Gary’s Chicaro, a restaurant in Enid, is a Nigger-Free Zone
— it says so right on their official t-shirt. It also prohibits faggots
and welfare queens
.
It’s been in business for 44 years.
It’s finally making the news because a white guy, Matt Gard, was denied service — he’s in a wheelchair. See, they also hate the handicapped! I am cynically amused, though, by the fact that the white-guy whistleblower was a regular at the restaurant for years, and only woke up to the nastiness of the place when it finally affected him directly.
The article on the Daily Kos about Gary’s Chicaro also sets up another contrast: it quotes from libertarians who argue that we don’t need civil rights laws imposing the heavy hand of the government, because the Magic Power of the Marketplace would shut down racist establishments that exclude a significant fraction of their customer base.
Still in business after 44 years, while serving only healthy heterosexual white men with jobs — good ol’ boys. In this way is libertarianism refuted.
But, Ron Paul is a genius right? Right? The thing I miss the most about Morris is sitting in poli sci class listening to Prof. Bill Hunt tear libertarian ideology apart. It was always masterfully done.
So… is someone prosecuting the place for its flagrant breaches of equality law? I thought the US had anti-discrimination laws in place to deal with these kinds of bigots?
Does it? Because the report video seemed to give the impression that this was just an issue of bad manners and bad taste rather than illegal activity.
The place is also the subject of some civil dis-Yelp-bedience.
So, how long would a restaurant run by anyone even vaguely not WASP stay in business if it even vaguely hinted at a policy like that? Not long I bet.
I assume so, as resturaunts fall under Public Accommodations Law, which are not allowed to discriminate.
There’s federal law, but often that’s difficult and expensive to sue with. Oklahoma has state laws as well, which are more accessible:
http://www.oag.state.ok.us/oagweb.nsf/ocre.html
The libertarians being quoted are naive: reasoning from their own economic first principles demonstrates that the market will only sometimes end discrimination:
If a minority is small enough, and/or the customer base is bigoted enough, then the business gained by serving minorities is more than offset by the customers alienated by seeing minorities served, and the market will tend to perpetuate the bigotry.
Conversely, the libertarians’ prediction is likely to be fulfilled in the very long term in a place where the minority is sizable enough, and enough of the population opposes bigotry. The profits to be made by serving minorities, the costs to be cut by underpaying minorities, and public opinion, will gradually move the Overton window toward hiring and serving them.
Note that years ago I saw, on a news program, KKK members reciting their creed–and they said something about keeping relationships with black people on a “strictly business basis.” I.e., the KKK hates African Americans, but (if I’m not misremembering and didn’t misunderstand) their own Overton window has shifted to the point that they will do business with minorities, but will of course shun social contact with them. Please note that I’m not claiming this as validation of any libertarian claims! It seems most likely on the surface that this shift would be the result of being forced by law to do business with minorities.
A libertarian of any intelligence would agree that the market will provide segregation, if that’s what the customers want. This hypothetical intelligent libertarian would instead point out that if the people want segregation, then the government will not do anything about it. For example, even if it passed laws against discrimination, it would turn a bind eye to a segregated business operating in its jurisdiction for 44 years.
A masked avenger,
It is interesting though that discrimination in public accommodations tends to purify said Libertopias, as the shunned minorities die from starvation or flee in exile. Unless there is some situation where a minority population can grow faster than starvation or other deprivations can kill or exile them.
Libertarian societies seem shitty when you think about them, unless you’re a white dude.
Bah, pardon my grammar fail.
“chicaros” doesn’t sound very white to me.
In principle that’s more than possible: it seems almost a theorem that minorities that are (1) discriminated against and (2) smaller than some critical mass, will tend to be driven out of that community, or starve, or otherwise disappear.
We see relatively few examples of that in the real world, though, and all of them (that I’m aware of) involve violence. Since the “War on Terror” began, for example, sectarian violence has increased in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, with the effect that Sunni areas have been nearly purged of Shi’ites and vice versa, and the Christian minority has reportedly been nearly wiped out. In Ireland, on the other hand, sectarian violence has raged for 50 years (largely as a facade for a political argument) without the Protestants being purged. The South had Jim Crow, the KKK, and generally deployed every weapon in its arsenal against African Americans, but the African American population neither starved nor fled.
