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Minus The Nemesis
A Collaboration of Some of the Finest Thought on Today's World

IS IT EVEN LEGAL TO CRITICIZE THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT?

Monday, August 08, 2005

Over at Hit and Run, Nick Gillespie points to an interesting development out in the Aloha state. Seems an exclusive private school there, that until now admitted only native Hawaiians (of the Samoan variety), is being forced to admit students regardless of race.

What makes this case interesting is that the school receives no federal funding-- it is an entirely private organization. Yet the federal government sees fit to mandate who the school can and can't let in.

Gillespie, correctly, ties this back to the Civil Rights Act which, in order to have any meaningful effect, defined a number of private institutions (restaurants, business, etc.) "public" areas. Upside is with one swift blow from the federal hammer, decades of racial oppression was ended. Downside was it significantly eroded our rights as private citizens. A number of principled (and some not so principled) arguments were made against the Civil Rights Act by some very famous thinkers-- some of which have later recanted their opposition. One stalwart who remained opposed was one of this blogs hero's: Barry Goldwater. Gillespie provides a quote from Goldwater that neatly sums up his oposition to the Civil Rights Act. Namely that it...

...reintroduces through the back door the very principle of allocation by race that makes compulsory segregation morally wrong and offensive to freedom...Our aim, as I understand it, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society...It is to preserve a free society.
Could the private/state sector have corrected the injustices of segregation? Or did it require the federal government to end it? In any event, Goldwater was at least partially right, as highlighted in another quote:
Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have
The proprietors of the Kamehameha Schools are witnessing just how prescient Goldwater really was.

Nemesis




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