HISTORY IS REALITY AND...:

Why Rand Paul Is Right … and Wrong: The new GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky would be wrong to oppose the 1964 civil-rights law, but his underlying concern was legitimate (Julian Sanchez, 5/21/10, Newsweek)

There's no doubt the libertarian argument, springing from the sanctity of private property, was adopted by bigots looking for respectable cover—and the line between them has not always been as sharp as this libertarian writer would like. Rand's father, libertarian icon Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), caught his share of flak over racially incendiary statements that appeared for years in his newsletter. Ron Paul didn't pen such gems as the suggestion that a group of black protesters hold their demonstration "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty. But he had unwisely lent his name to a clique of libertarian writers whose misbegotten strategy was to rally the white working class against "big government" by exploiting resentment of the "parasitic Underclass."

Yet there's nothing intrinsically racist in the argument in favor of property rights—and indeed, any real liberal ought to at least have some sympathy for it. Strong property rights have often been the friend of unpopular minorities: Jim Crow laws were imposed precisely because racists feared the South's rigid caste system would collapse if business owners were free to integrate, as historian Charles Wynes noted in his 1961 study Race Relations in Virginia. After that long apartheid imposed on consumer preferences, it might have been too sanguine to hope market forces alone would have ushered in desegregation as rapidly as the Civil Rights Act did. But history is littered with tribal boundaries shattered by commerce, and formal law yielded no instant solution either. (A ban on formal segregation could only do so much in practice where majorities were determined to exclude blacks by means less explicit but barely more subtle than signs announcing "whites only.")

Anyone who values freedom of association should also recognize the real tradeoff that antidiscrimination law involves. In a free society, Americans have long believed, even people with repulsive views have a right to express them, and to join with like-minded bigots in private clubs and informal gatherings. It is not crazy to imagine that in a more just world, an ideally just world, respect for that freedom would lead us to countenance—legally, if not personally—the few cranks who sought to congregate in their monochrome cafés and diners.

Yet that's precisely why Paul's 1.0 argument breaks down on its own terms: at the scene of a four-century crime against humanity—the kidnap, torture, enslavement, and legal oppression of African-Americans—ideal theory fails. We libertarians, never burdened with an excess of governing power, have always had a utopian streak, a penchant for imagining what rich organic order would bubble up from the choices of free and equal citizens governed by a lean state enforcing a few simple rules. We tend to envision societies that, if not perfect, are at least consistently libertarian.

Unfortunately, history happened.

...it happens every day.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2010 7:52 AM