Actually purging a minority would seem to require a level of unanimity in the majority populace, a fairly dedicated application of violence, a small enough minority, and some other factors. The “violence” part is not necessarily necessary. Remember that in libertopia, which is an imaginary place, the initiation of violence is always considered a crime and dealt with severely. In libertopia it would be legal to have a segregated restaurant, and to treat minorities coming onto the property as trespassers, but it would be strictly illegal to assault, rob, vandalize, kill, threaten, or otherwise initiate force against a minority, however strong one’s prejudice against them.
However, as I said before, it would seem almost a theorem that this not only can happen but will, under the right conditions, and it would also seem obvious that plenty of small towns will satisfy those conditions. Even in a hypothetical libertopia in which all violence is promptly and completely suppressed.
You’re thinking about a libertarian society in Alabama. In a libertarian society in Saudi Arabia, it would suck to be a non-Muslim, or for that matter a Muslim woman. Violence would be removed from the equation, but it would still be possible for restaurants to refuse to serve unaccompanied women, for employers to refuse to hire them, for gas stations to refuse to fuel cars driven by women, etc. I do suspect that a libertarian society the size of Saudi Arabia would be unable to preserve its strict Islamic character for long, but it could if society were sufficiently united in its desire to do so, and in the short term it surely would.
But if instead of “white dude” you mean “member of a privileged class, caste, etc.,” then yes. Absolutely.
Given my experience with libertarians, I’d say that’s a universal trait with them. Libertarianism could only work if most people were enlightened enough to respect civil rights without any sort of government oversight. While a libertarian troll and I might agree that racial discrimination by business is wrong, the difference I often see is that the libertarian naively assumes the two of us are a representative sample of the population. Either that, or they think they can pull the wool over my eyes.
I’m sure everyone experiences a phase in their life where they believe declaring that they’re boycotting a company out of some principle gives them a rush of perceived power. Unfortunately, there’s a threshold a boycott or other activity has to cross in terms of how much lost revenue it represents to the target company. Sadly, bigotry is common enough that some businesses can rally support for being unethical.
Chigau, #9,
I too pondered the origin of the word. Not very much. But I did briefly entertain the possibility that there might be irony for the pointing out.
Louis
Love thy neighbor?
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Libertarians are not just naive when it comes to discrimination. That’s really only one facet of their ignorance.
And to quote another person they are ignorant of: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. “
A restaurant is a place of public accommodation.
Federal Law prohibits racial discrimination there.
The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of physical ability.
Now that his asshattery is public expect to see some attention from Washington.
I see something to sympathize with on both sides of that divide. Libertarians naively trust in the basic decency of their fellow humans. Authoritarians naively trust the government, or else naively assume that it’s self-evidently the best means in a bad lot for securing human rights. This despite objective evidence that governments do things like nuclear bombings, holocausts, genocides, world wars, wars on terror, slavery, Apartheid, etc., etc.
Would I trade Nagasaki for allowing some asshole in some podunk town to run a segregated business? In a hot minute. It’s pretty hard to stack up enough private wrong-doing to outweigh the 50 million dead in WWII.
The problem with libertarianism is a much deeper one, which libertarians usually avoid addressing: how does a libertarian society avoid devolving back into (some form of) state, with its nuclear bombs, world wars, and all the rest? Non-libertarians consider it self-evident that a libertarian society would quickly fall pray to warlords, who would quickly reinstitute the state. It’s not completely self-evident, but I’ll take it as axiomatic that power-hungry individuals would certainly try. I’ve never heard a satisfactory explanation how a libertarian society avoids going down that road.
Bronze Dog @ 11
Sadly, bigotry is common enough that some businesses can rally support for being unethical.
See Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty for examples.
