Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity.
Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.
People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people.
Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?
You're absolutely right. I should clarify that I mean that the societies in the advanced world have grown more unfair over the last 120 years.
>laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.
Laws against interracial marriage in the US were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony. But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed.
On the other hand, new laws have been created that force individuals to pay for the costs of other people's personal choices. If a person engages in rampant promiscuity for instance, and contracts a sexually transmitted disease, others are forced, at pain of imprisonment, to pay the costs of their medical care.
Just as laws prohibiting homosexuality were once popular, laws mandating that individuals pay the costs of others' medical care are very popular today. Popularity is not a measure of justice.
Occupational licensing is another area that has grown increasingly unjust. In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today it's over 25 percent. The growing restrictions on economic participation have harmed millions of people and exacerbated income inequality. [1]
Government spending meanwhile is increasingly creating a set of haves and have-nots. The majority of the wealthiest counties in the US are now suburbs of Washington DC. [2] The average Congressperson in the US makes well over ten times more once they become a lobbyist than they did while they were in office. [3] The pay gap between federal employees and workers in general continues to increase. [4]
The power of public servants continues to increase thanks to unionization and collective bargaining, resulting in this class of workers extracting more economic rent, while the quality of the public services suffers. [5]
And then we have privacy rights. The Snowden revelations showed us that society has never before been subject to such extensive surveillance of its private activities and interactions. This is an extreme systemic danger, and very likely has numerous malignant effects that are unknown, e.g. contributes to the centralisation of economic power, as a result of the information asymmetry it creates.
> There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony.
The bans in question are on the state itself, recognizing such marriages. Unlike anti-miscegenation laws, there is no criminal sanction for those who enter a relationship that they consider marriage.
>No, they were struck down by the Supreme Court, and only in 2003!
Strictly speaking, that's a law against sodomy, not homosexuality. But I can agree that such laws can be construed as anti-homosexual, given that any sex practice between individuals of the same sex could fall under the sodomy category.
You're attempting some pretty fine hair splitting here.
Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury (which some states specifically made a felony: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/10/indian...).
As for sodomy laws, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat... states "Three states specifically target their statutes at same-sex relations only: Kansas, Kentucky, and Texas" - and the ones that didn't certainly saw selective application preferentially targeting same-sex acts.
>Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury
There are no state laws that say 'homosexual marriage is a felony', while there were laws that said so with respect to interracial marriage. The criminalisation that you allege is happening, on the basis that there are laws against perjury combined with non-recognition of same-sex marriage, is not the same as the direct criminalisation of interracial marriage.
Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.
People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people.
Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?