Clown Car: 7/6/23
Inez and I begin by discussing two major Supreme Court cases from last week, SFFA v. Harvard, on affirmative action, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, on whether a private business can be forced to create a website for a gay wedding. We talk about how the affirmative action decision impacts the incentives of universities, and how its holdings might find their way into other areas of law.
This leads to a broader discussion about free speech and when it’s justified for government to tell social media companies they can’t censor users. I take the problem of false information and bad actors much more seriously than Inez does, although I definitely understand her point and feel conflicted on this issue. I just really hate government interference in the market! By all means, crush CRT, LGBT, and everything else in public schools and cut off their funding, but I find it very hard to get myself to support the state telling private actors what to do under almost any circumstances. I just love liberty and freedom too much.
As we find out, I’m much more inclined than Inez is to agree with the Goldwater position on the Civil Rights Act. It seems to me that her worry about modern discrimination against conservatives has led her to take a more left wing position on whether the federal government should have told private actors in the South who they could associate with in the 1960s. This just confirms my fear that as soon as you start to accept any arguments for government intervention, it’s the first step towards communism/civil rights, or god forbid, industrial policy. If we could silo the censorship issue and simply work on that I would be reassured, but I worry about general anti-market trends on the right.
We close by talking a bit about Vivekmania, which is taking the Republican primary by storm. This conversation touches a bit on generational differences and aesthetics, and his strengths and weaknesses as a candidate.
Listen here or watch us on YouTube.
Links:
My immediate reaction to SFFA v Harvard
My thread on how markets are the cure to discrimination
Goldwater speech on the Civil Rights Act
My appearance on Vivek’s podcast
My take on Vivek right before he jumped in the race
Vox on Vivek (and me)
Vivek video at Moms for Liberty
Clown Car: 7/6/23
"As soon as you start to accept any arguments for government intervention, it’s the first step towards communism/civil rights, or god forbid, industrial policy." Good God, are you actually equating civil rights with communism?
I can understand Inez's pessimism but I think she is excessively pessimistic. UC Berkeley is in a liberal state but California voters have repeatedly passed ballot initiatives to ban affirmative action. Though UC Berkeley has tried its best to advance racial quotas it has been unsuccessful. For the 2021 incoming class, it was 2% African American, 15% Latino and more than 50% Asian, while Stanford which could consider race has 7% African Americans in 2021 class.
Many good universities are state universities in red states - UIUC, Purdue, GaTech, UNC etc and republican legislatures are not going to tolerate any affirmative action policies. Given UC Berkeley could not implement backdoor affirmative action even though it is in a state run by most ideological democrats there is no way other universities can get away with continuing race based admissions.