Harvard’s position on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, banning the group from campus until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) is overturned, has always struck me the wrong way. It just doesn’t make sense to punish ROTC cadets for the decisions of anti-gay politicians.

Still, you have to admire Harvard’s stand against DADT (and on behalf of the DREAM Act, for that matter) when you compare it with the moral mushiness recently on display in the case of Martin Peretz. Earlier this month, Peretz, the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, issued some characteristically sweeping denunciations of Muslims, which coincided awkwardly with, first, a plan to establish a Harvard research fellowship in his name, and second, a plan to honor him at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Social Studies program.

Now, we have seen that the university will go to great lengths to defend its gay students—banning all groups that would discriminate against them, even when that means hurting cadets who may very well oppose DADT. And we have seen that Harvard will protect its immigrant students when their presence in this country is threatened.

So, in this current climate of Islamophobia, with mainstream politicians comparing moderate Muslims to Nazis and terrorists, surely Harvard will renounce Peretz at least as squarely as it has renounced DADT and anti-immigrant fear-mongering? Surely refusing the Peretz research fellowship is not too much to ask?

Surely nothing. Harvard is going to keep the money, thank you very much. And reports that Peretz was “disinvited” from speaking at the Social Studies event were exaggerated. In a September 21 email to Social Studies concentrators, Professor Anya Bernstein said that Peretz’s anti-Muslim statements are the “diametric opposite of what we in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies stand for,” but she reiterated that Peretz would still be honored at the event. (As indeed he was, this past Saturday.)

A statement from the university tried to pass this off as a brave stand for freedom of speech: “We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas.” The irony, of course, is that Peretz’s opposition to those basic freedoms is precisely what got him in trouble. He said on his blog earlier this month that it is hard for him to “pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” He apologized, as he had to, but he did not apologize for the statements that “routine and random bloodshed… defines [Muslims'] brotherhood” and that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”

So the question becomes, do we need to be tolerant of intolerance? Harvard’s answer is clear: only if there’s money involved. There’s no need to tolerate intolerance of gays or illegal immigrants. But Peretz’s intolerance of Muslims is just part of the “robust exchange of ideas.”

What should the more principled among us conclude? On the Harvard Political Review’s blog, Max Novendstern proposes that we adopt what he calls the “intent/effect principle”: Speech that hurts others by design is clearly repugnant to the university atmosphere, but speech that hurts others unintentionally is “the direct consequence of diversity itself, of high contact struggles between people of genuine difference.”

Novendstern’s paean to “the unease of the new, the uncomfortable, the forbidden” is admirable and articulate, but his intent/effect principle is, in the end, unworkable. The line between what is hurtful-by-design and what is hurtful-in-effect could never be drawn reliably. Intent to harm is a very high bar, and a lot of reprehensible people and statements would not clear it.

The key, of course, is that we aren’t talking about censoring Peretz or taking him “away from the table,” to borrow Novendstern’s terminology. We’re just talking about refusing to honor him. Peretz is welcome to come to campus to express his views, and anybody who shouts him down or disrupts his speech should be ashamed.

But the Peretz fellowship is different. It will inevitably bear the university’s seal of approval. Yes, of course there have been problematic donations in Harvard’s past; just imagine how many donors must have owned slaves. But the modern university is a more self-conscious place, and that’s by and large a good thing—it contributes to an atmosphere of inclusivity.

The editors of the Harvard Crimson downplay such symbolic concerns; for them, all that matters is the tangible good that the Peretz fellowship might do. But symbolism matters: It helps to define what our community values, and what it doesn’t. And if ever there was a time when Harvard needed to take a symbolic stand, to demonstrate its core values to the world, this was it. I can only imagine how difficult the last couple of months have been for Muslims at Harvard and elsewhere, to see their community vilified, their holy book desecrated, their motives suspected.

In this context, Harvard’s Muslim community deserved more than perfunctory noises about the evils of bigotry. It deserved something on par with the support Harvard has offered to gay men and women through its opposition to DADT, and to illegal immigrants through its support of the DREAM Act. As an Economist blogger recently pointed out, the Peretz affair and others like it help to “delineate the boundaries of acceptable discourse.” Unfortunately, Harvard has only helped to blur them.

Rand Paul

Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent libertarian,” that he “picks and chooses” appropriate targets for government intervention and contends that eliminating racism in the workplace is an illegitimate function of government. Specifically, Rand Paul is pro-life and supports laws against abortion, but says he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act had he been in Congress in 1964.

