The neocon-dominated GOP's hatred of Ron Paul is well-established, and I've mentioned it here on numerous occasions. So it's not exactly news when the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Mark Levin attack him. But Paul's stubborn refusal to follow Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, and Michele Bachmann out of the limelight is now starting to grate on the nerves of some Democrats as well. One would think that Dr. Paul's strong record on civil liberties, his opposition to the drug war, and his consistent denunciation of imperialist foreign policy and elective wars would buy the man a little sympathy from people who profess to care about such things - and in some cases it has. But by and large the professional left is showing how little the issues actually mean to them in practice. Whatever importance they may assign to those worthy values pales in comparison to their primary objective of ever-larger government, and they correctly perceive Ron Paul's brand of libertarianism as a threat to their dream of a warm-and-fuzzy totalitarian state.
Case in point is an interesting article from Michael Lind over at Salon.com titled "Race, Liberty, and Ron Paul." At least I found it interesting. (Then again, I always find it interesting when hyper-educated people like Mr. Lind make such poorly reasoned arguments in public).
The angle of attack, naturally, is Dr. Paul's alleged racism, as evidenced by the fact that he does not believe the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was absolutely, positively, 100% perfect. That he feels there may have been some unintended consequences associated with the Act is a heretical idea, and Mr. Lind is determined to burn Ron Paul at the Salon.com stake for it. But Lind's piece is only superficially about Ron Paul. The real thrust of the article is a broadside against libertarianism in general, and I feel his claims merit closer analysis than the average Salon.com reader (as evidenced by the comments section) seems willing to give. There's at least one problematic statement per paragraph – but please read the entire article first just to make sure I'm not taking things out of context.
Here's the starting point:
Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Paul explained that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "destroyed the principle of private property and private choices" and "undermine[d] the concept of liberty." The candidate drew a direct line from the Civil Rights Act to illiberal legislation passed in the panic that followed the 9/11 attacks: "Look at what's happened with the PATRIOT Act. They can come into our houses, our bedrooms our businesses … And it was started back then."
Whether one agrees or not, Dr. Paul's analysis is hardly prima facie evidence of racism. As Walter Williams once wrote, "One does not have to be a racist to recognize that the federal government has no constitutional authority to prohibit racial or any other kind of discrimination by private parties. Moreover, the true test of one's commitment to freedom of association doesn't come when he permits people to associate in ways he deems appropriate. It comes when he permits people to voluntarily associate in ways he deems offensive."
Indeed. Moving on:
By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.
There's definitely some idiocy here, but Dr. Paul is not the one displaying it. The problem is not pushing little old ladies into or out of the paths of buses. The problem is Mr. Lind assigning an equal moral value to the act of pushing a little old lady out of the path of a bus as he does to the act of saving the little old lady by pushing someone else into the path of the bus instead. Because that's how government operates – it can only help some people by harming others – and this is what libertarians object to.
Like other libertarians, Ron Paul does not understand American values. The American experiment is an experiment in creating and maintaining a democratic republic, not a minimal state. American political culture is founded not on the theories of Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises but on the reasoning of natural rights theorists like John Locke, for whom coercion in the service of communal self-defense is perfectly legitimate.
Neither Ron Paul, nor Ayn Rand, nor Ludwig von Mises ever objected to using government coercion in the service of communal self-defense – they just insist that the coercion be strictly limited to self-defense. In fact, they have all written extensively that some government is absolutely essential for maintaining a basic social structure. Perhaps Mr. Lind should try actually reading Rand and Mises before he writes about them – he might learn something about their positions. While he's at it, he may even want to pick up one of Ron Paul's many books – the man is a much better writer than public speaker.
While abuses of military and police power are to be guarded against, the idea that the military and police and government as such are inherently tyrannical, a familiar theme in libertarian and anarchist thought, is utterly alien to America's Lockean republican tradition.
Oddly enough, the idea that military and police and government are inherently tyrannical was not an utterly alien concept to the writers of, say, the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense, or The Federalist Papers. They penned rather lengthy warnings against things like war and standing armies, wrote lines like "Those are governed best who are governed least," etc. But I guess those nutters just aren't part of America's republican tradition. Maybe we should start taking down a few monuments.
Libertarians typically argue that only government, backed by military and police power, can be tyrannical.
I know a lot of libertarians, and I've never heard any of them make this claim. Libertarians do not dispute the existence of social hierarchies and power structures that often result in unfair treatment or disparate outcomes - they just view them as less of a problem than government tyrannies that have historically resulted in mass plunder and lots of dead people. Let's just call it a question of priorities.
Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don't like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.
Mr. Lind's definition of "intelligent people" must not extend to those who understand basic economics. Wages are not determined by the generosity of employers, they are determined by marginal productivity. If you're working for twenty-five cents a day, it's only because it takes you a whole day to produce something that's worth more than a quarter to someone else. (I suspect it would take Mr. Lind substantially longer).
The other popular libertarian remedy for exploitation is to move somewhere else where you will be treated better. But what if you can't emigrate? Well, it seems, you must suffer your exploitation in silence, rather than enlist the aid of the law in restraining your thuggish employer, your predatory landlord, your exploitative banker or the vendors who sell you toxic food and dangerous products.
