Women and Big Government

Women are naturally pro big government. Since they cannot physically prevail against the larger male, they must rely on convincing one or more males to defend them. By passing laws that they think will require males to defend them, they see big government as a form of legal jiu-jitsu. Before Women's Suffrage women had to convince their male acquaintances of the necessity of such laws in spite of the more powerful and dangerous government the laws imply. Once they obtained the vote, it became obvious that they no longer needed the acquiescence of the males - they could, as in jiu-jitsu, use the male's strength against himself, so to speak. Thus we see that, after a century of women voting, government has grown into a nanny state - providing the female with not only protection against physical harm, but guaranteeing food, shelter, health care and anything else her little heart desires. The Welfare State is the direct result of Women's Suffrage. In fact, it has evolved to the point that, in the welfare class, the presence of the male is actually discouraged.

The historic flaw in democracy is the Tyranny of the Majority, i.e., the tendency of 51% of the electorate voting to have the remaining 49% for dinner (and not as guests!). Since there is naturally a slight majority of females in the population, there is a ready-made majority to exploit. The Left has done just that, with the constant drumbeat of more promised security, more freebies, more equality, etc., that appeal to the supposedly underdog females. The fact that, in almost every election, the female vote is significantly in favor of more government proves the point.

Western Civilization was built by males, and over centuries ceded many rights and protections to women. But ceding control will almost certainly be its downfall.

Discrimination

This essay was written in the 1980's and published on OpEds.com in 2005.  Its relevance to the U. S. scene seems to increase with each passing year.

Discrimination, particularly racial, has commanded the limelight of the media and the almost undivided attention of the citizenry in America for most of the last half of the Twentieth Century. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, opened the floodgates. Since then there have been uncountable laws and rules written, bureaucracies created, suits filed and children bused, wheelchair ramps built and parking places painted, all trying to eliminate both real and imagined discrimination in every possible form. Some of the more blatant cases of discrimination, particularly those denying equal protection under the law, have been eliminated or at least minimized, but in many cases there has been only exchange of one form of discrimination for another.

The existence of discrimination in a society is indicative of a more fundamental underlying problem. Discrimination can only exist when there are identifiable factions in the society. A homogenous population defies discrimination, since there is no identifiable attribute upon which to target individuals to discriminate against. But since most social systems develop identifiable factions sooner or later, it ultimately becomes necessary to address the subject of discrimination of one faction against another.

The solution that has been proposed and attempted by the simple-minded idealists is to legislate the problem away by defining any and all discrimination as illegal. This is the current state of affairs in the United States, but the approach has two shortcomings. The first is the fact that laws are only definitions and no real problem has ever been solved solely by trying to define it out of existence. The second shortcoming stems from the reality that not all discrimination is unjustifiable.

In a social system based upon the principle that all members are equal under the law, no discrimination by the government against any law-abiding citizen should be condoned. The social system as a whole can afford the luxury of presupposing innocence of each individual and only discriminating against those that have been proven as undeserving by due process of law. Relative to the individual the state has virtually unlimited resources, and therefore it is reasonable for the government to amortize the risk of possible damage by an individual over the population. For the individual, however, the situation is very different. Not only is the average citizen blessed with modest resources, but also above all he (or she) is a mortal. As such, survival demands that the individual use any and all information at his disposal to protect his life and property from a hostile world. If experience, valid information acquired from others, or even unfounded rumor suggests that additional risk is associated with the members of any group, the individual must be allowed to take such information into consideration in his dealings with the group. This is true whether the identification of the group is based on race, creed, sex, political affiliation, length of hair, style of dress, or just plain ugliness. Mortality and limited resources deny the individual the otherwise noble philosophy of judging everyone innocent unless proven guilty. In addition, it is unreasonable to expect the state to protect an individual from all risk, and it is even more unreasonable for the state to force any individual to assume additional risk.

A gray area exists with respect to private organizations. If an organization is sufficiently large it would seem reasonable to require it, like the society as a whole, to amortize the risk of each individual over all the individuals with which it interacts. The problem exists in determining where to draw the line as to whether or not each particular organization is 'sufficiently large'. Not only is the wisdom necessary to make such a determination beyond any mortal, and especially beyond those that usually try, but the existence of such an arbitrary 'cut-off' only serves to complicate the subject discrimination, not to eliminate it. An exception to this might be corporations, since a corporation is an entity created by the government and enjoys several legal advantages by virtue thereof. It is not mortal and by definition has limited liability. It would therefore be reasonable to deny it an exemption from anti-discrimination law.



Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that group or faction based discrimination does create a burden on the targeted individuals. In addition, the severity of the burden increases as the relative size of the targeted faction decreases. One of the primary factors of the discriminatory burden is the cost to the targeted individual in determining by trial and error whether he or she will be subject to discrimination in dealings with others. It is therefore proposed that a reasonable, proper and adequate measure to protect the rights of all parties is to require any discriminatory behavior on the part of all private business entities to be publicly declared. Such declaration would at a minimum entail a declaration of discriminatory bias in every advertisement published or displayed by the entity desiring to discriminate. Failure to properly declare bias would then expose the guilty party to criminal prosecution or civil suit.

This approach has several attractive features. First and foremost, it retains the inalienable right of the individual to minimize his risks in the necessary day to day dealings with his fellow man. It puts the burden of action on those that wish to discriminate, but in such a way that protects the privacy and autonomy of the individual. An individual that has no public business dealings with others is unaffected by the rule. It addresses all forms of discrimination without explicitly reciting a list of particulars. It spares those targeted by a properly declared discriminatory policy from the cost and embarrassment of attempting to interact with the discriminating faction, and in addition allows all concerned who are offended by a particular case of discrimination to boycott the business. Last but not least, it spares the society the greater costs of the inevitable failure ensured by attempting to regulate day to day behavior of a large segment of the population by government decree.