In Sam’s estimation, Mr. Paul is not racist in the sense that he wears a white hood and burns crosses, but in the sense that, in the words of the illustrious Mr. Kanye West, he “does not care about black people.” Sam’s post rightly implies that the bar for calling someone the “R-word” should be relatively high, a standard many of his fellow partisans have often ignored: witness Sen. John Edwards’s absurd insinuation in the 2004 vice presidential debate that Dick Cheney was racist because he voted against the holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., while in Congress, or Rep. Diane Watson, an African American congresswoman who condemned her Republican colleagues for the mere act of opposing “the first president who looks like” her, or the relentless attempts by the media to indict the Tea Partiers as a reincarnation of the KKK (we know this is not true, by the way, since if it were, the President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate would be scrambling to join its ranks). Sam’s accusation, unlike many leveled by trigger-happy race-baiting Democrats, is reasonable and deserves an answer. I should explain at the outset that I am not a libertarian per se, that I supported Trey Grayson, Rand Paul’s erstwhile opponent in the Republican primary, and that I have no intention of passing either positive or negative judgment on the Civil Rights Act. What I will argue here is that simultaneous opposition to anti-discrimination policies and support of anti-abortion laws does not a racist make. The reader will have to excuse the length of this post; such a serious charge requires a thorough response.

In Economics 1017, Professor Jeffrey A. Miron, Harvard’s foremost authority on libertarianism, provides an analysis of racial discrimination in the workplace from a libertarian perspective (and luckily for the HPR, I retained my lecture notes from the course). The economic model of discrimination, he explains, begins with the assumption that some people have a “taste” for discrimination, which in this case means people prefer hiring or buying from only persons of a certain race. As any graduate of Ec-10 knows, a free market will in theory drive racist employers out of business. Assume, for example, that some white employers do not like hiring blacks. This preference initially reduces the demand for black employees and reduces their wages, but this results in any employer with non-discriminatory preferences obtaining a cost advantage by hiring black employees. Since the non-discriminating firms have lower costs, they can set lower prices and take profits away from the discriminating firms. The discriminating firms exit the industry as they lose money, which then reduces the demand for white relative to black employees, and results in equal wages for blacks and whites in equilibrium. I would add to this that the economic disincentive to refrain from serving minority customers is even more obvious: business owners who choose not to serve an arbitrary segment of the population put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by depriving themselves of access to a broad swath of the market. In theory, therefore, competitive markets provide a potentially strong counterweight to employer discrimination.

An alternative assumption is that discriminatory preferences come from customers. For example, suppose restaurant patrons prefer to be served by white waiters, meaning they are willing to pay a higher price even if the quality of service is the same. In this case, Miron notes, a higher wage for white waiters can persist in equilibrium, but even here there are economic pressures that counteract the discriminatory preferences of customers. For one thing, restaurant owners face higher costs than they would if they could use both white and black wait staff, so they might still use both if customer discrimination is weak. And since some customers presumably do not care, the benefits of accommodating the customers with discriminatory preferences are potentially small. The same logic, incidentally, applies to situations in which some whites prefer not to be served in an establishment that accommodates blacks. A priori reasoning thus indicates that economic forces are likely to hinder discrimination in the workplace. As an example, Miron cites Levine, Levkov, and Rubinstein (2008), who determine that increased competition resulting from deregulation in the banking industry from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s reduced both the racial wage gap and racial segregation in the workplace, particularly in states with a comparatively high degree of racial prejudice.

That said, Miron explains that what is known as “statistical discrimination” in employment may be rational as a result of the correlation of unobservable factors, such as educational achievement and general competence in the workplace, with observable factors like race. If African Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor workers because they receive disproportionately poor educations, in other words, then it can be rational for employers to use race as a proxy for the less observable characteristics of intelligence and competence. The fact that statistical discrimination might be rational, as Miron points out, does not mean it is acceptable. But if statistical discrimination is the underlying cause of workplace discrimination, improving the quality of education offered to minorities is likely to be more effective than direct anti-discrimination policies à la the Civil Rights Act. Incidentally, Republicans have long advocated school choice through government vouchers to improve education within minority communities, an effort that has been blocked by teachers’ unions and their allies among congressional Democrats.