The Libertarian fallacy : a “free market” is inherently good and right. Anything that controls or regulates the “free market” is inherently bad or wrong.
Libertarians seem to have irrational faith in the “free market” as the arbiter of ethics.
Opps! Sorry, HTML fail. Bronze Dog’s comment was supposed to be blockqouted.
Masked Avenger appears to be the master of the false dichotomy
Masked Avenger@16:
Perhaps, but Atlas Shrugged is the libertarian Bible, and nobody ever accused Ayn Rand of trusting in the basic decency of her fellow humans.
Bronze dog @#11
Indeed…witness the recent flap over Phil Robertson’s bigotry. Duck Dynasty is still on the air. Or the bigotry of Chick-fil-A’s owner in 2012 with no-lesser luminary than Mike Huckabee setting up an Appreciation Day to counter a boycott. As far as I know, Chick-fil-A is still cooking. Societal processes seem to institutionalize and reinforce the dominant bigotry. That’s why Supreme Court decisions and Federal intervention were necessary to curtail (hardly end) the blatant discrimination of racism in the South.
And just because a libertarian doesn’t trust in government does not mean they are not authoritarian. They would just hand authority to a different group, like John Galt and his strikers. There’s a reason there is no sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand didn’t do horror.
You assume that libertarians are honest about ideas against authority. But from what I’ve seen they see no problem with the authority of CEOs, board members, corporations, etc.
I see them as anti-government, not anti-authoritarian. They want corporate oligarchy, not freedom or democracy.
Libertarians are a diverse group, of course, so we’re running into the usual equivocation problem. The Cato Institute, Objectivists, Rothbardians, and the average college stoner who reads Atlas Shrugged, are very different. Any statement about “libertarians” can be countered by picking an example from one of those subsets.
Objectivists firmly insist that they are not libertarians. Many, including many here, tend to equate libertarians and Objectivists. There’s plenty of overlap–otherwise, non-Objectivist libertarians wouldn’t say so many positive things about Rand–but it’s hard to talk about libertarians (or any other group) without actually being fairly specific; otherwise we easily fall into a tail-chasing series of equivocations.
All terse statements are inherently over-simplifications. Please don’t infer that those are the only two choices. “Government” is itself a sufficiently vague term that it’s impossible to define a crisp dichotomy between “pro” and “anti” government. In very broad terms, however, it’s useful to note that libertarians are roughly characterized by their opposition government, and non-libertarians have in common that they do not share this opposition to government.
I never said libertarians are against “authority.” Many of them believe that people have authority over their own bodies, and over their own property, and from this they derive those “authority” structures that they deem legitimate. I.e., you can decide who is allowed to touch you, and who is allowed into your house, and you can get together consensually with others and form organizations, families, etc.
Libertarians of that sort oppose any “authority” structure in which participation is other than explicitly consensual. The most obvious example of that is a government, which claims authority over everyone within its territory whether they consent or not–or more precisely, they claim that by failing to flee its territory, everyone in the territory has consented to obey it.
There are left-libertarians who oppose the concept of property itself, and they would tend to be against authority in all forms. They are most decidedly not Randians, though.
B
MA
No, they have a naive trust in the basic decency of their fellow members of the privileged class. Their main argument against the government helping people is that “some” (ie non-members of the privileged class) will abuse it. So they don’t trust “those people” to have basic decency.
Eh. As already alluded to, “authoritarians” naively trust “authority”. not necessarily government. Just look at the USA’s Republicans. Authoritarian to the core, yet purportedly as against “big government” as libertarians. But also like libertarians, they worship business. They generally consider Christian religious figures as legitimate authorities, and will only consider fellow religious Republican politicians as legitimate authorities in terms of government. They generally will not accept people outside of their particular set of tribes as legitimate authorities, in any walk of life. Authoritarianism is about hierachical thinking and uncritical obedience, but doesn’t necessarily mean that they are uncritical and obedient in every respect, to everyone. Just look how Fox News changes its tune from the Bush presidency into the Obama presidency. Just look how Christian debaters uncritically accept nonsense in support of Christianity but will relentlessly nitpick atheist arguments or any other religion’s beliefs. You have to look at who they consider The Authority. And for most authoritarians, let alone most people, trust of government in general, without caveats or qualification…is kinda rare.
