Today’s post is an encore for last year’s Dr. Rand Paul, Civil Rights Patriot. The changing flux of the Republican primaries & caucuses has renewed its relevance this Christmas, 2011. The ensuing attention directed toward Ron Paul’s many years of newsletters had developed minimal traction in prior episodes of exposure. This present episode must be exploited quickly, before attention wanes and the truth is no longer of interest to America’s Cult of Celebrity.
Yesterday, Tuesday, May 18, 2010, Dr. Rand Paul won the Republican primary election in Kentucky for U.S. Senate. Today, those of us outside of Kentucky have begun our introduction to a man who is, according to Catholic Online, “…the real article; a man guided by principle, not party; a man loyal to ethics, not party bosses.
Dr. Paul is a Libertarian. It is a political viewpoint that I share in a diminished form, so I can relate to his views – views that emphasize individual liberties over governmental influences. {Friends who know me: Do not be confused. ‘Libertarian’ and ‘Libertine’ are utterly different and mutually exclusive. Do not assume that my strengths in one quality are matched in the other.}
Today, our introduction to Dr. Paul included his views on important historical events, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I listened to his interview on the Rachel Maddow Show. (It was on this show that he first announced his candidacy.) The interview was prompted by an interview he gave to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Dr. Paul was unequivocal in describing himself as a staunch advocate of civil rights. He absolutely believes that the federal government should not discriminate, as per the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
As a Libertarian, Dr. Paul advocates that such legislation is only appropriate in restricting government. Individual citizens and businesses should not be incorporated into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 using the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution). Several states and their Republican officials have recently expressed the same view regarding federal reform of health care – that such reform should not be forced upon states using the Commerce Clause and its practical extension, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and that states have the right to decide individually if they will be subject to the federal government’s regulation.
Dr. Paul says that private conduct is properly controlled by the free enterprise system. It is clear to me that this is true. If a public business chooses to accomodate only customers of specific races or religions, another business can accomodate both those and other races or religions. The second business will surely prosper in comparison to the first. It will have a economic advantage which intelligent business people will recognize and choose to incorporate.
I was born in 1950, so I had a little direct experience (in addition to lessons from history) with how this worked before 1964. Springfield had some businesses which were, for example, ‘Whites Only‘. Those businesses, and similar ones which existed in virtually every city and town in former Slave States and many Northern ones, must have suffered significantly for their policies. Springfield might be a poor example of this, because there were not many non-white residents after the famous 1906 lynchings (concluded on the Public Square) prompted much of Springfield’s non-white citizenry to move away – immediately. I’m sure that, wherever they choose to live after 1906, their economic influence guaranteed that they would be served equitably by businesses. They would also not have had to fear a repeat of such injustice as the 1906 lynchings or similar lynchings which occurred as often as daily in the South of the late 1800’s.
At the least, groups which are discriminated against by businesses may actually form competing businesses. They have every economic, free-market, incentive to do so – and they often did before 1964. It is obvious from this the Dr. Paul is completely correct, and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 accomplished (for private business) nothing but an artificial interference on an efficient mechanism for insuring just and equitable treatment of all citizens.
Just as I am not a 100% Libertarian (we must balance our views to some degree), neither is Dr. Paul. He does advocate implementing a consitutional amendment (with supporting state and federal legislation) to totally outlaw abortion. There does not seem to be a free-market mechanism to achieve the outcome he seeks, so he recognizes the practicality of government involvement.
Dr. Paul has the heart of of a true civil rights advocate and moral leader. He says, for instance, that if he had been old enough, he would have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle for equal rights.
Thank you, Drs. Randal Howard “Rand” Paul and Ronald Ernest “Ron” Paul. That’s real white of you.
Postscript
Will Allen, Horace Duncan, and Fred Coker,
lynched in 1906 by a mob of 2,000,
were falsely accused and were innocent.
![[http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/elsacade/boxcontents_large.jpg]](https://heygetthis.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/shelterbox-org-boxcontents_210x209.png "\"To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.\" - Matthew 25:39")
H e y ! G e t T h i s . . . 
Yeah, Carroll, I’m bad. The original post proved the subtlety of this sarcasm, so I was DEPENDING on some confusion this time. (dang. hardly got any notice though – original hit big) People need to think a little about what the Pauls are really advocating – a destruction of secular government to prepare for a Reconstructionist / Dominionist theocracy.
The first post was followed by Poe’s Law was incomplete – Stone’s Law is absolute, explaining all. That includes the resulting disbelief of the folks who cannot imagine my corrections. I had originally thought that the closing gratitude and Postscript would have led folks to notice that (as you describe) such statements as “The second business will surely prosper in comparison to the first” are absurd. There is truly no depth too low for the True Believer.
Jim One & sekanblogger, it is my contention that the ‘needed changes’ are as carefully crafted as Ron Paul’s “Outreach to Rednecks”. That some of those changes are things which many of us support must not obscure the character and real intent of the messenger.
Well, Jim, unless you are writing tongue-in-cheek again, I can’t agree. The free enterprise system did little or nothing to correct racial imbalances in this country. It operated for a century after the civil war and made little difference in the economic conditions of minorities in this country, at least that is the way it looked to me growing up in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. I admit, the Civil Rights Act has not had the profound effect that many hoped. One reason that the free enterprise system did not help achieve equal opportunity in the economic sphere is that in that system, money itself is power. Businesses that were white only suffered very little in negative consequences because blacks had a proportionally tiny share of the wealth. And black businesses could not prosper proportionally to white businesses because their market was tiny. The system, when infected with such a massive imbalance, tends to perpetuate the imbalance, like a physical system that is out of stable equilibrium: to far out and the instability just grows more severe until it falls over. The same imbalance is occurring right now as the economy has vastly shifted to the control of the very rich: they are now in position to take permanent and complete control of the economy, just as whites used to be in complete control of the economy. In other words, the current so-called free market economy – if it is one – makes everyone into niggers (to use the n word in what I think is an appropriate sense).
I do share some sympathy with the libertarian ideal, but less and less. The free enterprise system seems to me to have exposed itself as a villain, rather than as a hero. If anything, an unregulated economy, a semi-regulated economy, inclines me toward socialism.
I was for a time enamored of the Libertarian philosophy, but no more. Libertarianism is proposed as simplistic solutions to a complex set of problems. Ergo, a mismatch. Nevertheless, I agree with sekanblogger that some of Paul’s notions are “needed changes”, not least of which is to eschew nation-building as foreign policy.
If nothing else, hopefully Ron (and Rand) have influenced today’s politics enough to help bring about some badly needed changes.
I find it ironic that many of their views have been championed for years by Noam Chomsky. Of course, conservatives consider Noam nothing less that treasonous. Now that Noam’s ideas come to us through a Republican primary, suddenly they are damned American and revolutionary in a good sense.
Strange twist huh?