“To be forbidden to discriminate is to be forbidden to think.”

ALAN writes:

When writing this summer about the old drugstore in St. Louis where I once worked, I neglected to mention that its owners were criminals. To wit:

While reading microfilmed newspapers in connection with that essay, I discovered that the owners of that store had placed numerous “Help Wanted” ads in St. Louis newspapers over a span of many years. Sometimes they wanted a pharmacist to work the midnight shift.  Most often they wanted male cashiers or women to work at the soda fountain/lunch counter, with “uniforms furnished.”

One “Help Wanted” ad read in part:  “Cashier. White, night work…..”  That was in 1960.

Isn’t that simple and straightforward? They placed an ad, the ad was printed, and people responded to the ad.  What could be a better expression of the liberty that Americans once understood and valued? Yet Americans today — “Liberals” and “Conservatives” alike—would tell us that that was a crime. By that standard, I worked for criminals. If you accept such claims, you are beyond hope; you have gone through the looking glass into a nether world where left is right, dark is bright, and evil is good.

The genius of a totalitarian regime is to suffocate people in a miasma of laws and regulations while telling them at the same time how lucky they are to enjoy “freedom” and pointing to the wide variety of choices in toys, TV screens, and motor vehicles as proof.  Americans today live under such a regime. They imagine they are free when in fact they live with substantially less liberty and more government and more powerful and intrusive government than their grandfathers ever imagined possible, let alone acceptable.

It is considerations like these that make 1960 now appear to me as a golden age compared with life in American culture today. It wasn’t a golden age by any means, but it was a time when ordinary Americans had a much better understanding than they do today of the proper (meaning: severely limited) role of government in their lives.

The corruption of words is a part of enemy strategy.  The word “discrimination” is an example.

“In the days of yore, to say that a man was discriminating was to pay him a compliment,” wrote Dr. Walter Block.  “It meant that he had taste: he could distinguish between the poor, the mediocre, the good, and the excellent.  His ability to make fine distinctions enabled him to live a better life than otherwise.”   [Walter Block, “Why Discriminate?”, Jan. 21, 2011.]

I make it a point to discriminate every chance I get. To do so is my inalienable right.  To paraphrase Lewis Carroll:  On good days, I may discriminate half a dozen times before breakfast.

In the years when Americans read newspapers instead of gaping at screens, they understood what words mean far better than they do today.

“This trio Discriminates….  Every day more and more housewives realize it pays to discriminate,” an advertisement for Bond Bread proclaimed in the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat on May 23, 1927.  And discriminate they did.  Did bread companies run to Nanny Government and demand “equal opportunity and representation” for all other brands of bread?  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.  None could have been that stupid.

To be forbidden to discriminate is to be forbidden to think.  The wonder is not that petty tyrants have now issued such commands to ordinary Americans for more than half a century, but that Americans agree to obey them, as if they are unable to imagine any alternative.  One bizarre consequence is that Americans today are free to choose the brand of bread they prefer but not to choose the kind of people they prefer to work for them.  And they see nothing wrong with that.  This, I submit, is proof of Zombiedom.

Where is the anger, the laughter, the ridicule, the outrage, the principled objections, the moral certitude, the confidence with which to say No to such tyrannical laws that earlier generations of American white men would have expressed without any hesitation?

When I was a boy, there was an attorney living in St. Louis who was born when Lincoln was president.  He was old enough to remember living in the South under the tyranny called Reconstruction.  (He did not remember it fondly.)  As a boy, he played with Jefferson Davis’s daughter.  As a man, he spoke with Jefferson Davis, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.

At age 98, he wrote:

“Employers have a right to say what kind of employees they wish to have.  An employer with dislike for redheaded men has a right NOT to employ men with red hair and may so state in an advertisement…..”  [Lee Meriwether, My First 100 Years, 1862-1962, St. Louis: Artcraft Press, 1963, p. 125]

Of course he was right.  If I were a business owner and did not want to hire people with tattoos, I would have an absolute, inviolable, moral right not to hire them—the federal government’s monolith of non-discrimination laws having no greater moral-philosophical foundation than would an edict asserting that 2 and 2 equal 5.  Americans have it backward:  What is right is not established by “what the law says”.  It is the law that must be determined by what is right.  Any government that compels any business owner to hire people he does not choose to hire or to accept customers he does not want as customers is a tyrannical government.