Assuming workplace discrimination is based on employer or consumer preferences rather than statistical correlation with unobservable traits, policy may undertake to counteract discrimination either by prohibiting it in hiring, promotion, firing, establishing wages, selecting customers to serve, and so forth, or, in the job market, by “affirmatively” promoting the hiring of targeted groups through quotas. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, among other things, ended racial discrimination in all federal government agencies and organizations receiving federal support, and prohibited discrimination in the private sector to the extent permitted under the Constitution. While the private sector provisions probably had some impact, Sam’s opinion that “Paul gets the Civil Rights Act completely wrong” because the “ban on private discrimination was absolutely central to its achievement” is hardly a matter of scholarly consensus. I couldn’t agree more, by the way, with Max Novendstern’s comment in his response to Sam’s post that the Civil Rights Act should be judged based on its “material consequences, not just (and not primarily) the soundness of its ethical claims.” Although black-white wage differentials have declined substantially over the past fifty years, Miron points out that the gap began declining before the federal government adopted anti-discrimination policies, and that there is little dispute that “forces other than anti-discrimination policy played a significant role in reducing race … wage differentials.” One plausible candidate that he mentions is increasing educational attainment by African Americans. In “Catching Up: Wages of Black Men” in The American Economic Review, Finis Welch notes that he and James P. Smith observed that although the relative wages of blacks increased in the decades after 1960, “there was little evidence of improvement within cohort”; the narrowing wage gap was in other words a result of younger African Americans receiving better wages rather than increased wages for blacks already in the workforce (Smith and Welch, 1977, 1984, 1989). Although there were clear employment shifts toward industries with concentrations of firms presumed to be more sensitive to affirmative-action pressures, the wage gains were “pervasive and not restricted to these industries.” For these reasons, Smith and Welch conclude that improvements in the quantity and quality of schooling were more important in decreasing workplace discrimination than federal legislation. Miron further points out that the Civil Rights Act was accompanied by Justice Department suits against Jim Crow laws (which, let’s not forget, were racist government interventions frequently opposed by profit-seeking private firms) as well as private actions including boycotts and protests in the South. So while some academics and policymakers contend that the Civil Rights Act was crucial to eliminating racism, others have argued that it was unnecessary, and, as Miron points out, “reasonable people can disagree.”

One might assume that the Civil Rights Act was justified if it succeeded even to a very minor degree in eradicating racism in the private sector. This is a legitimate position, to be sure, but the fundamental libertarian philosophy as articulated by Professor Miron, which Sam appears to overlook, is that while the free market often delivers imperfect outcomes, government intervention generally does more harm than good. It is therefore necessary to examine the potential costs of anti-discrimination policy, including those that may accrue to the very minority communities they are intended to help, before arriving at a final evaluation. For one thing, libertarians often contend that the distinction between merely banning employment discrimination on the one hand, and implementing racial quotas on the other, is not meaningful in practice, since without affirmative action there is no way to enforce fair hiring practices (employers, in other words, can always claim that whites are simply more qualified). And Miron explains that affirmative action entails potentially draconian costs, including perpetuated negative stereotypes of minority communities (i.e., the perception that minorities are unable to find employment without the government’s help), resentment among non-minorities (i.e., whites who feel cheated out of positions for which they are more qualified), reduced educational attainment and effort within minority communities (i.e., reduced incentive for minority communities to improve themselves if the government guarantees them a certain number of jobs), and reduced efficiency (i.e., firms cannot hire the most qualified employees). But Miron explains that even anti-discrimination measures by themselves might do more harm than good. If an employer knows he might get penalized for firing, or not promoting, or not giving a raise to a minority employee, it might make sense to avoid hiring members of the protected group in the first place. One prominent example of this is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which requires employers to accommodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) observe a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect, and ironically isolate the ADA itself as the likely cause. Sam’s libertarian straw man advocates the right to do “whatever you want with what’s yours,” even if it means “perpetuating a system of race-based subordination.” While it would be difficult to oppose a government effort to eradicate discrimination that reliably produced results in excess of its costs, Miron points out that policy cannot ban discrimination without endorsing the view that firms are partially “public” and can be told to operate in “socially” approved ways. Even if this does more good than harm in the context of discrimination, he says, blurring the private/public distinction might legitimize ill-advised government intervention in other areas. All this is to say nothing of the deadweight loss from taxation needed to fund the personnel who enforce the laws. So the notion that anti-discrimination legislation in general, and the Civil Rights Act in particular, is an unequivocal good is far from accurate.

