Apparently Senator Webb recently felt the need to take a stand on a particularly pressing area of public policy:

White people are being kept down by the government and funny colored immigrants.

No, seriously:

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Yes indeed, it is a tragic historical irony that the white man, once lord and master of all he could survey (and steal from the Native Americans) has become a lowly serf in his own former kingdom of ‘Merika, kept in chains by those dastardly college admissions offices and a social safety net so robust it is the envy of slackers and Communists the world over.

Wait. What?

Lyndon Johnson’s initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate “the badges of slavery.” Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

Yeah, I seem to recall that Southern Whites were particularly understanding of these policies.

Webb goes out of his way to justify the past existence of programs to aid African-Americans, and even notes their continued necessity… before calling for their elimination, in favor of some nebulous ‘aid’. Riiiiiiiight.

So, if it’s not hating on black people that’s gotten Senator Webb so agitated, what rod HAS been jammed up his butt? Turns out it’s a rising, inexorable tide of BROWN AND YELLOW PEOPLE heading to America.

*dun dun DUNNN*

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

*sigh* Ok. First of all, the United States has, as official governmental policy long claimed the ENTIRE WESTERN HEMISPHERE as its own private sandbox; it was called the ‘Monroe Doctrine’

Then there’s the matter of our very long-standing policies of economic imperialism in Latin America, setting up banana republics, toppling governments we don’t like, fueling both sides of the violent drug wars on Latin American soil, setting up an entire academy for Latin American human rights abuse and mass murder, etc. Naturally many of these policies continue to the present day.

And if all that doesn’t work, we just embargo your country, ala Cuba.

So one might, just might, be forgiven for thinking that the United States has had *some* negative influence over the lives of people throughout Latin America, over the years. Just maybe.

But it’s clearly nothing compared to what’s happened to white people here in America:

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

…

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

See? Some of those funny colored people are super-smart, and they’re invading America to take our jobs, thanks to the Federal Government! Conspiracy! Conspiracy!

In support of his thesis concerning the longstanding oppression of the lowly White Man, Webb cites a study from the 70s on how many people went to college and some data on how much schoolkids got per capita during the Great Depression. (He also repeatedly confuses the concepts of religious background and ethnicity.)

This groundbreaking and ironclad research completely and forever refutes the silly notion that white people are privileged in American society.

I hope my fellow liberals are ashamed. /snark

In all seriousness, here we have a Democratic Senator going to the Wall Street Journal to vent his ugly, nativist, racially inflammatory gobbleydegook, and that’s apparently ok. We have to have a big tent, after all.

Uggh. This party deserves every ounce of the curb-stomping it’s going to receive at the polls in November.

I guess someone’s criticism of Obama got under his skin yet again, because the esteemed Mr. Cole went off on a tear again about how nobody gives President Obama any ‘credit’:

And when you point that out, you are hippie-punching or just an O-bot and not a critical thinker. And he managed to do all this without ANY help from the Republicans and minimal help from the Blue Dogs, all while dealing with a childish media (Is he smoking? Does he hate the womyn folks because he won’t shoot hoops with them? Is he angry enough?) and a left-flank that thinks teaming up with Grover Norquist and echoing Republican talking points is moving the fucking Overton Window.

You point out the fact that this is the most successful Democratic Presidency in my lifetime and all you hear is but, but but… He didn’t get single payer!

This after Cole posted a lengthy comment about all the supposed achievements of the Obama administration, getting the health care fiasco passed, the stimulus bill, his Fierce Advocacy on gay rights or on behalf of BP victims, etc. Why, oh why, the Obama-bots ask, won’t we give him any credit for these enormous legislative achievements?

Answer: because, and I’m truly sick of saying this to Obama supporters, LIFE DOES NOT GRADE ON A CURVE.

Let’s just take one example from the list, the stimulus bill, and thus evaluate Obama’s overall work on the economy.