If I have a right to hire people with tattoos, then I must also have a right not to hire them.  If “The Law” compels or forbids either, then “The Law” is a tyrant.

These principles were understood by Americans in the 1950s.  Americans today do not understand them.  More proof of Zombiedom.

There is no such thing as a “right” to a job or to consideration for a job.  People who cannot earn responsibility—as in a job—on the basis of talent alone or the promise of such talent as judged by the employer have nothing to offer.  No third party has any right to intervene in such a setting, and there is no moral, philosophical, or political justification for government to intervene in such a setting.  Such intervention by government is characteristic of a dictatorship like Stalinist Russia, not a free country like the USA.

(It was a free country when Lawrence Auster and I were boys.  It is of course not a free country today; it is an aggressive, Orwellian, administrative-bureaucratic regime specializing in mendacity, controlled by the Left, ratified by a Congress of eunuchs, and upheld by means of interlocking rackets of non-accountability and non-objective law.)

If non-discrimination, affirmative action, equal opportunity hiring, and fair housing laws had not been shoved down Americans’ throats over the past half century since Lyndon Johnson’s outrageously arrogant scheme to build a utopia called “The Great Society”, then:

How many business owners would have avoided hiring slackers, liars, thieves, idiots, or worse?

How many property owners would have avoided having their property vandalized or ruined?

How many bus passengers and train passengers would be alive instead of dead?

How many schools, like those in Atlanta, would not have become cesspools of incompetence, rot and excuses?

How many parks and neighborhoods would not have been dragged into decadence by lowlifes, parasites, and predators?

How much cost—financial, cultural, moral—would Americans have saved themselves from litigation caused by such laws?

The entire non-discrimination/anti-discrimination revolution of the 1950s-‘60s was not about rights, liberty, or opportunities.  It was a skillfully-engineered stratagem for advancing the Permanent Leftist Revolution.  Its immediate goals were to enable parasites, opportunists, and slackers to get something for nothing, to enable others to  get cushy government jobs in place of honest work, and to chip away at whatever fragments of self-confidence American white men may have had left after being taught to believe that they are to blame for everyone else’s failures.

It was also based on the false premise that whites “owed” something (or better yet, everything) to blacks.  That was not merely a lie; it was a Big Lie, the kind of lie preferred by those whose goal is to put one over on a population of decent but outrageously credulous men and women.

If blacks are the fount of genius, intelligence, creativity, inventions, marvels, and wonders that agitators and propagandists claim they are, then it stands to reason that such talent would have sold itself in the open marketplace without any need for brute force in the form of non-discrimination and anti-discrimination laws, and business owners would have rushed to hire such geniuses.  Not only did that not happen; what happened instead was that even after they were given countless unearned privileges through such laws over the past half century, blacks have not revealed that bottomless well of talent.

Why have they not made East St. Louis into a showplace of splendor, beauty, and achievement instead of the wasteland of ruined buildings and weed-covered lots that it is? What are they waiting for?

Why instead have they left a trail of incompetence, negligence, irresponsibility, theft, cheating, destruction, and assorted degeneracy in the public schools of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, in hospitals, in transit companies, in law enforcement, in government, and in cities like Detroit, Camden, Baltimore, and Chicago?

It must be one of the most bizarre spectacles in history that people who do not do those things apologize and award special privileges to those who do.  Still more proof of Zombiedom.

White American business owners were nuts indeed if they did not refuse to hire people whom they knew were likely to cause those problems.  Why would a business owner want to make his company into Detroit?

As Richard Epstein argued in Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992), the anti-discrimination principle is the antithesis of freedom of contract, which means:  The right possessed by all individuals to do business with whomever they please for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.  Obviously that includes hiring.

The private business owner must always have the right to hire or not to hire anyone he chooses, for whatever reason he chooses, on the basis of his judgment—because he is risking his capital.  He must have the right to discriminate on the basis of red hair, tattoos, appearance, speech, religion, race, talent, experience, astrological signs, or anything else.

“How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?”, asked Zora Neale Hurston in 1955 in her dissenting response to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that demanded desegregation in American schools.

