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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll
Read: because we didn't like the way other people used their property.
Childishness dressed up in language designed to assume a right to an apartment without forthrightly - and honestly - stating that assumption. It's a 'failure' because you wanted it to happen and it didn't. 'Failure' doesn't mean very much more than "something else happened" in that context.
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No, it was a failure because entire neighborhoods were being segregated by racist landlords. That's not how a free market ought to operate. That's not how a free nation ought to operate. Everybody has a right to be a bigot. But, renting property is a responsibility, and part of that responsibility is not discriminating against people for being the wrong color or for wanting to bone the wrong gender of person.
People have collectively decided that their right to live somewhere regardless of the color of their skin trumps a landlord's right to deny someone a lease because of the color of their skin. It's a pretty simple choice.
Property rights don't exist in a vacuum.
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If a newspaper doesn't like a private business, it can refuse advertising space. Potential tenants can boycott. The general public can avoid and badmouth to its heart's content - and I'd normally be right there along with them. But if a tenant still wants to rent from the bigot down the street, that's none of the general public's business. Or yours.
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It is the public's business. When the collective action of a bunch of racist landlords begins to affect people who have nothing to do with said racist landlords, then it becomes the public's business. Renter's rights laws came about because landlords were being douchebags, and that douchebaggery became such a huge problem that lawmakers were persuaded to act. In other words: landlords had the right to rent to whomever they wanted, but couldn't handle it, so that right got taken away. That's often what happens when people can't exercise their unenumerated rights in responsible ways; they lose those rights.
Perhaps the founders were a bit shortsighted in that they specifically failed to include the right to discriminate against entire classes of people when they drafted the bill of rights. Perhaps they believed that the ownership of property shouldn't guarantee the absolute right to do whatever one wants to do with that property.
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I prefer a much less tyrannical majority.
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I prefer much more realistic limitations on property rights.