For pro-life libertarians like Rand Paul, the cost-benefit equation with respect to abortion is substantially different. Abortion restrictions, like anti-discrimination laws, undoubtedly entail costs. The difference is that pro-lifers equate the termination of unwanted pregnancies (at least those that do not result from rape or incest and do not threaten the mother’s life) with murder. Prohibiting abortion is therefore an attempt to prevent the needless slaughter of innocent human life, which, unlike ensuring equal employment opportunities for every citizen, is justified at virtually any cost. In the most recent issue of the Harvard Salient, Roger G. Waite notes that the United States has the highest abortion rate in the developed world, as well as a legal system extremely permissive of abortion. This does not imply causation, but it’s difficult to imagine that laws against abortion would increase the number of abortions, or that our high abortion rate results from Americans’ moral depravity (or, as Mr. Waite posits, the structure of our health care system). A true libertarian who opposes the Civil Rights Act and supports anti-abortion laws, therefore, is not being inconsistent, but making a rational cost-benefit analysis of government intervention in two distinct cases.

Sam ends his post by invoking the questions Ezra Klein poses to Mr. Paul as to whether the federal government can set the private sector’s minimum wage, tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants, tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform, tell toy companies to test for lead, or tell liquor stores not to sell to minors. I’ll spare you the explanations, but I can assure you that what Sam calls “consistent libertarians” can indeed oppose each of these forms of intervention, or oppose some and not others, according to a rational cost-benefit analysis. Sam and Mr. Klein might reach different conclusions, but this does not imply that libertarians or Mr. Paul are “willfully blind and insensitive to racism.”

None of this is to say that I endorse or condemn either anti-discrimination policies or the libertarian response thereto. The point is that it is entirely possible for Rand Paul to be a consistent libertarian, and not to be a racist, while both opposing the Civil Rights Act and supporting legal restrictions on abortion. Perhaps Mr. Paul is racist, but not by virtue of anything he has said about the Civil Rights Act. It is important to hold politicians accountable on an issue as fundamental as race, and I do not fault Sam for raising this accusation given Mr. Paul’s opposition to landmark civil rights legislation. I would advise Sam, however, that a valid charge of racism must withstand the strictest of scrutiny. This one does not.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I am struck by a few things from Peyton’s post, and I want to pull them out and talk about them directly.

First, Peyton argues that we should not consider the FICA tax when assessing the overall progressivity of the tax system, because, he says, those who pay FICA taxes “receive direct monetary benefits during retirement.” The idea here seems to be, if I may put it crudely, it’s not really a tax if you’re getting it back eventually. But when conservatives lament the overall tax burden that falls on, say, the top 5% of American earners, I am pretty sure they include FICA. Otherwise, taxes would seem pretty darn low! Moreover, the FICA tax isn’t the only one that is remitted back to the people in the form of some service or benefit. Peyton helpfully lists these: “the U.S. military, benefits for veterans and federal retirees, federal support for education, transportation and infrastructure, and international affairs, and the numerous other areas of federal spending not directly tied to workers’ retirement welfare.” Now, liberals and conservatives disagree about how much money should be spent on such things, and how cost-effective our current spending is, but we don’t try to calculate what proportion of our taxes is eventually remitted back to us in the form of services and benefits, and then say that only the remainder, only the waste that is, is our real tax burden. To sum up, taxes are taxes.

Second, Peyton responds to the point that everybody also has to pay state and local taxes by saying that these taxes “vary tremendously from state to state and from locality to locality.” Of course. But Republicans and conservatives media figures have been pushing the narrative for at least a week that 47% of Americans just don’t pay taxes, period. Even when they take care to say “federal” taxes (which they don’t always do, as I found out yesterday when I flipped to Fox News), the implication is clear to everyone: half the country is a bunch of freeloaders, and the other half is paying their way. One Tea Party sign, quoted by the New York Times today, read: ““I’m the 50 percent stuck paying for the other 50 percent.” If that were true, it would be quite objectionable. But it’s just not true, and the existence of state and local taxes makes it not true. Peyton can’t do these two things at once: recognize basic facts about our system of government, and imitate or justify the moral outrage of the Tea Partiers.