All we need do is modify her question to read:  “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to hire me who would not choose freely to hire me?”

To both questions, an honest and thoughtful person must answer “None”.  Zora Neale Hurston was such a person.  But she wanted to play fair.  She had enough integrity to know that there were no grounds—moral, philosophical, cultural, or political—for forcing her company upon people who did not seek it.  She was an exception to the millions of blacks and whites alike who have been indoctrinated to believe that might makes right.  She knew that respect and privileges, like friendship, must be earned and cannot be mandated by the police power of government.  Opportunists, parasites, and slackers couldn’t care less about that.  She was looking to make an honest living.  But they are looking to get something for nothing, which anti-discrimination laws deliver to them in abundance.

“Liberty will not descend to a people,” Benjamin Franklin wrote.  “A people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.” 

How many American blacks have shown a desire to “raise themselves to liberty”?  How many have demanded instead that the police power of government be used to give them special privileges via non-discrimination laws?  How many millions of others reveal their desire not to raise themselves but to drag everyone else down with them into the gutter of depravity and lawlessness?  Observe how few blacks understand Franklin’s words.  Observe how few whites understand them.  Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Elizabeth Wright understood them.  But they were exceptions.

It is whites, not blacks, who are to blame for tyrannical non-discrimination laws.  It was unprincipled, opportunistic, stupid, or gullible whites who accepted unearned guilt and taught entire generations of non-whites that they are “owed” something for nothing.

Many examples of the tyranny of non-discrimination law have been discussed at The Thinking Housewife, including the trucking company (Oct. 4, 2011), the U.S. Forest Service (June 12, 2012), a reception for a fake “wedding” (Aug. 24, 2012, and Aug. 23, 2014), the pasta maker (Dec. 1, 2014), cakes for fake “weddings” (April 25 and June 16, 2015), and flowers for a fake “wedding” (March 4, 2017).

The tyranny in these examples and countless others like them is accomplished by means of non-objective law, principally “administrative law.” It is of course an abomination.   There is no moral, philosophical, or political justification for non-objective law.  If Americans possessed even a primitive understanding of rights and political liberty, they would repeal all “administrative law” immediately, strip its practitioners and defenders of their arbitrary power, and assign them to latrine duty for the families and companies whose lives they imagine such “law” gives them a right to rearrange.

Here is yet another example:

When the Denver Sheriffs’ Department placed a Help Wanted ad for deputies and specified that they must be American citizens, Nanny Government responded instantly and punished the department to the tune of ten thousand dollars for practicing discrimination.  This is a perfect illustration of how Nanny Government permits criminal trespassers and murderers to destroy American cities, kill Americans, and remain unpunished while at the same time it punishes American citizens who harm no one.  Honest, loyal, patriotic men who want only to do their job are punished by do-gooders who couldn’t find honest work and have no talent for doing anything except pushing other people around.

How would Washington and Jefferson or Patton and MacArthur respond to a government that has now become the most powerful enforcer of absurdities the world has ever seen?  Can’t you just imagine them saying “Yes, sir, Nanny Government!  We are here to obey and fall in line!”

How do Americans today respond?  They applaud.  They roll over and play dead.  Or they sit up and beg for even more handouts, privileges, and “programs”.  That is not the response of confident men, of grown-up men, of people who value liberty, responsibility, and self-reliance, men who distrust government—as all government should be distrusted all the time, especially when it proclaims good intentions.

Men who agree to surrender their rights of free association are incapable of defending anything.

And observe that “Conservatives” who prattle endlessly about American “freedom” not only did not say NO to that surrender of liberty and rights; they jumped aboard the bandwagon only a few steps behind the “Liberals” they pretend to oppose.

At the outset of this essay, I wrote about a classified ad from 1960.  Here is another glimpse into that era:

In the 1950s, there was a tavern in downtown St. Louis called “A Gentleman’s Bar”.  It catered to businessmen who worked within walking distance.  The owner’s policy was:  No women and no bums.  And he enforced it rigorously.  [Jack Rice, “Moving Day Near for ‘A Gentleman’s Bar’”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 5, 1962 ]

Such were the breed of men who once ran American culture and made it the envy of the world:  Masculine, principled, confident, unapologetic.  And what do we see in their place today?  Squishy, soft-headed, “flexible”, apologetic, accommodating, semi-literate, inarticulate, vulgar-mouthed, rule-hating, adolescent-witted, ballcap-wearing, feminized boy-men.