Why don’t I give Obama credit for the stimulus bill? Because it didn’t work. It didn’t work, his own advisors knew it wouldn’t work, prominent economists like Paul Krugman said it wouldn’t work, and he pursued it anyway, knowing it was too small, because he thought it was good politics.

Did it do some good? Yes, in the same way that pouring a single bucket of ice water on the fire consuming your home does good. Did it come anywhere remotely close to solving the problem? No. Absolutely not.

Here are some handy facts about life post-stimulus, sports fans:

–Long-term unemployment is at record levels, with over 4.7 million Americans looking for work for over a year.
–An astonishing 22% of children in the United States will live in poverty this year. That’s right; 22%.
–Since the start of the Second Great Depression, Americans’ personal income has declined by a shocking 500 billion dollars, even as exports and corporate profits soar.
–In 2009, Fortune 500 profits tripled to 391 billion. That’s right, 391 BILLION dollars. Profit. Simultaneously, they fired 800 thousand people.
–Gross Domestic Product is off by approximately 1.3 trillion, that’s trillion with a ‘t’, dollars. That’s counting the much-vaunted stimulus bill, and gives you a good idea how inadequate it was.
–Unemployment is now forecast to rise to 9.9% in early 2011, by the esteemed, and thoroughly bailed out, Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs.

So let’s recap: according to Obama supporters, we should give him lots of credit for a stimulus bill that prevented the recession from getting worse… only it’s apocalyptically bad, and in fact, projected to get worse yet. Almost five million Americans have been looking for a job for a year with no luck, and the unemployment rate overall is at the astronomical level of 9.7%. Worse, it’s projected to go up another .2%. Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting… worse.

Meanwhile, corporate profits are through the roof and hey, the banks got bailed out at 100%, including Goldman.

This, right here, is the root cause of my greatest frustration with Obama supporters. They think that they’re arguing with us when they go on about how successful he is, when in fact, they’re arguing with the cold and indifferent universe itself, and that’s an argument you just cannot win. No matter how many times you say black is white, it doesn’t become true, and no matter how many times you claim otherwise, the stimulus bill DID NOT WORK.

And Obama knew it wouldn’t. He knew, and pursued a failed policy anyway, with bold speeches and fierce advocacy.

Over and over throughout the Obama presidency I go back to a post by Ian Welsh about what he calls the ‘American Death Wish’, which also aptly sums up Obama’s repeated pursuit of inadequate half-measures, from the wars to the economy to health care, climate change and financial reform. The choicest bit:

Sometimes the world doesn’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump a fence, and you can’t. You need to climb a rock face, and you aren’t good enough. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough. And now you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores. You’re in a fight, and the other guy wins, and you wind up on the ground and he puts the boots to you and you’re crippled for life. You tried “your best”, but you lost and you’re going to pay the price for losing for the rest of your life. Maybe you lost because he fought dirty, and you’d rather take a chance of being crippled for life than kick someone in the balls. Maybe you lost because he trained harder than you, and you’d rather go have a drink with your friends.

Or maybe you needed to pay for health care, and you didn’t have the money, and someone you loved died. And they died because you didn’t have the money, and because your country didn’t have universal health care. And maybe you always worked as hard as you could, and you campaigned for health care with all your heart. It doesn’t matter, your child, your wife, your husband—they’re still dead. Your best wasn’t good enough.

I don’t give Obama undue credit, or praise for half-measures, because if this is his best, his best isn’t good enough. He’s the President of the gods-damned United States; if his best isn’t good enough, then nobody’s is. We’re not getting better as a nation until more people stop praising the perpetual mediocrity machine that is the Obama Administration, endlessly pursuing legislative compromise with the Republicans while struggling to make the universe conform to its wishy-washy corporatist centrism.

Up isn’t down. Black isn’t white. Obama’s efforts to change the world to suit his views have failed. Recognize that fact and move on.

