doesn't really matter.
Because culture is so embedded that it would almost be preferable if it were genetic, as I've mentioned before, because you could at least treat a genetic disparity with some sort of stem cell wonder drug.
But you can't easily dislodge culture from people's breasts, as we well know, who are libertarians or market anarchists or objectivists.
It's very hard to get people to think clearly about culture, cultural preferences.
So, if that is the case, if it is true that the really smart people are Asians and the not-so-smart people are whites and the not-so-not-so-smart people are blacks, then racism is going to occur in that sense in a market situation, but it's not racism.
It's simply a judgment.
Based on objective and observably definable metrics.
If you're an Asian guy, it's not like you're not going to hire any whites.
It's just that generally you're going to give more time in an interview and perhaps a few more interviews to Asian people.
Not because of cultural preferences, but because they're simply smarter.
Whether it's because they work hard or, you know, on Saturday nights when I went in, I was the only geek who went in on Saturday nights to the library when I was in college.
And I tell you, I was really the only non-Asian in there on a Saturday night because I just loved reading and writing essays.
I wrote voluntary essays.
I was a pure academics geek because I just loved it to death.
But it was a very different work ethic than the other whiteys around me who weren't so much with the crack in the books.
So it's not prejudice, of course, if you're hiring people for valuable characteristics of which the external skin and hair colors and configurations is merely a side effect.
So, if every red-headed person turned out to be a fantastic surgeon, you would be hiring fantastic surgeons, of course, but you would be looking for the external markers of someone who was a fantastic surgeon by looking for red hair.
You would be hiring only red-headed people, or mostly red-headed people, and that would be considered bigoted, perhaps, but what you're really hiring is really great surgeons and the external marker happens to be something you can see which makes it efficient and so on.
So that's something that's important to understand that it's not bigotry if there are objectively determinable and economically significant differences between the races.
I'm not saying there are.
There are theories that are out there that there are.
I haven't read all the rebuttals so it's possible.
In my own experience There are differences between the races.
I don't know if it's cultural or not.
As a manager who's managed just about every kind of configuration under the sun, I can tell you that there are differences.
In very, very broad terms, it is that the Asian people are very organized and much better at particular intellectual tasks.
But they lack negotiating ability because it's a very top-down culture.
The whites are sort of fun and more free and easy to work with, but they tend to not be quite as focused on their tasks.
And I've only worked with two black people, and it really didn't work out very well.
I didn't find that they were able to get what it is that we were doing.
I'm not going to make any generalizations because, of course, it's far too small.
A sample.
I had to let them go, but there's just no way that I can sample based on that.
I've had much more experiences with the other races simply because not a lot of IT applicants in Toronto who are black, but there are differences.
Now, as a skilled manager, what you want to do is you want to recognize cultural differences and use them to your advantage or, you know, I guess to the advantage of the employees as well since When the company does better, they do better.
But you have to recognize that there are differences.
And so, you know, if you're going to find people that you want to promote into managerial positions, they have to be good negotiators, they have to be good motivators.
In the IT field, for sure, they have to be people who get other people excited and enthusiastic about tasks, rather than give them deadlines and start to screech at them when they...
When they start to get close, because that demotivates everybody and makes everything unpleasant.
So, I'm saying that the free market, or market anarchy, will tend to diminish, if not eliminate, cultural biases that are irrational in nature, and will tend to reinforce, if there are such things, economic preferences that are not subjective in nature.
And the great thing about all of this is that, let's say that if we look at the widest gap in some of the vague theories about intellectual achievement or IQ, then we can say that if it is cultural, the difference between Asians and whites or Asians and blacks or so on, if it is cultural and there is a clear economic preference to cultural or work-study habits that Asians have,
Then it will be very likely that those habits will spread to those members of those other populations that are very interested in the economic advantage, right?
I mean, if they want to sell their Saturday nights in the library in return for economic advantage, then they're more than welcome to do that.
I'm not saying that's a good idea.
I'm not saying that's a bad idea.
Economics is not about profit.
Economics is not about maximizing your money.
But if they do want to adopt the habits of other cultures that are more economically successful, That's great!
They will be more likely to do that in a free market situation.
Because cultural differences will be less extreme.
Because there won't be a welfare state which subsidizes those who make poor economic decisions.
Because, because, because.
Unions to protect bad workers and so on.
Or at least unions not in their current configuration for sure.
So, it seems to me quite likely that it's going to diminish any cultural differences between the races, which is good, right?
I mean, the last thing you want is for a black kid to feel that he's going to be called white if he tries to do any real hard work and get ahead, right?
They call these guys Oreos, right?
The black on the outside, white on the inside.
Just as they call sort of loosey-goosey Orientals a bananas.
The yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
And I didn't make up these terms.
They come from the cultural groups themselves, so...
Put down your swords and pickets.
But it would be great.
There was in this book, Blink, there's a study this guy did where he asked people their race and then when they said black they did far worse on those tests, right?
The black kids did far worse on those tests when they were asked their race and they had to put down black or whatever.
