Ron Paul makes an excellent point about false assumptions regarding white racism

I was reading noted American libertarian Ron’s Paul’s Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues that Affect Our Freedom last night when I came across some interesting thoughts on government measures to force employers to hire minorities, particularly where he attacks: “…the presumption that wherever blacks and whites and others associate freely and to their mutual benefit, and whenever  a person makes accommodation for disability— and this is far more common than one would think from the media—it is due solely to government laws that have forced the issue. The idea here is that if people are left to their own devices, they will always and everywhere choose homogeneity in their social associations. I can’t imagine a stranger view of the human condition.”

The passage concludes: “To me it demonstrates that the supporters of antidiscrimination have an extremely low view of people and their choices.”

Well, of course they do, Ron. Having replaced Christianity with the religion of Equality, they have identified Racism as the modern version of Original Sin – one which has the unique property of only applying to white people. The idea that we’re only capable of behaving decently if the government – acting on advice supplied by non-elective social “experts” - forces us to lies at the heart of the liberal-left’s dismal view of (white) humanity in general and of businessmen in particular. (The same rules do not apply to public sector employers – I once worked in a BBC department which employed upward of two hundred people, only two of whom were black: our hideous whiteness was only alleviated by all the Asians in the finance department.)

I’ve worked in a lot of places since my first holiday job at a laundry 46 years’ ago, and I can’t remember a single instance of someone being fired or not being hired or missing out on promotion because of their colour or because they were disabled. In fact, one of the people working alongside me at Sunlight Laundry was an enormous, muscular African who smelt like a drain, frequently broke off from his work to pray – disconcertingly loudly – and would suffer occasional schizophrenic episodes where he’d go so bonkers that they'd twice had to call the police to restrain him. He was also a very nice fellow (when he'd remembered to take his meds), and – perhaps because of this – our Reg Varney-lookalike manager bent over backwards to keep him on the workforce. I once asked the little cockney why he didn’t get rid of his troublesome employee. ”Poor bloke don’t deserve that,” he replied. “What’s he gonna do wiv himself?”

The only questionable example of workplace discrimination I ever encountered was when a female Coptic Christian news producer working in a department mainly comprised of Muslim males joined a programme team I was advising at the time. I was warned that she’d had “disciplinary issues”, and that this was really her last chance. She turned out to be extremely talented and conscientious and cheerful and was thriving by the time I left a few months’ later. (But of course the very thought that the male Muslims she’d been working with had treated her unfairly because of her gender or her religion is simply unthinkable.)

I’m not saying discrimation never happened in any of the organizations I worked for – I’m just saying I never saw any obvious instances of it. I suspect it would have been the same tale if there had been no laws against discrimination supposedly keeping vicious racism at bay. On the other hand, I worked with at least two people – one black and one Asian – who would undoubtedly have been shown the door a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for their ethnicity. When the black chap was finally sacked for being utterly useless (I was one of the many people who had complained about him) a classic left-liberal white producer turned to me, shook his head, and said, “Of course, they only got rid of him because he’s black.” (I wasn’t in the least surprised when I heard that the sacked producer ended up as some sort of race relations guru at another broadcaster: these roles mainly serve to provoide employment for the terminally unemployable.)

If white British employers are so tribal, so prejudiced, how have the vast majority of the 1.3 milliion East Europeans who now grace this little island been able to find work? (When, a few years' ago, we arrived for a week's stay at a former hunting lodge in the Highlands owned by the National Trust for Scotland, the first four employees we spoke to were all Poles, as were the three people behind the counter at a bakery we visited in Braemar the next day.) I don't suppose employers are happy to employ Poles simply because they work hard, could it? No, of course not – it’s because they see an opportunity to take advantage of them. If immigrants find work, it’s because the British are exploiting them: if they don’t, it’s because the British are racist. Got that?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the British are the most welcoming and tolerant race I’ve ever encountered. Otherwise, the streets really would be running with blood by now. It’s when governments start interfering – by refusing to face the fact that immigration levels are ridiculously, unsustainably high, and by denying Britons the right to employ whoever they wish to employ – well, that’s when resentment begins to stoke up.

Ron Paul’s books is available in PDF form here. As a non-libertarian, I agree with about two-thirds of it (for instance, I’d need a lot of convincing to view that ghastly blister Julian Assange as a doughty defender of liberty). But on the issue of discrimination, he's spot on.