Why did women in St. Louis not protest that policy and demand entry to that bar? Because they had better sense by far in those years than they do today and had not yet been brainwashed by Feminist Fairy Tales.

If I opened a bar and adopted that same policy, today’s feminist harpies would have a hissy fit, “administrative law” judges would lick their chops in anticipation of another kill, and none of those squishy boy-men would utter a peep of dissent.

What gullible tribes of white men and women have inherited this once-great nation, and for whose gullibility those who are not gullible are paying an outrageous cost.

It was, I suggest, no coincidence that Lawrence Auster expressed his judgment (which I had formed also, independently) that the late 1950s were a high point in American civilization, a time when a hierarchy of patriarchal authority was still largely intact; when most American white men still had nerve enough to defend what their ancestors built, not apologize for it; when longstanding moral and cultural standards were still upheld; and when private companies and small businessmen could flourish in an open marketplace, just a few years before the avalanche of “anti-discrimination” laws and regulations would begin to suffocate them while at the same time creating thousands of swell new government jobs for busybodies.

— Comments —

TK writes:

Thanks, Alan. I always look forward to your posts. They take me back in time the way an old song takes me back to a particular time and place. Excellent writing.

Feb. 7, 2018

Robert writes:

Alan writes:

One “Help Wanted” ad read in part: “Cashier. White, night work…..” That was in 1960. Isn’t that simple and straightforward?

It was so simple and straightforward, that it meant more to other readers of the ad than it did to whites. Today it would be illegal. Alan laments that change. He’s arguing, if I understand him properly, that it should not be a crime, since there “could be [no] better expression of the liberty that Americans once understood and valued.”

Is that a good idea in a country in which whites will soon be a minority?

There’s an awful lot of anti-white sentiment, and no good reason to believe that such “simple and straightforward” legal language wouldn’t be “valued and expressed” as in “Cashier. No Whites, night work…..”

Alan also laments our “corruption of words”, and cites “discrimination” as his example. “Gay” and “gender” are the two most successful corruptions ever to be used strategically to advance public policy in the long history of so-called “civil rights”. Both are tactically brilliant and obviously unstoppable as used in the startlingly rapid manipulation of the required public sentiment it achieved. Pure genius.

However, the state outlawing public acts of manifest discrimination isn’t a corruption of the plain meaning of discrimination. The state has codified its meaning into law. Rather than a corruption, a clear and profound distinction has been drawn between certain obvious discriminations that it requires by its law, and those that it prohibits by its law; leaving be other astute discriminations, at least for now.

Alan’s good voice is obviously favored here at TTH. There’s a lot in this posting that is easy to agree with.

Laura writes:

Robert makes an important point — discrimination isn’t illegal today; some forms of it are codified into law.

I think it would be perfectly okay if businesses openly discriminated against whites. After all, they already do it tacitly. : – ) It would be better if that discrimination were explicit. It would also be okay if some posted Help Wanted ads that said, “Cashier, Must Not Believe in Discrimination against Non-Whites, Night Work …”

Let these principle work themselves out in practice. Just get the government out of the business of telling business owners what to do.

That said, I don’t favor ads that mention the race of possible employees. I think people should be legally free to do it, but restrained from doing it by custom and public opinion.

Feb. 8, 2018

Laura writes:

From Alan’s piece:

Why instead have they left a trail of incompetence, negligence, irresponsibility, theft, cheating, destruction, and assorted degeneracy in the public schools of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, in hospitals, in transit companies, in law enforcement, in government, and in cities like Detroit, Camden, Baltimore, and Chicago?

To be fair, these developments should be seen in the context of the following:

*The deliberate destruction of the South’s economy

*The migration to the industrial North of millions of blacks who had lived an agrarian life

*The decline in manufacturing jobs that originally enticed them to the North

*Endless racial grievance fed to blacks by whites, especially by Jewish propagandists

*Welfare benefits which discouraged family formation and promiscuity

*The Sexual Revolution, which was not started or marketed by blacks

*Atheist schools which created lawlessness