Finally, Peyton has a very interesting psychological argument about how voters who don’t pay much in taxes might not be responsible stewards of our fiscal future. But I don’t understand the leap from saying “I ultimately don’t pay the federal government any income taxes” to saying “I have no stake in anything the federal government funds.” Obviously this is the kind of thing that’s easier to say than to show, but I just don’t think people reason like that. It’s not that Peyton’s being too cynical, as he worries. It’s that he’s not being cynical enough! Voters don’t go through those sorts of calculations. Many if not most people vote out of atavistic party loyalty; many others vote based on the personal characteristics of candidates; many vote on symbolic issues or issues unrelated to taxing and spending; and many people who care about the deficit also don’t much in federal income taxes (unless we are to suppose that all fiscal conservatives are in the top 53%).

I also object to Peyton’s claim that “Such programs are all benefit and no cost for the bottom 47 percent of the country.” Just to pick an easy target, I hardly think it’s the case that military spending is all benefit and no cost for the poorest Americans. Not when they’re the ones fighting our wars.

Ultimately, I agree with Peyton that this debate comes down to irreconcilable moral positions. But I still think we need to get our facts straight, and talk about these issues with complete candor and statistical rigor. And as for the moral side, I’ll just say this: Peyton might be right that all citizens ought to have a stake in how the government spends its money, but I’m not willing to worsen the living conditions of the working and middle classes just to satisfy this abstraction.

Photo credit: Ezra Klein

First, Sam Barr notes in his comment on my original post that it is unfair to focus on the income tax in isolation, since “[T]he FICA tax, property taxes, sales taxes, and excise taxes” are regressive.” We’ll begin with the FICA and excise taxes, since the other two Sam mentions are levied at the state and local level. As I have already mentioned, excise taxes, while regressive, accounted for only three percent of federal revenue in FY2008, and much of this was derived from taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and recreational goods. As I also noted, the FICA is levied on both employees and employers to fund Social Security and Medicare, from which employees receive direct monetary benefits during retirement. Since the bottom two quintiles actually profit from the federal income tax system, the only reason the red federal tax bars in Max’s graph do not extend below the x-axis for the “Lowest 20%” and “Second 20%” of income earners is because of payroll taxes, which directly fund the retirement of these same people.

Max correctly refutes my claim that “for nearly half of American households this year, April 15 will be no different from any other day,” since I failed to mention that I had been referring to federal taxes. Virtually all citizens, of course, pay state and local taxes, such as property taxes, sales taxes, and state-level income taxes. The first and most obvious response to this is that taxes vary tremendously from state to state and from locality to locality, meaning that, while the CBO’s “effective tax rate” might be accurate in some sense for the country as a whole, the overall rate is much more progressive in, say, Knoxville, Tennessee, than in New York City.

But the more salient (sorry) issue here is the notion that there is no important distinction between federal and state taxes, and that pointing out that 73 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the top 10 percent of income earners—never mind the effects of corporate and estate taxes—results from a “confusion between share of taxes being paid and tax rate.” While there may not be a significant economic distinction between federal and state taxes, this distinction is quite important in political terms, as is the proportion of federal taxes paid by various economic strata. It is quite reasonable to say that taxes should be levied according to citizens’ ability to pay, but it is also reasonable to point out that 47 percent of the country has virtually no stake in funding the U.S. military, benefits for veterans and federal retirees, federal support for education, transportation and infrastructure, and international affairs, and the numerous other areas of federal spending not directly tied to workers’ retirement welfare. Such programs are all benefit and no cost for the bottom 47 percent of the country, and very little cost for a great many more. Is it unreasonable to speculate that such voters go to the polls with far less concern about the deficit, or federal fiscal policy in general, than those who are footing the bill? Is it alarmist to suggest that a system in which so many citizens have little if any stake in the nation’s fiscal future is a recipe for disaster? One might argue that I am being too cynical about the way voters think, or that I simply misunderstand how voters go about choosing candidates, but this is anything but an illegitimate concern.

It is difficult for me to respond to Max’s arguments concerning economic justice given our seemingly irreconcilable definitions of this concept. I tend to approach the tax policy debate with the assumption, naïve though it may well be, that people generally have money because they earned it, and that, although there are few causes more important than helping the poor, this generally lies outside the domain of government. He is correct, however, when he says I imply “that taxes divide us”: they divide us politically in the sense that they require a very small proportion of citizens to fund what he terms the “American communal project,” or virtually every federal spending program outside Social Security and Medicare. Those who are legitimately unable to pay taxes (i.e., those living in poverty) should not be required to do so. But those who are not impoverished should have a non-negligible stake in the portion of federal spending that pays for the services enjoyed by the entire country. My hunch is that this would include more than 53 percent of Americans.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia.

