The Cato Institute

Have We Achieved Dr. King’s Dream Yet?

Fifty-five years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream,” one of the most stirring and memorable speeches in American history…

In the over five decades since Dr. King laid out his dream at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, our country has made great progress toward racial equality by destroying Jim Crow, expanding voting rights, and more thoroughly integrating our society.

Today, black people hold seats in Congress, the Cabinet, Fortune 500 company boardrooms and, of course, the Oval Office.

The United States has come a long way in fifty-five years, but many of King’s complaints are still relevant today. These inequities are impediments to the personal liberty of millions of Americans.

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The Cato Institute Celebrates Black History Month

The greatest libertarian crusade in history was the effort to abolish chattel slavery, culminating in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement and the heroic Underground Railroad…

The ideas of the American Revolution — individualism, natural rights and free markets — led logically to agitation for the extension of civil and political rights to those who had been excluded from liberty, as they were from power.

How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? 

In the United States, the abolitionist movement was naturally led people who were fighting for the ethical basis of libertarianism: a respect for the dignity and worth of every individual.

Leading abolitionists called slavery “man stealing,” in that it sought to deny self-ownership and steal a man’s very self. Their arguments paralleled those of John Locke and the libertarian agitators known as the Levellers. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that his goal was not just the abolition of slavery but “the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force.” Frederick Douglass likewise made his arguments for abolition in the terms of classical liberalism and libertarianism: self-ownership and natural rights. 

The history of black people in the United States is perhaps the most quintessentially American story of freedom and liberty. 

Besides the horrendous affront to human rights that was American slavery, black people in America have been and continue to be singled out for “special treatment” by the government in other ways, too.

Disparate treatment in education, criminal justice, and the economy are facts of life for many black Americans, and libertarians should take an active role in combating it, both through policy suggestions and in our personal lives. Part of this requires a deeper understanding of American history, and specifically the history of American racism.

Racism is an age-old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women. As Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1963 essay “Racism,” racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism — one that, unfortunately, still plays a practical and tangible role in the lives of many Americans.

if libertarians want to have any voice in suggesting what the future should look like, we must grapple with the past and explain how and why this sordid history won’t repeat itself. Moreover, American libertarians must not only confront the nation’s racist past, but how the legacy of that racism affects people today.

Black history is American history, a story of oppression and liberation rooted in the libertarian idea of individual rights. Much of the progress we have made in the United States has involved extending the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — to more and more people — but the struggle for freedom is never finished.

Slavery is long gone, but it is hardly coincidence that the descendants of slaves have accounted for disproportionate percentages of Americans in poverty and incarceration in the 150+ years hence. Save Emancipation and America’s reluctant recognition of the 14^th Amendment by way of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the government has consistently (though not exclusively) been a boot on the necks of African-Americans, hindering progress and true equality. 

It is not enough to be passively “not racist.” We must be actively anti-racism. Respect for the dignity of each person is the foundation of moral and social progress.

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The Forgotten War on Chinese Food

In the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, a national movement sought to use the law to eliminate Chinese restaurants from the United States…

For most of U.S. history, the nation’s borders were open. Although criminal conviction, disease, and certain other characteristics disqualified a prospective immigrant, until 1921 there were no numerical limitations on immigration.

However, this open-border policy did not apply to Asians. Political, moral, and economic considerations led to perception of a “Yellow Peril,” the danger that untold numbers of racially dangerous Asians could immigrate and undermine America’s basic character.

Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, suspending all immigration of skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers for 10 years. In 1892, the suspension was extended another 10 years by the Geary Act, and then was made permanent in 1902. 

Chinese-Americans had limited opportunities for employment. Some jobs required licenses that were limited to U.S. citizens, a status immigrant Chinese could never achieve because of racial restrictions on naturalization. Even without law, social discrimination restricted employment opportunities. 

Accordingly, many Chinese were employed in services and small businesses such as restaurants and laundries. Because many Americans liked Chinese food, the restaurant business seemed promising. The popularity of “chop suey” and other Americanized or American-Chinese dishes resulted in a boom in Chinese restaurants. Their numbers grew rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The “war” on Chinese restaurants, as it was then described, is a lost chapter in the history of U.S. racial regulation, with relevance to immigration policy today.

Chinese restaurants were deemed “a serious menace to society” for two reasons. First, the restaurants employed Chinese workers and successfully competed with other restaurants, which prompted white unionists to claim the Chinese restaurants denied “our own race a chance to live.” Second, Chinese restaurants supposedly were morally hazardous to white women; one observer noted that “beer and noodles in Chinese joints have caused the downfall of countless American girls.” Accordingly, many Americans recognized “the necessity for stamping out” the “iniquitous Chinese Chop Suey joints.” 

Fortunately, the effort failed. Today there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC restaurants combined. 

But the “war,” unsuccessful in its nominal goal, helped propagate the idea of Chinese as morally and economically dangerous people, and contributed to the passage of the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, which almost completely eliminated Asian immigration to the United States

Perhaps the most important implication of the campaign is that it represents another chapter in the persistent, systematic economic exploitation of people of color in the United States. Although the specific techniques used against various non-white groups differed, they shared the underlying idea that public policy should be structured to benefit white Americans. And, of course, history echoes in the present. 

Politicians are again talking about deporting Mexicans and other Hispanics, citing concerns about crime and a surplus of labor. New “extreme vetting” policies are being crafted for immigrants and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. And, the Department of Homeland Security posted a notice in the Feb. 15, 2017 Federal Register proposing the collection of social media information for people from China. 

Back in 2015, Steve Bannon, now a top White House official, had a special guest on his radio program: Donald J. Trump.

Trump spoke of his concern about immigration but added, “You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country.” Bannon disagreed, saying: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

In saying this, Bannon not only wildly overestimated the percentage of Silicon Valley professionals of Asian descent, he repeated an old belief: that only white citizens should be a part of this nation’s civic society.

And, that is not liberty. 

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Anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s Arrest

Originally posted by traceloops

On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested in South Africa. He was not released from prison until February 11, 1990. Four years later, he became the first black President of South Africa.

Although Mandela had a complicated relationship with capitalism, he was a leader in the fight for liberty in South Africa. 

Read Cato’s research and commentary on Nelson Mandela: 

• Nelson Mandela’s View of South African ‘Capitalism’ Was Misunderstood by Left and Right
  
• The Longing for Utopia
  
• Criticism of Nelson Mandela Unjust