DOUGLAS WILSON:
Liars are usually clever — you have to give them that. And one of the things the really smart ones know how to do is to use the last lie you caught them in as a basis for getting you to believe the lie they are currently telling. Take the specter of Jim Crow laws and the current “scratch a liberal, find a totalitarian” frenzy that we have going on right now. Or, as Iowahawk aptly put it, “Hey, great job, ‘coexist’ bumper sticker community.”
The enabling problem with Jim Crow laws was the fact that they were LAWS. The sin involved was bigotry. The crime involved was coercion by the state. Bigots focus on the fact that people are white or black, and they run screaming to their first refuge, which is “there oughta be a law” that mandates the imposition of their bigotries. Entrepreneurs notice that everybody’s money is green, and they don’t demand that anybody do anything. And in a mixed community, where the free market is allowed to work, the general result is cosmopolitan.