The majority view was that, even though stricter regulation “might result in fewer internship opportunities, this cost is worth the elimination of discrimination” against interns who can’t afford to work for free. The dissenters, meanwhile, insisted that the Labor Department’s move “would even the playing field, but it would do so by reducing opportunity for all.”

I appreciate the temptation to chalk up differences of opinion to ideological disagreement (you like opportunity, I like equality), but I think this is a case where the real disagreement is over facts. The pro-payment Crimson editors started to get at this when they wrote that “the number of opportunities for internships might not decrease as much as would be presumed.” They pointed out, for instance, that Atlantic Media has already magically discovered that it can pay its interns after all. But they don’t really elaborate on the reason why this would be so. What’s going on here?

The reality, I believe, is that many firms that don’t currently pay their interns can afford to. (Obviously many non-profits are excepted from that generalization, but probably not all.) So why wouldn’t they pay? For one thing, they don’t have to because there’s such a glut of talented, eager, well-credentialed, and well-heeled college students. But I also think that part of the reason is that, if you don’t pay interns, you don’t really have to take responsibility for them. That is, I take the opposite view from Jeff Kalmus, who commented on Max’s post, saying that “the lack of pay reminds the employer that the intern should receive nonmonetary benefits such as interesting projects.” On the contrary, I think that when you pay someone, you try to get your money’s worth; and when you don’t, you’re more likely to assign trivial tasks or none at all.

Of course some employers will be virtuous and will think like Jeff. The place I worked at last summer certainly gave me substantive work, even though I wasn’t paid. But we’re talking in broad strokes here. I think that there’s a perverse culture of unpaid internships from which nobody, not the interns and not the employers, benefits. The interns don’t benefit from being made to clean bathrooms, like one intern interviewed for the Times article. And, crucially, employers don’t benefit from that sort of thing either. I think that many firms just crowd up their offices with well-dressed warm bodies, not giving them much to do because what’s the point, they’ll be gone in two months anyway and it’s not like we’re paying them.

If that’s true, requiring that internships either provide meaningful educational experience, or fair pay, will actually benefit both students and employers. It won’t reduce opportunity at the cost of fairness, but increase opportunity for many interns who will now be assigned more substantive work and paid for it to boot.

At the most basic level, all I’m really saying is this: If you want someone to provide the services of an employee, pay them. If you can’t afford to pay them, then you really have no business hiring them at all. Or, feel free to hire them and not pay them, but give them a genuine internship, where they shadow an actual employee and get a lot of hands-on experience. But you just can’t tell me that “opportunity” is so important that we need to be scrubbing toilets and doing coffee runs for free.

Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Since we began three weeks ago, debate on this site has been spirited and engaged: we’ve taken on the racial politics of Avatar, praised Obama’s “shrewd” bank tax, discussed the “ Sociology of Mankiw” and the “ Dim Prospects for Meaningful Financial Reform.” We’ve blogged ruefully about congressional dysfunction here, here and here; called Ross Douthat out for “ phony moderateness;” noted the Harvard Republicans Club new blog; and discussed the Tea Party movement here, here and here. We talked about how we read, and then how the Yalie s do it. We praised Drew Faust for crowdsourcing diabetes research, and then speculated on transfomative implications of Harvard Thinks Big. We debated whether Asians were discriminated against by college admission committees here and here. We asked whether math teaches us how to be good citizens. And we blogged about Iran here and here, Yemen here, China here, Greece here and Israel here, here and (provocatively) here. And much more besides: we’ve written about Citizens United, Scott Brown, sex education, gay marriage, David Paterson, Valerie Jarrett at the Harvard Forum, religion on campus, and more.

It’s been an exciting few weeks in American politics, and the HPRgument has been a part of the discussion — tracing its contours, staking out positions, calling out phonies. And it’s only the beginning. We’ve got a lot more to come.

To students and organizations on campus: if you’re interested in contributing to the HPRgument — in blogging, guest blogging, crossposting photos or articles, publicizing events, telling us how to improve — please contact me, Max Novendstern (mnovends@fas.harvard.edu) or the The Harvard Political Review’s Editor-in-Chief Sam Barr (sbarr@fas.harvard.edu). Thanks my friends. Stay engaged.

Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2009.

