Sometimes liberty is finite and must be redistributed

The Civil Rights Act was a triumph of people willing to recognize that, to increase the liberty of black Americans, you had to reduce the freedom of whites to practice discrimination. By 1964, the 1st Amendment’s principles of freedom of association and federalism (emphasis mine):

… had been used as weapons against black Americans, and esoteric concerns seem less important than being unable to eat or get a hotel you’re willing and able to pay for as you drive across your own country. This sort of adherence to principle at the expense of the tangible freedom of millions of African Americans sent a clear message of whose liberty received priority.

Of course the unwillingness of motels and restaurants to serve blacks was just the tip of the iceberg.

Obamacare is also redistributing liberty. Millions of Americans once shut out of the health insurance market (who could otherwise pay) are now able to gain coverage, which is a huge deal. Of course, there was no way to do that other than to force insurers to accept them, which requires the other two legs of the stool.

The first piece above also confronts libertarians for not seeing the world as it is, by embracing a view that racism has abated to the point where it doesn’t affect the daily lives of black Americans. Unfortunately this view is in no way limited to libertarians and couldn’t be more wrong. When people think that government interference in markets or taxation are the major things that blacks have to fear, they’re going to propose policies that are hopelessly out of touch with the real world.

Related: Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the damage done by housing discrimination:

Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.

…If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn’t need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally injures, but does not bruise.

Bug Fixes: the Hidden Value of JS Libraries

Paul Irish points out a huge value added from jQuery that few people (even the jQuery home page) seem to acknowledge, which is that it transparently works around dozens of browser bugs. If you consider older versions of jQuery this is probably more like hundreds of bugs, and many of them have been big showstoppers that even crashed browsers.

Fans of the “vanilla.js” movement—an understandable reaction to mindless library use—tend to understate what a minefield browser APIs tend to be when you consider the wide variety of browsers in use (take a sobering dip into your site’s browser stats). There’s nothing wrong with using and learning the real APIs, of course. There are big sections of DOM, Events, and friends that are very well supported, but if you’re not extremely careful, as soon as your site picks up traffic you can count on “vanilla” code breaking for users with browsers that don’t auto-update.

The moral: Even if you’re a JS pro and know the native APIs, if you’re doing anything substantial with them, then using jQuery—or some other battle-tested library—isn’t so mindless; you’re improving UX for some end users.

Why doesn’t someone create a library that just fixes the bugs? Dean Edwards was an early experimenter here with base2 and IE7.js, but as far as I remember these were mostly combed over by the JS nerds who were working on their own libs. Combining workarounds with other useful bits just gave you more bang for the buck, and, frankly, the standard APIs like DOM have never been particularly elegant to work with anyway (it took the W3C way too long to even acknowledge that giving devs the ability to parse markup (innerHTML) was something browsers might want to offer!).