Actually, this is a great argument in favor of a more libertarian society. Whatever the difficulties in relocating away from an employer, landlord, banker, or vendor, they're nothing compared to the difficulties of relocating away from an oppressive government.
Some libertarians concede the legitimacy of government coercion in protecting property rights. But in doing so, these libertarians, like Ron Paul, give up any principled objection to government coercion. They simply want government coercion to be used for some purposes—protecting property rights—and not others—enforcing civil rights.
Actually, the vast majority of libertarians make this concession. Ron Paul makes it, Ayn Rand made it, and Ludwig von Mises made it. In doing so, they in no way, shape, or form give up their principled objection to the use of government coercion – they simply claim that it is immoral to use coercion against those who have not first aggressed against others. That a certain degree of coercion is necessary to maintain even a minimal state is, to them, an unfortunate fact of life – but it hardly provides Mr. Lind carte blanche to point government guns at anyone at any time for any purpose he deems worthy. And unlike Mr. Lind, libertarians do not make arbitrary distinctions between civil rights and property rights – they just understand the distinction between a right and a wish list.
Until the federal Civil Rights Act was passed, the coercive power of state and local governments was routinely used to enforce the "private choices" and "property rights" of racists. If a diner owner banned blacks from his diner, and blacks sat down at the counter and insisted on being served, then the diner owner could call the police, who, protecting the property rights of the owner, would drag the would-be black patrons of the restaurant off to jail.
Yes, and if another diner owner wanted to serve blacks and whites equally, he risked fines and imprisonment from those same police. The point of having segregation laws was precisely that some people did not wish to discriminate on the basis of race – if everyone did, there would have been no need for Jim Crow laws to force them to do so.
The straightforward way to interpret Paul's remarks on CNN is to read him as saying that bigoted property owners, like owners of restaurants, should to this day have the right to call on the coercive power of the police department to enforce their decisions to refuse to serve certain categories of customers on their property. Anti-semitic store owners, for example, should have the right not merely to put up a "No Jews" sign, but also to summon the police, at the taxpayer's expense, to arrest any Jew who insisted on entering the store.
A more straightforward interpretation would be that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made a fundamental change to the way private property was treated by law. Prior to the Act, private property – whether a house, a diner, or an office complex – was private. After the Act, that same property was simply declared to be "public" and thus subject to a much greater degree of government control than before.
From his statement that the Civil Rights act "destroyed the principle of private property and private choices," I think his meaning is quite clear: civil rights legislation at any level—federal, state or local—should never have been passed. To this day, store owners should be free to call on the public police at public expense to drag blacks, Jews, or members of other groups that the owners do not like from their business establishments, in the name of property rights.
Again, this seems out of line with the statement presented. Although I don't know the man personally, my understanding of his principles would lead me to think that Dr. Paul would have fully supported a federal initiative that struck down the racially discriminatory laws that were imposed by state governments, but that left individual citizens free to associate as they saw fit – neither forcing people to accept one another, nor forcing them to avoid one another. It is certainly possible – indeed, highly probable – that many odious racist business owners would have continued to deny service to some customers on the basis of skin color. But then again, lacking the support of their state governments' Jim Crow laws, those business owners would have borne the full cost of their racism directly – and ultimately green would have been the only color that really mattered.
Should we be impressed if Paul says that as a personal matter he would oppose such things, while defending their legality? It is hard to see any daylight between an overt racist and someone who claims to oppose racism or anti-semitism, but also denounces the only effective ways to put a stop to them—that is, civil rights laws.
Is it really so hard to understand opposition to criminalizing everything with which one personally disagrees? So much for "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Here again we see the statist's inability to conceptualize any means other than violence to solve social problems ("If the government doesn't do X, then X can't possibly get done!"). Libertarians, on the other hand, can envision any number of voluntary ways to achieve positive social outcomes, and those voluntary ways are solidly grounded in fundamental economics.
If you argue that private racism is bad but anti-racist laws are worse, and if you have no problem with the state's coercive power when it enforces racism but object to coercive state power only in the service of anti-racism, then you cannot complain when others draw their own conclusions about your motives (even if, unlike Ron Paul, you did not publish white supremacist newsletters for years under your own name).
Maybe not, but neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I know objects to coercive state power "only in the service of anti-racism." They object to pointing guns at people who have not first aggressed against others.
Abraham Lincoln dissected the sophistical rhetoric of people like Ron Paul, long before the noble word "liberty" was tortured into "libertarianism." In 1864, during the Civil War, he told an audience:
"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not
all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are
two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name———liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names———liberty and tyranny.
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon
a definition of the word liberty…"
Unfortunately for Mr. Lind's case, it is the libertarian who defines liberty as the right of "each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor." As the t-shirt says, libertarianism is the radical notion that you don't own other people. Sometimes those other people might not act as we believe they should, but liberty means more than just the freedom to behave in ways approved by the government and Michael Lind. As is painfully clear from the Lind article, it is statists like him who define liberty as the right for "some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor." After all, he's the one arguing for the right to use government coercion to control the property of those with whom he (and I) disagree.
There's no shortage of people who, like Michael Lind, oppose Ron Paul specifically and libertarianism in general. And I'm sure there are some people out there who can make legitimate points against both – as opposed to the litany of straw man arguments outlined here.
From what I've read, though, it seems that Salon.com hasn't been able to find any.
0 comments:
Post a Comment