Rand Paul's interview on Rachel Maddow - A real Libertarian meets the real world

[FinnAgain]

@SenorBeef

libertarians only oppose 1 provision out of 9 or 10 of the CRA

If you oppose 1 provision then you oppose the bill, given that the bill contains that provision.

[SenorBeef]

@FinnAgain

If you oppose 1 provision then you oppose the bill, given that the bill contains that provision.

Bullshit. How many billions of times have politicians say “I don’t like this particular provision, but since we need the bill as a whole…”

Besides which, if they were setting out to create a new law to repeal that provision, they wouldn’t repeal the entire CRA, just change the law to eliminate that particular portion.

Besides which, I don’t think think he cares. It’s probably priority #15285812581 to him. There’s so much damage that can be undone before something like that to even worry about it.

[panache45]

@kunilou

So you’re saying that in Libertania, unless you’re one of the “the best,” you can be compelled to work as a glorified prostitute?

Sorry I’m so late with this. After “the best” start their own company (or go to work for someone else), they’ll be recruiting “the better” of their former coworkers . . . and eventually “the good,” and maybe even “the adequate.” Nobody is “compelled” to do anything.

[Algorithm]

@panache45

Nobody is “compelled” to do anything.

We’re all compelled to feed ourselves and our families, which is tough to do if you quit your job and can’t find another one (because “the best” haven’t gotten around to hiring “the adequate” yet). Sometimes, we’re compelled to accept a less than optimal job situation because we need the money. Sometimes, “less than optimal” equates to “rife with harassment”.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

After all of this talk, I think the thread title nailed it. RP is trying to take his academic beliefs into the Real World, and that does not work very well.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Paul_in_Qatar

After all of this talk, I think the thread title nailed it. RP is trying to take his academic beliefs into the Real World, and that does not work very well.

Arguably Alan Greenspan did the same, to his later regret. Frontline discusses it in their episode “The Warning” (video link)

[Kent_Clark]

@panache45

Sorry I’m so late with this. After “the best” start their own company (or go to work for someone else), they’ll be recruiting “the better” of their former coworkers . . . and eventually “the good,” and maybe even “the adequate.” Nobody is “compelled” to do anything.

And the circle goes round and round. Once the “best” employers have competed for the “best” workers, then the good will compete for the good, etc. At some point in the cycle there are going to be “bad” employers and “bad” workers.

Now, you can either say that even bad workers deserve some protection against discrimination, harassment, unsafe working conditions, etc. (just as even “bad” employers have a right to secure their workplace, dismiss disruptive employees, conduct drug screenings, etc.) OR you can say that bad employees and bad employers deserve what they get, so screw both.

So let’s slide down the slippery slope until we’ve reductioed this right down to the absurdum. I want a society that has at least some sort of minimal assurance that even “bad” people have some protection against being exploited, and that “bad” people who do the exploiting must come up with a better defense than “it’s mine and I can do what I want.”

[BrainGlutton]

“The Great American Book that Refutes Rand Paul,” by Michael Lind, in Salon, about Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin:

On rereading “Black Like Me” with Rand Paul’s controversial comments in mind, I was struck by how very few truly public places there were in the apartheid South. Employers, subdivisions, stores, restaurants, gas stations, hotels – Rand Paul would have allowed all of these to be segregated to this day because they are privately owned. According to this disingenuous theory, in the segregated South everyone, black or white, should have had a right to work, eat and sleep at the small-town post office or police station, because they were public agencies – but no right to work, eat or sleep anywhere else.

Private employment? Disguised as a “Negro,” Griffin tried to get a job at a plant in Mobile, Ala., by offering to accept less pay than a white man would:

"No use trying down here," he said. "We're gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. We're taking it slow, but we're doing it. Pretty soon we'll have it so the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have."

"How can we live?" I asked hopelessly, careful not to give the impression I was arguing.

"That's the whole point," he said, looking me square in the eyes, but with some faint sympathy, as though he regretted the need to say what followed: "We're going to do our damndest to drive every one of you out of the state."

Private real estate transactions? Until struck down by federal law, restrictive covenants barring homeowners from selling to blacks, Latinos and sometimes Catholics and Jews were common in every region of the country. Griffin tells the story of a talk he gave at a college where an industrial psychologist was the only black in attendance. A white college professor, proud of his paternalistic liberalism, asked the black doctor of industrial psychology whether he considered the lecture a turning point in the community’s history, and was shocked to be told no:

The doctor said, "It's true that I have a good job in this town, and I seem to be respected, and I am certainly paid a wage commensurate with my skills. But -- so long as I have to house my wife and children in a town twenty miles away because I can't buy, rent, lease or build a home here, don't expect me to get too excited over your 'historic turning points.'"

Privately-owned stores?

No matter where you are, the nearest Negro café is always far away, it seems. I learned to eat a great deal when it was available and convenient, because it might not be available or convenient when the belly next indicated its hunger ... It is not that they crave service in the white man’s café over their own -- it is simply that in many sparsely settled areas Negro cafes do not exist; and even in densely settled areas, one must sometimes cross town for a glass of water. It is rankling, too, to be encouraged to buy all of one's goods in white stores and then be refused soda fountain or rest-room service. 

Rand Paul is a year younger than I am, born like me in Texas during the final years of segregation. I have difficulty believing that any white Southerner my age who questions the civil rights laws that broke down the all-encompassing system of “private” economic and social segregation in our native region does so purely out of libertarian principle. I would have trouble believing that, even if not for recent revelations that his father’s supposedly libertarian newsletter for decades was filled with unsigned racist rants.

I have known and worked with many conservatives and libertarians in my life, and in my experience states’ rights arguments and libertarian arguments against the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts are used opportunistically by people who are covert, if not overt, bigots. You do not have to be a racist to oppose race-based affirmative action, a form of compensatory discrimination that Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the March on Washington, opposed as a violation of the nondiscrimination principle. But if it bothers you that cafeterias and stores and hotels and gas stations since 1964 had been unable to refuse service to blacks, or Latinos, or Asians, then you cannot complain if people speculate about your motives. I do not believe it is possible for anyone to be “personally” opposed to racism and at the same time opposed on the grounds of high constitutional principle to public policies that eliminate private policies constituting an elaborate, interlocking system of racial apartheid. That position may be theoretically coherent. But it is psychologically impossible.