Discrimination and Personal Choice

A few short clarifications for my earlier blog entries:

1. I was told that my definition of racism and other "-isms" is an incorrect one. Racism is (I will use racism as an example here, but it applies to all the others equally) the arbitrary belief that one race is inferior or superior to another. Therefore it is evil because it leads to discrimination. As I wrote in my earlier post, discrimination is just a way for people to exercise their right to have a personal choice about things. It can be a logically justified choice, but it can also be completely arbitrary - that does not make a difference. The example I used last time is accurate: Since I prefer the taste of Coca-Cola, I drink it instead of drinking Pepsi, thereby discriminating against Pepsi. Let me use another, even more arbitrary example: If I prefer the color red to the color blue, I will buy a red car, not a blue car. Thus I discriminate against all blue cars. My choice is completely subjective! I don't see any difference in making personal choices about things and choices about people. I don't know why I should be able to discriminate in some areas of my life, and not in others.

2. The subject of "institutional racism" also comes up. People say that since I support all forms of discrimination (and I do, except I prefer the term personal choice), I must also support oppressive legal systems like South African Apartheid, or forced segregation in the US pre-1960's. This is plainly not true. I do not and will never support any measures forced upon people, whether it be forced discrimination (such as under Apartheid) or forced integration (such as Affirmative action laws in the US today). Those sort of laws destroy personal choice, because they mandate that a person must behave one way or another or else... This is where I will make my first argument for Monarchy as a more just system which promotes personal choice. Institutional racism is really just a euphemism for public racism (the term "public" here referring to publicly owned government operations). A publicly owned government (most notable today in the forms of democracy, social democracy, or communism) can mandate that citizens behave one way or another not only on public property by on their own private property. This coercive measure always appears under publicly owned regimes, where one group wants to supplant another group. Some examples are: whites vs. blacks in the United States(democracy), workers vs. peasants in China under Mao(socialism), intellectuals vs. the uneducated in Cambodia under Pol Pot(communism). Now let me portray how this is impossible under a Monarchy (assuming of course the Monarch follows the rule of Law). In a Monarchy, nothing is public - every piece of land and property is privately owned. Every human being within such a state can therefore exercise personal choice within his own property, but cannot under any circumstances impose his will upon any other property owner. The Monarch himself is limited only to controlling his own possessions, therefore he cannot by Law mandate his subjects to treat a group of people one way or another. There are no privileges in Monarchy besides ones assigned to people by personal choice. It does not matter whether it is the personal choice of the King or another property owner because neither can mandate that the other behave in a particular way. In fact a King is far more likely to discourage racism anyway - he wants his subjects to be as productive as possible, and racism sometimes leads to unnecessary isolationism. The King also cannot simply ignore opinions of his citizens. If most of them are against racism, he will not enact any racist laws on his own property because doing so might lead to secession of the discriminated groups or people who disapprove of the discrimination (their personal choice does not match the Monarch's personal choice). Thus their contributions to the royal coffers would disappear.

3. In reference to yesterday's post - I am not really supporting the use of the death penalty on economists! It was simply a nice thought and, referring to what I just wrote above, a King might do well enacting that sort of measure on his own private property.