David McElroy

Are you a subject, a citizen or a sovereign? Your answer to that question says a lot about who you think owns you, at least in the earthly sense.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Eduardo Saverin giving up U.S. citizenship as Facebook goes public. He’s one of the founders of Facebook, so he’s becoming incredibly wealthy because of Facebook’s initial public offering. By living in Singapore and giving up his U.S. citizenship, Saverin is going to save millions of dollars now and save his heirs possibly billions of dollars by avoiding U.S. estate taxes later.

Saverin told the New York Times, though, that his move isn’t about saving money.

“This had nothing to do with taxes,” Saverin told the Times. “I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen.”

In 1215, King John of England signed what came to be called the Magna Carta. (The full name in English was “The Great Charter of the Liberties of England, and of the Liberties of the Forest.”) The English lords accepted that they were subject to the king, but they tried — sometimes unsuccessfully — to get kings to limit their absolute power over them.

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After slaves were freed in the United States in the 19th century, how much really changed for them? For the most part, they worked on the same land, did the same labor and worked for the same plantation owners. How exactly did their lives change when they were told they were free?

The slaves in the United States had worked hard and had nothing to show for their work. When we look at the sharecropping contracts they signed after they were allegedly free, it’s clear that their lives were just as controlled as they had been before. The only difference was that they now had a piece of paper that said they were free.

If you look at the typical sharecropping contract they signed, it’s clear that they didn’t have a chance to change their lives. They were leasing small tracts of land from the plantation owner. They went into debt — to the plantation owner — for the tools and animals they needed to work the land. They were required to mill the cotton at his cotton gin at a specified price. They were required to pay back the money for the tools out of the first cotton of the season. If there was anything left over, they could buy their own food, of course. But the plantation owner had the right to end the contract and kick them off any time he wanted.

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Which is more important — letting people make their own decisions about what to do with their property or forcing them to make decisions that are morally acceptable to you? You have to pick one. You can’t have it both ways.

Discrimination is a dirty word today, but there’s no reason for it to be. Discriminating is actually a neutral thing. Merriam-Wesbster’s first definition for the word is, “Making a distinction.” That’s all it is. It’s only when you discriminate on grounds that we think are wrong that discrimination becomes a bad thing. A woman who chooses one man over the others who might want to marry her is discriminating. She’s making a choice based on what she sees as the differing characteristics of her choices. A man who chooses between different job offers is discriminating. The woman who chooses one pair of shoes over another is showing discrimination. The list is endless.

What you’ve come to think of as discrimination is a specific class of discrimination, characterized by choosing among people for reasons that are considered wrong. Examples are racial discrimination, sex discrimination or religious discrimination. If you hire a white man instead of a black man because he’s white, you’re engaging in racial discrimination. If you hire a woman as a teacher because you refuse to believe that men can be good teachers, you’re engaging in sexual discrimination.

Until the 1960s, this sort of discrimination was perfectly legal. In fact, the law in some places required racial discrimination in many areas of life. (In the U.S. South, the legal requirements to separate races in many ways were called Jim Crow laws.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 changed all of that. The law said that restaurants and other private businesses must serve anyone, regardless of race.

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