When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong

If you aren't familiar with Rand Paul, then you don't torture yourself with the daily digestion of political blogs, and I salute you and your common sense.  He's the son of famed libertarian and multi-year presidential also-ran Ron Paul (R, TX-14).  Ron Paul has, at multiple times during his political career, called for our withdrawl from the UN and NATO, the elimination of the Federal Reserve, reinstitution of the Gold Standard (not just the normal standard, but actually using gold and silver coins/bars as as currency in leiu of paper representations), has written economics texts in the Austrian style, would eliminate the Department of Education and EPA if he had the power.  But he's not a partisan.  These are his earnest libertarian beliefs.  He was one of only three Republican representatives to vote against the Patriot Act.  He opposes the War on Drugs, DADT, torture, the death penalty, and the unitary executive, and supports habeus corpus rights of terror detainees.  These are all very consistent boilerplate libertarian opinions.  Liberty and states' rights above all else, with a heavy dose of non-regulated free market economics.

Which brings us to Rand Paul, newly primaried Republican senatorial candidate from Kentucky.  He's made recent comments about his personal rejection of Title II of the Civil Rights Act.  That's the one that prohibits private businesses operating in a public capacity (basically everything but country clubs) from discriminating against customers on various protected-class guidelines like race, religion, etc.  Similarly he's criticized the Americans with Disabilities Act for unfairly infringing upon private businesses who don't wish to cater to the physically disabled.  The premise of his argument here is that personal liberty trumps the outreach of the federal government, and businesses should have the freedom to discriminate however they wish, and that free market forces would adjudicate the economic outcome fairly.  That racism is inherently a personal choice, and the freedom to choose bigotry is a necessary component of freedom.

At first glance, I had to admit that, similar to his father's strict adherence to libertarian ideals, this is a ruthless but consistent spin on the civil rights movement.  Rand's willing to express his dislike for the practice of racism while simultaneously defending your freedom to manifest your racism.  If you're going all-in on the liberty-or-death argument, then this is a solid step in that particular direction.  However, like his father's economic opinions, I feel that this brand of cutthroat ideological libertarianism demonstrates a fundamental and perhaps intentional disconnect from the tribulations of the American population.  That these people shouldn't be responsible for our lawmaking.

Let me first explain from the economic side, where I can speak more competently.  Economic libertarians, aka free-marketeers, aka "of the Austrian school", are everywhere.  Anbody who's ever spent more than one but less than four semesters of college taking econ courses is probably an Austrian, whether or not they know enough to call themselves that.  Those introductory courses teach the basic framework of econ theory as being solely about perfect competition, equilibrium, and the maximization of GDP and profits, in a manner similar to how your 5th grade history lessons on the Pilgrims and early colonial times were probably heavy on the maize and Thanksgiving and teepees light on the indigenous warfare and religious proselytization at gunpoint.  It just so happens that the Austrian way of thinking is founded on free market equilibrium, the resulting efficiencies, and calculable results derived from an axiomatic framework focused primarily on the producer side.  So it's pretty natural for people with an abbreviated understanding of formal economic education to make the leap to Hayek and von Mises.  There's legitimate theory flowing from that base setup (in, say, the business cycle and capital theory spheres of study) but that circumscripted framework also lends itself to the type of person who seeks to vindicate their traditionally conservative opinions on economics by espousing free markets to an ideological extreme, focusing on producer benefits, claiming those producer benefits will result in trickle-down effects on the consumer side, and providing an outlet for the tinfoil hat types to get paranoid about paper money and stores of wealth.  The point I'm driving towards is that there's a certain political influence for those who lean towards the right to fall into Austrian prescripts, whether or not they understand what they're talking about.

And so we have the Paul family fighting the battle for the gold standard, pre-Depression-era cyclical deflationary spirals be damned, because they believe first and foremost in liberty, in life and in business, and that naturally flows into Austrian goldbuggyness.  It's not founded in any kind of rational analysis of GNP expansion versus monetary supply, or by comparative Real terms, but a simple dogmatic belief in some nebulous concept of liberty.  They want to abolish the Fed because it regulates...stuff.  The particular regulations aren't as important as the concept, as they understand it, of the distortionary effects of regulation from a philosophical standpoint, not one grounded in math or empiricism.

Now back to Rand's take on the Civil Rights Act.  He argues (and has since slightly backed down from, after the immediate media firestorm of his comments) that liberty and economic freedom trump the government's mandate to regulate equality.  While he specifies that he wouldn't personally discriminate against a black person, and wouldn't shop at a store that did, he feels the businessowner has the inherent human right to discriminate which cannot be stripped.  This is another dogmatic, ideological stand, and one that I find rather telling given that we only have centuries of actual real-world data of the result of what free-marketing our race relations would result in.  I enjoy Andrew Sullivan's response:

Worse, Paul's entirely abstract intellectual argument wrests pure principles out of an actual society, with actual historical atrocities, violence, oppression and contempt. That's why I cannot be a libertarian the way some others like Paul are. I do not believe you can reify an abstraction like liberty and separate it from the context - historical, cultural, moral - in which it lives and breathes and from which it emerged. I can believe in freedom and believe in equality of opportunity but I should be mature enough to see when there has to be a compromise between the two - and decide. On the issue of race in America, the libertarian right was proven wrong - morally, empirically wrong. Giving up the ancient and real freedom to discriminate was worth it - indeed morally and politically necessary for America to regain its soul.

I like this particularly because Sullivan is a self-described libertarian, who frequently bases his outraged reactions to government expansions and oversteps within the framework of freedom and the Declaration of Independence and etc, but even this Rand Paul thing is a step too far.  I think Sullivan's experiences as a homosexual in this country have given him some personal insight on the greater concept of civil rights and the battle between autonomy and equality.  In the face of increasing breathless libertarian cries from, say, the Tea Party epidemic, he's actually softened his Austrian tones over the years.  His go-to blog for conservative economic analysis is Bruce Bartlett, who on any given day this year could be mistaken for Paul Krugman, given what's coming out of the religiously libertarian camp lately.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight what I consider to be a pretty dangerous political mindset.  Not one of partisan Republicanism, but ideological libertarianism.  That it supposedly anchors itself in philosophy instead of politics doesn't make it immune to callous and frankly dangerous conclusions that would result, as has been documented in our nation's not-too-distant history, in actual harm, monetary and physical.