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Posts Tagged ‘Minority Groups’

Socialism, Minority Groups, and Personal Liberties | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2023

It would even be expected that socialist regimes are opposed to the minority groups listed above. There is a very low cost for bureaucrats to prohibit the minority groups from continuing unhampered in their daily activities and a potentially high cost of inaction. If they do nothing, a problematic statistic might be found, and that would not be good for the bureaucrat. When the lives of people are owned by the state, people can be disposed of however the bureaucrat desires.

https://mises.org/wire/socialism-minority-groups-and-personal-liberties

Benjamin Seevers

Socialists have managed to acquire the loyalty of a coalition of disparate groups by championing the principle of personal liberty. Especially in the United States, many women, disabled, gay people, transgender people, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrants are among the proud supporters of the socialist cause, foolishly believing that capitalism or the free market is antithetical to their livelihood or lifestyles.

They could not be more wrong. Unfortunately, under socialism, people are not self-owners; they belong to the state.

The state owns everyone’s bodies under socialism. No example is more extreme than the gulags of the Soviet Union, where the state sent millions to forced-labor camps in which about 1.6 million died. The individual was merely a producer good in the state’s grand schemes. In current and former socialist countries, the minority groups that support socialism experienced this as well.

For example, in Dr. Paul Kengor’s book, Takedown, he retells the Bolsheviks’ history concerning the most cherished of modern women’s rights: abortion, or the right to choose. The Bolsheviks did legalize abortion once taking power (at that point, it helped wither away the family), but Joseph Stalin, under the fear of depopulation, outlawed abortion in 1936.

This ban continued until Stalin died and Nikita Khruschev’s more progressive administration revoked it in 1955. On the flip side, Fidel Castro’s socialist regime forced abortions as a means for cutting back on risky pregnancies. Additionally, through China’s one-child policy, many of the state’s abortions are compelled in what Kengor describes as “one of the most severe infringements on family life ever inflicted by a government on its people.”

Despite the right to choose being supported by feminists of socialist countries, it is among many of the rights that go by the wayside. Any instance of women being granted the right to choose merely means that the natural rate of abortion was aligned with the goals of the state, or the rates were tolerable.

Convenience, not principle, becomes the criterion for rights. Births become a statistic to the socialist tsar. Whenever births exceed what the directors believe to be the optimal level of births, abortion is allowed or even forced; if births are below what is desired, then abortion is prohibited. There is no room for the rational calculation of individuals in family planning. The socialist woman is not ultimately the owner of her body—the state is, and it exercises that power arbitrarily and totally.

Antifeminist abortion regulations bleed into “ableism” as well. Prior to China’s ending its one-child policy, prenatal screening was successfully used to detect children with Down syndrome so that they may be terminated. This may not immediately seem like socialist management. However, given that families would be less willing to bring a child into the world if it is disabled in some way, parents would maximize the one-child policy by opting to terminate the pregnancy in favor of a more “desirable” child. It is obvious that the socialist management of women’s bodies is to blame for the desire to terminate disabled children.

Given the prevalence of abortion, especially compulsory abortion, in socialist countries as well as the attitude against the disabled, mentally or physically disabled children become a burden on the state rather than on individual parents. To the bureaucrat, these children are merely a statistic. Ordering an abortion is nothing to them but numbers.

Moving away from the abortion issue, those with unorthodox sexual desires have not had a good time under socialist regimes either. Kengor notes, “the Bolsheviks were rooting out the slightest traces of so-called culture cancers such as prostitution and ‘homosexualism.’” Stalin even criminalized homosexuality in 1934. Castro’s Cuba locked up gays in the name of healthcare. As AIDS spread to the island, Castro imprisoned gays in sanitariums against their will, and Che Guevara personally executed and tortured gays as well.

Again, this is all about the public. You do not own your body under socialist regimes. If you own your body, you can spread diseases, and that is a threat to the “public” health regime. Gays were routinely subjected to this violation of human rights under socialism under unjust pretenses.

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Disproportionalities: Whose Fault? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/walter-e-williams/disproportionalities-whose-fault/

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Jews have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes in economics, 30% of those in medicine, 25% in physics, 20% in chemistry, 15% in literature and 10% of the Nobel Peace Prizes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been just over 900 Nobel Prizes awarded. Since Jews are only 2% of the world’s population, instead having 22% of Nobel Prizes, 206, they should have won only two, according to the proportionality vision of justice. There’s an even greater domestic violation of the proportionality vision. Jews are less than 3% of the U.S. population but 35% of American Nobel Prize winners. Several questions come to mind. Does the disproportionately high number of Jewish winners explain why there are so few black or Hispanic Nobel Prize winners? Who’s to blame for ethnic disproportionality among Nobel Prize winners, and what can be done to promote social justice?

Proportionality injustice doesn’t end with the Nobel Prize. Blacks are about 13% of the U.S. population but close to 70% of the players in the National Football League. Blacks are greatly overrepresented among star players and highly paid players. While the disproportionality injustice runs in favor of black players in general, they are all but nonexistent among the league’s field goal kickers and punters. Perhaps the only reason why football team owners are not charged with hiring discrimination is that the same people who hire quarterbacks and running backs also hire field goal kickers and punters. Proportionality and diversity injustice is worse in the National Basketball Association, with blacks being over 80% of the players. Plus, it’s not uncommon to watch college basketball games and see that 90 to 100% of the starting five players are black.

Most readers know that I teach economics at George Mason University and have done so for nearly 40 years. However, that doesn’t mean the field of economics doesn’t have its problems. Many see economics as neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women or blacks. Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, in addressing a Brookings Institution audience said: “Within the economics profession, women and minorities are significantly underrepresented. And data compiled by the American Economic Association’s Committees on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and the Status of Minority Groups in the profession show that there has been little or no progress in recent decades. Women today make up only about 30 percent of Ph.D. students. Within academia, their representation drops the higher up one goes in the career ladder. The share of Ph.D.s awarded to African Americans is low; and it has declined slightly in recent decades.” Yellen says that diversity in economics is a matter of “basic justice.”

Had I been in the audience, I would have asked Yellen whether there’s basic justice in the nursing field, where less than 10% of nurses are men. What about the gross lack of proportionality in incarceration? According to 2015 figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall U.S. prison and jail population is 90.6% male and 9.4% female. The only way that I see to remedy such a gross disproportionality injustice is to either incarcerate more female prisoners or release male prisoners.

Back to Janet Yellen: It is pathetic and professionally incompetent that she can ignore decades of research — some of it by female researchers — that shoots down the idea that disparities prove discrimination. Moreover, if one carries the notion that disparities prove discrimination far enough, they’d look like true fools. According to a study conducted by Bond University in Australia, sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill men than they are women. Despite the fact that men are 50% of the population, and so are women, men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning, 82% are men. One can only wonder what social justice warriors would do about these and many other disproportionalities.

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Yellen’s Self-Serving Assessment: Fed is “Doing Pretty ...

 

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