So Rand Paul has stepped in it over his libertarian ideology, for a time refusing in interviews to support nasty government intrusion like the Civil Rights Act. He has since clarified that, at least on that point, he doesn’t actively support *repealing* it. No word on whether he would have been in favor of its initial passage.

At the heart of all the hubbub here is, as one might expect from a man named Rand, the idiotic pseudo-philosophy of Libertarianism, the half-witted political descendent of his namesake Ayn’s ideas.

First, the cowardly tap-dancing on racism thing actually makes sense in light of Randian thought; Ayn Rand herself hated racism… in that she thought it was kind of the same thing as communism. Thus, it could be cured, as could all social ills, by laissez-faire capitalism.

No, really. Rand, for what it’s worth, saw racism as a flawed way of judging people based on innate characteristics beyond their control and irrelevant to their moral stature. On the other hand, she really hated gay people, because being gay is a completely voluntary choice and also icky. So go figure.

Of course, Ayn Rand’s prescription for everything was pure, almost entirely unregulated capitalism, so she’d have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The magic of the free market would desegregate lunch counters on its own. Her namesake’s pathetic dancing around the question gets to the heart of the flaw in both Libertarianism as a political philosophy and as a movement: it is childish, small-minded and thoroughly unprepared for the complexity of the real world.

Take Rand Paul’s ‘example’ of a restaurant owner being menaced by the big, bad government:

If you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says ‘well no, we don’t want to have guns in here’ the bar says ‘we don’t want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.’ Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?”

See, for Rand and others like him, rights aren’t a complicated proposition dependent on the social fabric, they’re binary; you either have complete freedom, or you’re a kind of slave.

I’m reminded of something I was taught during an undergrad class for my POLS degree in a class on rights: namely, that every right carries with it at least one corresponding duty (as well as the inverse, a duty you’re obliged to perform relates in some way to another entity’s rights). An easy example is free speech: if a person has the right to speak his mind, then you have a matching duty not to knock his front teeth out in response to speech that offends you. Right, duty. In the Libertarian, aka Randian, worldview, only the right exists, and the necessary duties to enforce or enable it are often regarded as tyranny.

Randians claim the government exists to prevent violence and fraud, and thusly things like the police and the military are necessary and proper government functions, but they rarely extend the logic beyond this extremely simple perspective.

Take the hypothetical restaurant Paul talks about. It’s wrong for the government to intrude into the operations of a restaurant… yet it needs to protect its citizens against fraud or theft or violence. So, let’s say you own this restaurant: how is the government going to protect you from fraud? Well, I suppose for a start, it will have to produce a uniform currency, so that when you get paid, you have a reasonable expectation it’s real money. This could be paper, metal, or chickens, so long as everyone can agree on the value of the currency. Then it will have to police that currency, so add some more cops, counterfeiting experts and the like; in the case of chicken money, we’ll need chicken inspectors.

Now you want to buy meat for your restaurant (other than chickens, which are for spending); guess we’d better set up the USDA, hire some inspectors to make sure it really is beef that your supplier is selling and not stray dogs ground into a fine paste. (It’s hard to test the meat AFTER it’s been consumed for trace of Fido) Come to think of it, might want to get some testing done on microbes, make sure it’s actually fresh and safe to eat, even if it is a cow, so nobody sells you spoiled product. Oooh, but that means we have to set up laboratories, hire doctors and biologists, come up with standards for all of that, and then inspect them and enforce THOSE standards too. Tricky. We might as well do the same for the lettuce your restaurant buys, the flour, oil, butter, milk, etc.

You probably need a way to cook your food, come to think of it, so we’ll need to have a system set up so that you can fairly purchase electricity and/or natural gas, oil, etc, to do so. Darn though, we wouldn’t want your business to get ripped off doing that, so hire on some more inspectors, bureaucrats, and so forth. Since this whole prospect has gotten pretty complicated and expensive, we’re going to need a Treasury, accountants, and some system to pay for it all, aka taxation, so slap on some more government there. Can’t rob the government workers of *their* time after all; that’d be theft too.