I see what you did you there (and I hope it was on purpose!)
I think that PZ brings up a vital point regarding this Matt Gard fellow.
In almost all of the former-conservative-comes-around-to-progressive-position-when-it-hits-home-for-them type of stories, I can’t help but think that the difference between liberals and conservatives here in the USA is that a liberal thinks of what’s best for the populace, while a conservative thinks of what’s best for them self.
(yes, obviously a gross over-generalization)
There seems to a general lack of empathy on the right. An inability to take a see that, for a example, a particular restaurant’s policy is horrifically discriminatory until they themselves experience discrimination first hand.
This fellow was fine with the restaurant until he couldn’t eat there. Someone was against any sort of nationalized health care until they traveled to Canada and had better pre- and post-natal care under Canada’s system than they had for previous children here in the USA with private insurance. Someone rallies against an extension of unemployment benefits until the time when they are no longer able to find a job in the unemployment benefit period.
And so forth.
So I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for someone who was wrongly denied entry in to a restaurant when they had, at least tacitly, supported these discriminatory polices when he wasn’t directly affected.
Along with any belief that you truly support right of gathering, freedom of speech or, in point of fact, logic. The exception does not prove the rule. The fact that nobody’s heard of this place till now should tell you something about its scope and influence. I can get behind the idea that the place is odious, but this manner of cherry picking argument could just as easily be used to refute something as big as New Atheism or Liberalism. See how poorly those New Atheists treat women at conventions? Ergo, New Atheism is refuted! See that liberal president expanding the surveillance powers of the state and spying on all his allies and citizens and edging toward a fascist dictatorship by bypassing congress? Ergo Liberalism is refuted! Same logic.
And your employer should be allowed to fire you for any and all these things.
If we’re just going to dance around the word libertarian, then I fail to see how this conversation is worth anything. The whole point of having a category “libertarian” is so that we can talk about that category. If all statements must be hemmed and hawed, then I fail to see the point of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum at all. It is a useless construct.
No, viggen111, follow the link. It includes comments from fanatical libertarians specifically stating that the power of the market would prevent discrimination. That is a specific prediction by libertarians about libertarianism, and it is easily demonstrated to be false.
You’ll find plenty of atheists saying gender discrimination must end, and plenty of liberals saying that the expansion of the surveillance state is illiberal. You won’t find many libertarians declaring that there is an important place for government regulation of business practices.
@A Masked Avenger #10:the African American Population neither starved nor fled
Are you sure you’re correct about that?
Onamission5 got there before me, so I’ll just add that Blacks in the south were an overwhelming majority but that didn’t seem to matter (they did starve and flee), fortunately the state stepped in before the white supremacist purification could run its course.
Only it’s not, because the NAP is both circular AND STUPID and any libertarian that’s thought about it concedes this. E.g., property is theft so they must accept some violence — the kind they like — the kind that privileges themselves.
Many of them believe that people have authority over their own bodies
That’s called “autonomy” and it’s nothing to do with authority. Authority is about giving orders and enforcing obedience. Autonomy is choosing what orders to accept and what actions to perform.
Yeesh. Pollos Hermanos will try anything to keep Walt’s brother-in-law out.
reasoning from their own economic first principles demonstrates that the market will …
Wait! Do the libertarians have an economic model that has predictive power? I mean other than “buy low, sell high” and “love those who chance has placed above you”??
*snort*
Libertarians don’t realize that they’re also adopting a slave morality. It’s just got a “you might make it into the 1%” veneer to make it a bit more attractive.
Speaking of Great Whites, here’s a petition to the government of Western Australia not to kill great whites or other sharks.
Dude, not many people in the world have ever heard of the whole city of Enid, “the ninth largest city in Oklahoma” which “is the county seat of Garfield County” “and has the third largest grain storage capacity in the world.” And yet, its population is almost 50,000; it’s not like “this place” concerns nobody.
