Maybe it's easy to make freedom an issue of "property rights" when you have never been the property.
That's my favorite line from this column by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Here's more:
Paul has long argued... that the act, which liberated untold millions of African-Americans from the tyranny of Jim Crow, "destroyed the principle of private property and private choices."
But the column's not really about racism. Ron Paul enjoys the support of white supremacist groups, but that's not his fault. And his claims that he didn't know what was being said for decades in the newsletters he founded and that bore his name ring a little hollow...
But the column's really not about racism. It's about some of the many other things that are wrong with Ron Paul.
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2 comments:
It's a particular libertarian tic -- to take the ideological premises and implement them regardless of the consequences. I can understand what led Paul to advance this argument. I don't agree with him, but I can understand how Paul ended up at that position.
At the barest minimum, I think that it's useful to have what conservative Jonah Goldberg calls "the libertarian in the room." Healthy public discourse requires having someone who, instead of arguing that government should be doing X instead of Y or Y instead of X, why government should be doing either at all. That is, you need a libertarian in the discussion to question the unstated premise, or else no one will.
So supporters of anti-discrimination laws should continue to advocate for their positions. But they should be intellectually challenged to address propertarian rebuttals.
Perhaps.
I like a lot of libertarian-style ideas. I like a lot of them a lot.
And yet most of the libertarians I know (or know of) are a little nuts, and the way they play those ideas out is scary and wrong-headed. There seems to be a lot of very black and white thinking in libertarian circles, a lot of either/or dichotomy thinking... doesn't translate well into being able to function in the real world.
Myself, I was very, very into anarchist philosophy when I was in my twenties. Still appreciate and admire that stuff. But I don't profess that philosophy because it's not doable, not practical, not real-world stuff.
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