Now the building your restaurant is in is a complicated thing. You have to be able to buy or rent the land, buy or build a structure on said land, stock, staff and occupy it, all without fear of being ripped off or robbed. So you’ll need the land surveyed at some point, plots drawn up, documents filed, heck, an entire office of land records and deeds is probably a good idea, better hire some guys to do that. To make sure you’re getting the building you thought you were paying for with your government regulated chickens, you might want some building codes, people to inspect them; it might be more straightforward to require certain training and licenses of builders and contractors beforehand, just to be sure. Now you need to get things like equipment, from stoves to napkin dispensers, and somebody needs to watch your back on all of that, so add in a ton of additional regulations, especially safety; nobody likes lead in their cookware these days. Messy.

I could go on, but the point is clear by now; the simple ‘right’ to own a restaurant is in fact an incredibly complicated proposition entwining public and private enterprises. One right to property on the behalf of someone who wants to sell burgers for a tidy profit creates a slew of duties and responsibilities for others, ranging from the obvious (don’t rob said burger store) to the less obvious (whether a slaughterhouse three states away can or can not slaughter a particular cow, for fear it might have Mad Cow disease). It isn’t all about the brave burger magnate, standing astride the food service industry like a god, creating value out of nothing. It is, in fact, a process, and it is both necessary and proper that, in exchange for all the benefits a government provides listed above, it ask for corresponding payments, aka duties, in return.

What about the specific example Paul brings up, the issue of guns? Well, what about it? Let’s say the government decides that, in fact, it doesn’t want guns taken into privately-owned restaurants. It turns out a lot of shootings are happening when people get drunk, and so restaurant revenue is down, as nobody really wants their kids dodging ordinance on the way to the condiment stand. That’s bad for government, in the form of increased outlay for cops and coroners, and bad for restaurants as a whole; on the other hand, let’s say we live in a fantasy world where there’s been some kind of alien invasion, and we need a well-armed populace to fight off Kang and Kodos at all times. Perhaps then the math would work out differently, and we would have to *require* restaurants to allow private citizens to carry guns for the public good (I’m really reaching for any sort of hypothetically plausible reason the government might dictate that you have to allow firearms in your burger joint, outside of NRA campaign money).

Of course the real issue Rand Paul is trying to duck here is that Libertarianism, despite its prophetess condemning racism, really has no answer to the problem of people being asshats. Human beings are not rational, no matter how much Ayn might have wanted it to be so, and they persist in acting irrationally and hatefully down through the generations. (And that doesn’t even start to address the fact that racism can be highly lucrative, and thus a rational path to great wealth). Though an individual, hateful burger joint owner might not like serving a particular ethnic minority, the fact remains that said minority pays into the same system that inspects his meat, patrols the streets outside his shop and protects him in the event of a fire, that hauls away his garbage and makes sure his sewage ends up somewhere far away and not right back in his own tap water. They’re citizens, and they have a right to their piece of the pie, a pie they helped pay for. So when your idealized, small-minded entrepreneur takes all the innumerable benefits of our civilized society, our police, our firefighters, our streets and electricity, inspections on our food, courts to settle our disputes, when they take value out of that system, and then refuse to pay out their obligation according to the law to the same individuals who support them in a hundred direct and indirect ways, they’re not being brave iconoclasts.

They’re thieves. The very worst kind of people, supposedly, to a property-minded small government type like Mr. Paul. They’re robbing people of their government’s time, and therefore of their tax dollars, by refusing to treat them like any other citizen, despite having been the direct beneficiary of so much aid from the government they claim to abhor.

So if they don’t like it, they’re free to go try and open a burger stand in Somalia. In the meantime, desegregating lunch counters is a small price to pay, an inconsequential duty to trade for your rights.

A small price, unless you’re Rand Paul.