...according to fake libertarian Ron Paul. Great job, Ron.
Paul’s weasly attempts to avoid answering Matthews’ reasonable questions reveal him as more concerned with preserving his nonexistent candidacy than with actually spreading the ideas of freedom. The critique of libertarianism that Matthews is offering—that rigorous libertarian protections for property rights would foster racist exclusion—is a perfectly reasonable one, even if you end up disagreeing with it, and it’s one that libertarians should address honestly and squarely. To what degree do we believe that the government may deny property owners the right to discriminate? Paul’s assertion that Jim Crow was a product of legislation is a half-truth, and his statement that slavery was created by law is just a falsehood; slavery was not created by positive law.
The argument that racism is economically inefficient and would wither away in a free economy is a reasonable one, but it suffers from the fact that it simply tells persecuted minorities to “wait” for racist attitudes to wither away. How long should victims of racist discrimination have waited to be accepted as equal citizens? Another century? It also suffers from the fact that economic efficiency is not necessarily the goal of racists. They may be—and in practice have always been—willing to accept a dramatic loss in property value and economic efficiency in order to maintain a racist society. There is no denying that civil rights laws that forbid restaurants or bars or whatever from excluding blacks do infringe on the private property rights of the restaurant or bar owner. But it also can’t be denied that such laws have not only been effective in eliminating racial discrimination, but also in changing social attitudes toward discrimination in the past half century, and have had many very positive consequences. Well…it can’t be denied by reasonable people. Ron Paul, on the other hand, regards such laws as “totalitarian.”
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