A Masked Avenger #6
This is acutally mathematically demonstrable.
#25
Only in the sense that the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches are very different; they have a wide assortment of petty points of dogma that they make a great deal of hay over, but their overall outlook, policies, and actions are functionally indistinguishable to the outsider.
No, they don’t. As doublereed accurately pointed out, they are entirely in favor of authority within businesses and families, and of the ruthless exercise of same.
the only difference I can see in practice between libertarianism and feudalism is semantic.
They are really advocating hereditary authority based on wealth and property ownership. If there are any other differences other than the words they use and I have not heard them.
I think mr gard’s experience is rather comic sounds like something that would happen to Eric Cartman
uncle frogy
Looks like he’s getting some…helpful…publicity. An online social media campaign is praising it as the “best place for hot man-sex” and “Gary does’t serve tube steak. He asks for yours when you walk in the door. But don’t ask to use his backdoor, he saves that for minorities.”
This thread once again demonstrates that, according to Libertarians, whatever Libertarians believe is not actually what Libertarians believe.
This is a false dichotomy, typical of libertarians. Libertarians like to characterise all non-libertarians in the way you have done, but it’s fundamentally dishonest. Liberals, democratic socialists and even some conservatives are all to be found opposing the extension and calling for the reduction of government surveillance and policing powers, for example.
It is completely self-evident once you think beyond actual warlords shooting it out in a postapocalyptic scenery. What happens when there’s no trace of an apocalypse and you just leave the free market to itself?
You get price fixing, cartels, megamergers, oligopolies, monopolies. Why try to undercut your competitors when you can simply join them and make prices as high as your customers can possibly pay? From the internal point of view of a company, competition is a massive waste of money.
Competition needs to be propped up artificially, or it disappears very quickly.
That’s why the strongest force for capitalism in the world is the EU Commissioner for Competition.
Someone, earlier, asked about anti-discrimination laws, and, haven’t they been in effect for years, how could this place not have already been charged. One thing is that the law only allows a customer to sue the place for discrimination. It is not a crime for which the law seeks out offenders to prosecute. It’s just a law that allows “discrimination” to be grounds for a suit. If everyone who ever wanted to eat there was a straight-white-guy, no suit would ever be brought, and if the “others” were poor, and few, a suit would be “too expensive” to pursue. That’s why this disabled vet is suddenly in the news. I’m sure he ate there for years and never even noticed the discriminatory attitude of the restaurant. Probably chuckled at the humor of the “Great Whites…” phrase, thinking it was “just a joke”. Only when they refused him entry in his wheelchair did he raise a fuss. hoist by their own petard, I think.
I was also amused by the “discussion” quoted in the the Daily Kos piece about libertarians quibbling over the phrase, “public accommodation”. Their quibble being, “it’s a privately owned business, not publicly owned”.
Ugh, libertarians. I can’t believe I ever subscribed to that dead-end ideology.
@Nick Gotts#45
Typical is an understatement. I’ve seen them accuse anarcho-syndicalists of being Freedom Hating Statists(tm) without a hint of irony. It’s pretty much the go-to libertarian response when their ideology is being criticized, with all the weight and intellectual maturity of “Your mother wears army boots” (an “insult” worth of libertarians, given how deeply sexist they usually are)
Not bad. Quite a performance.
:-D :-D :-D
#1 dalbryn:
Is there anywhere I can find Bill Hunt doing his number on libertarianism? I’d love to see it; there’s not enough debunking out there for this scourge.
PZ does his part, though, and it’s brilliant when he does.
Do we have a future contender to debate Bill Nye?
swampfoot @50:
I agree. I’d love to see it too.
But he doesn’t say anything about hippies, yippies, or bearded college professors — especially the latter, since it’s a known fact that they prefer exclusive holes-in-the-wall like Gary’s Chicaro. Gary thinks it’s really funny when everyone’s joking around and someone calls him a useless piece of shit.