They did far worse on those tests when they weren't asked about their race.
And when he asked these kids afterwards, he said, were you bothered by the fact that I asked you about your race?
And they said, no, I just don't think I'm smart enough to take this test.
Even though the exact sort of similar kids did far better on the test.
than those who said they were black when they weren't asked about their race.
So that to me is very sad.
I mean, look at the human potential that then is destroyed or undermined by sort of self-perception of race.
Now, whether that comes from racism or from within the black community, I don't know.
I would be more inclined to think that that anti-intellectualism comes from within the black community.
And Chris Rock has a very funny bit about all of this, where he talks about the lack of learning or the lack of desire for learning within certain segments of the black community.
And he's like, capitalist idea?
I don't know that stuff!
I'm keeping it real!
Keeping it real!
Yes, is Chris Rock real stupid is what it is, which is true, and you can find those people in just about any culture.
But it would be great if cultural prejudices were less reinforced, which of course is the whole idea behind market anarchy, which is to be rational and objective.
And if that frees up energies, fantastic!
If it turns out that there are significant economically valuable or economically significant differences between the races, then those are going to play out in a market anarchy situation or any sort of free market situation.
But that's not racism.
That's not racism.
It's no more racism to not hire a particular ethnic group that proves to not be quite as intelligent than it is for the NBA to say that we prefer people who are tall and good basketball players.
I mean, that's not exactly basketballism or NBAism to say that.
That's simply the nature of the beast.
If I'm going to hire a surgeon, I would prefer that he has some experience in surgery.
I mean, that's not surgeryism.
So that's sort of my answer to some degree.
To another degree, there are times when racism is entirely understandable.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily right, but it's going to happen.
There's nothing you can do about it.
And it's where you're going to hire people based entirely on their race.
And that's really just not anything you can do about it.
The only plus is that very few people want those jobs anyway.
So for instance, if you're running a sushi restaurant, you're probably not going to hire a lot of Scottish waiters.
And you may not be hiring a Jamaican sushi chef.
Simply because there is an association that if, like in the consumer's mind, and this may last over time, it may not, I don't know, but there is an association in the consumer's mind that if you're going to make sushi, maybe you should kind of look Japanese.
And I certainly have always found it kind of funny.
I've never really minded, but I've always found it kind of funny when I'm in a Japanese restaurant and some white kid comes up to serve me.
I just think that's kind of funny.
I'm surprised simply because it's unusual.
I could care less who brings me my food, but I think it's kind of funny.
But you will find, of course, that the overwhelming majority of servers and visible cooks within an ethnic restaurant tend to be ethnic.
Now, that's not entirely racist because a lot of these ethnic groups hire family members or extended family members to save money, but I'm sure that everybody pays their taxes anyway.
And also, if you're going to start a restaurant and you're interested in starting a sushi restaurant, you're probably interested in starting a sushi restaurant because you've learned how to cook sushi and serve sushi and so on.
And that's probably coming from your cultural background, so and so and so.
But still, I think there's going to be a bit of an after effect wherein waiters and visible people in very ethnic areas are going to remain part of that ethnic group.
And the only consequence, of course, is that it generally is the case that there's not a lot of lineups for people who want to be waiters anyway, so I don't think that's hugely important.
So the number of economic factors that are working against irrational prejudices are enormous.
The limiting of the talent pool, the problem if you only have one particular type of group, then you don't get fresh ideas as often, you don't get different ways of solving problems as often.
So economically it's going to be kind of a drag on you.
You, of course, may offend people you work with.
If everybody comes over and you've only hired one ethnic group, you're also going to limit your customer base because some people might be offended by that and think that that's not good and you're a racist and so on.
So you always face that kind of problem.
And it may be the case that you're a racist, but consumers have the final say in everything, in the market situation.
So if racism is an important issue for society and you are hiring only a particular type of person for your business, then it may be the case that you are going to face problems with the perception of racisms.
So if you have a store in Harlem and you only have white people working there, the chances of you getting a lot of business are not that high.
And that's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about.
So there is a problem that the market absolutely solves in terms of irrational preferences.
However, if there are external race markers that have to do with economically advantageous traits, then the market is not going to solve that particular problem.
It may, in particular areas, but overall the tendency is towards economic efficiency.
Now you will have philanthropic groups who hire those quote disadvantaged groups regardless, but they're going to be in the minority.
So there is going to be that fact, but you know there's nothing you can do about that.
You know you don't hire me for a hair commercial, right?
You don't hire a black guy to show how well a tanning system works.
You don't hire a short guy to be your running forward in the NBA.
So those kinds of things are just going to happen, and there's not much you can do about physical characteristics, because the only way to try and deal with that is to use force, which is far worse than any prejudices that people might have.
So I hope that helps, sort of, in freedom of association to understand how I think that the market is going to deal with prejudices overall.
Of course, if you have comments or questions, feel free to drop by the boards.
Feel free to drop me an email.
Freedom at freedomainradio.com.
The board, of course, is freedomainradio.com forward slash board.
▲
Export Selection