One way to understand the relationship between liberty and equality is to acknowledge that while the state doesn’t have to sanction anything (to, in Daniel’s words, grant “imprimatur on your relationship”), it does have to protect people’s free pursuit of social goods, marriage included among these. And if the state denies that protection to some but not others than that’s both an issue of liberty and an issue equality.

That’s the basic point of this post: my contention that even if we accept a minimalist state and the libertarian premise that nothing that comes out of a committee is, in itself, a “liberty/civil right/thing of justice/commandment” we can still understand the connection between liberty and equality to be something other than grotesquely confused, and we can still understand why the state should protect access to marriage for all.

Click over the jump for the argument.

First, note that I said “protect access” to marriage, not just “provide for marriage.” It only happens to be the case that marriage is actually provided by the state; it could also, conceivably, be simply protected by the state. So for our purposes, it’s easier to think of marriage of as just another social good — like money or happiness or health.

We can probably all agree that people are entitled to pursue these social goods as they see fit — that people are, in other words, free to “pursue their own ends.” That is natural rights theory; it’s a belief that our own freedom is embedded, somehow, in our humanness, in our having Selves. And if we agree on this, we can probably also agree that the state, at the very least, must protect this right; according to libertarians, in fact, that’s its raison d’etre: the state keeps us safe, protects our property, protects our transactions, and, otherwise, leaves us free to do what we please (so long as we don’t impinge on others’ ability to do the same).

If we’re all born with Selves that have rights, we are also born (we can probably agree) with certain identities on top of those fundamental Selves — we have a race, a gender, a nationality, a socioeconomic status, a sexual orientation and so on — and that our membership in these groups is both arbitrary and non-transferable: I, Max Novendstern, alas, am not free to be a female or a WASP; I am a member of two groups that are decidedly neither!

So the question is: what if those latter identities threaten the freedoms of my prior Self? That’s a big problem! What if my inherited membership into one group translates, because of the tendencies of my society, into the systematic deprivation of my access to social goods? Well, now the innocuous unfreedom of my identity (its arbitrariness) becomes a much graver, fundamental unfreedom of restricted access (my inability to freely pursue my own ends).

None of this is idle speculation. In America, at least, this is often the nature of unfreedom: the coupling of identity with access.

The result, of course, is inequality. Some have identities that are tagged as “deserving” social domination and radical deprivation, and others don’t. And if I inherited an identity and that identity causes my persecution (ie my restricted access to pursue social goods which is my definitional freedom as an individual) then not only is that just too bad for me, but it has little to do with the freedom of other’s who don’t have my identity. Persecution is distributed unevenly.

That’s how libety and equality are logically connected. Discrimination, which is persecution based on unevenly distributed identities, is ispso facto an affront to both liberty and equality at once.

Please note too that in the course of this entire argument I’ve said nothing about the distinction between “rights” and “privileges”. The privilege/rights debate is something of canard. Whether voting or drinking at a water fountain or marriage is a “right” or a “privilege” is not the issue here. What is the issue is my established human right to pursue social goods freely. This is, after all, what classical liberal “market freedom” is all about: not the “state’s imprimatur” on my “right” to a nicer car, but the state’s protection of my right to freely attempt to make my preferences for said car effective. The case of marriage is no different. I’m surprised that libertarians regularly miss this point. When the state intervenes, it is not to “establish a freedom” to but to correct, as it were, an imperfectly distributed zone of free action.

We don’t, in other words, have to ask the state to grant approval of any ends; we only need to affirm a prior right to pursue them; and this right should be distributed evenly, regardless of identity.

(But Max, can this occur in practice? Can the state protect our prior freedoms to pursue ends without “establishing” those ends as public morality? Perhaps not, but this is the libertarian’s problem not my own: if they can’t create a state that can protect their own conception of freedom without undermining it…well, maybe they should rethink things.)

To conclude, I’ll just point out that I also the think the state’s role in this is not the operative question. Of course the state needs to protect access, but, in reality, much of the struggle against discrimination (the struggle for liberty and equality) is negotiated outside the sphere of direct state power. The Civil Rights Movements did not begin in Washington, DC — it began in the basements of Baptist Churches — and it did not end their either. Marriage, likewise, is only one aspect of a larger fight, the longer war against the pathologies of identity politics (racism, sexism, homophobia); a war that has little to do with the state, and one that has much to do with the strength of our own civil association.

And that is something, if you think about it, that libertarians should applaud.