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.
