This whole Rand Paul thing about him probably being a racist for simply not really supporting the Voting Rights Act of 1964 has been typical and annoying. I guess I should have expected this from the mainstream press, considering their biases and fantastic worldview where world peace can be achieved with nuclear disarmament and the Earth, which has survived super-volcanoes and meteor impacts, can be destroyed by releasing the same gases that trees pollute our planet with.
On the flip side, Rand Paul is in the national spotlight and many people can finally rehash some issues that only libertarians have argued in the past. Namely, the nature of the beast that was segregation. What Rand Paul has said is that businesses should be allowed to discriminate as much as they want without fear of coercion from the government because the business owner is, after all, the owner. To many Leftists and other assorted morons, I can see how this can be construed as racism. Heck, I’ve been through government skools myself and 10 years ago I might have felt the same.
But I’ve more about how the world works by living in it and reading from some of the most brilliant minds in modern times to truly understand what Rand Paul meant. What he meant was not that he is racist or that segregation is a good idea, but that the free market reflects the attitudes of the consumer and when a company behaves badly in this modern era, things don’t go so well for them.
In fact, the segregated bus systems was not established by the racist bus companies, but by a racist government. If you don’t believe me, then try believing Professor Thomas Sowell, an economics who happens to be black as well:
Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.
These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit — and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.
It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.
It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.
The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.
The problem with the free market is that you get a lot of greedy people. But greedy people also tend to forget most of their other prejudices and vices in favor of that greed. It is only when the government interferes in the market do we get other evils. It was the government that solidified racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in which the Supreme Court upheld a racist decision. What they upheld, however, was not a racist business policy of a train company but a racist law passed by the state of Louisiana. It took several decades to overturn that decision.
So I guess segregation is nothing more than a case study in when the government can royally screw up and get away with it. What’s more, the main proponents of segregation were Democrats, the likes of which were the mentors and heroes of such popular Democrats as Bill Clinton and Al Gore. It’s sad that the black community has been duped into thinking that the Republicans were behind it all. Not to say that Republicans haven’t been better in most other areas involving state interference in the market, but the charges of racism are mostly unfounded and foolish.
So let’s have this debate. Let’s point out that property rights are sacred and without them there is no freedom, only fascism. And although racism is ugly, sometimes two wrongs do make a right, as bizarre and mathematically defying as it is.