Do You Have To Be A Racist To Be A Libertarian?

Dr Rand Paul's assessment of the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has proven to be a narrative blessed or damned with very long legs. It is a story which just won't go away as the news cycles roll along.

As the Geek parses the manifold repetitions of the Sin Of Rand Paul, it appears to him that, despite the protestations that no one really, really believes that the Kentucky ophthalmologist, Tea Party adherent and Republican senatorial nominee is a racist, the subtext holds to the contrary. In a more inclusive way. The implication or, at least, the inference the reader is encouraged to draw, is any person who subscribes to libertarian ideas in the raw must harbor racist inclinations deep in his heart of hearts.

Dr Paul in what was obviously a moment of politically damaging candor suggested that the employment of the cudgel of federal legislation in the interest of compelling any and all private enterprises offering any sort of accommodation to the public must admit all comers without regard to, inter alia, race was an arguably illegitimate extension of the interstate commerce act. This implies that the free operation of the market would be not only the more constitutionally correct but, ultimately, the more effective way of countering prejudice in the general public.

To many minds the Paul interpretation constitutes a rejection of the basic truth: In 1964 too many Americans were too blighted by racial prejudice to assure that the market could possibly operate in a color-blind way. That was the case in 1964. It is possible that without the policeman's truncheon of the Civil Rights Act, the same dynamic would continue to apply today.

The truth of the two contending propositions will, of course, never be known as history is a one way street. In a real sense the truth doesn't matter. Congress' moving finger, having written the law, has moved on to write others. Others which are predicated upon the interstate commerce clause. Others that may, as Dr Paul argued with respect to the Civil Rights Act, stretch the intent of the authors of the Constitution beyond all recognition.

The Paul Interpretation says nothing about race, per se. It says a great deal about the fundamental tension which has emerged in an evermore unmistakable way between the role and integrity of the market on the one hand and the power of the government to compel acceptance of whatever policy dictate occupies governmental attention at any particular moment.

The Paul Interpretation does not seek to roll the calender back to the days of Jim Crow. Rather, an honest appraisal of Dr Paul's comment demands that one question the legitimate limits a government may place upon the individual's sovereignty, on the individual's right to determine what will be done with or on property of his owning. Further, Dr Paul calls into question the right of the central government to rule by what is essentially legislative fiat; its legitimate authority to use the interstate commerce clause to give Constitutional color to any enactment it might make.

There are very real grounds to doubt the constitutionality of the many, varied, and quite extensive ways in which Congress has used the interstate commerce clause as a great and highly elastic rug under which any amount of all types of legislative dirt might be swept. Even the several critical Supreme Court decisions which have provided judicial blessing to the extensive use of the interstate commerce clause do not make the usage either constitutional or legitimate.

(Before going on, full-disclosure-in-blogging requires the Geek to admit that he has been refused entry to facilities offering public accommodation for reasons ranging from his Apache ancestor inspired long braids, to the presence of aesthetically disturbing scars on his chest, abdomen, and arms--this at a public beach in southern California the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed.)

The market is a notoriously inefficient mechanism. It is driven by any number of motives, many of them emotional and irrational and base in the exteme. The only thing positive which may be said about the marketplace is that the results of its morass of transactions, its flurry of emotions, irrationalities, and base motives as well as those of a contrary sort far surpass in providing benefits to people any other system yet contrived by fertile minds over the years.

In 1964 and today there are any number of Americans who would deny service, refuse the custom or patronage of potential customers, because of matters extrinsic to the proposed transaction. People would be turned away because of race, ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or even aesthetics. Landlords would reject potential tenants. Shopkeepers would refuse to sell. Restaurant owners to dish up the hash. Hotel owners to provide beds for sleep. The list of potential discriminatory acts is well neigh onto endless.

On the other side of affairs, customers have always had the untrammeled right to refuse their custom to any particular purveyor. Potential patrons have never been denied the free right to refuse patronage. No Congress has ever used the interstate commerce clause to compel buyers to buy, the hungry to go to any particular beanery, the tired to rest their weary heads at any given hotel.

In that sense the playing field of the marketplace has never been level. Indeed, it does not overly sharpen the point to note that the rights of all of us, any of us, to refuse to shop, eat, sleep at any specific offerer of those goods and service has always existed as a sovereign means to compel socially necessary outcomes such as an end to race based business practices.

Imagine for a moment that instead of passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government and other levels of sympathetic government had used their combined powers of the "bully pulpit" to encourage citizens to put the ideals of this nation into practice by patronizing only those who offer public accommodation without consideration of race. Imagine a media blitz that went on for weeks, months, not only portraying the ideals involved but the human tragedies, great and small, which resulted from racist practices and emphasized the power of the individual making choices of where to shop, where to eat, where to sleep, where to go to the movies, what club to join--or quit. The powers of persuasion historically have outweighed in effectiveness the powers of compulsion--even if the process is both longer and messier.

The marketplace is not the sole creature of those who own businesses. It is the creature of all of us who make the decisions on what to buy as well as what to sell, where to eat as well as what to serve, where to sleep as well as what bed to place in the room. In short, the customer is equal owner of the market along with the seller. Buyers who use their freedom to choose finally hold the whip hand. That is provided the government in well-intentioned acts does not short circuit the process.

This is what Dr Paul's comment was actually pointing at. It is for this reason that the Geek sees his criticism of the Civil Rights Act as both well taken and an important launching pad for a free wheeling examination of the ways in which Congress and Supreme Court (and Presidents) have stretched the interstate commerce act far from its narrowly constructed goal of assuring that the central government did nothing to interfere with trade among the several states and did whatever it could to facilitate and encourage that trade and the marketplace in which trade occurred.

Instead of acting to facilitate trade, expand the marketplace, the central government in recent decades has used the interstate commerce clause to restrict freedom. The interstate commerce clause has been used to prohibit farmers from growing certain crops in designated amounts even for personal use; it has restricted the rights of businesses to conduct business; it has even been used most recently as the basis for requiring Americans to buy a certain category of product in a given amount under penalty of law.

Dr Paul in common with libertarians generally seeks to restore the marketplace to its initial pride of place by inhibiting the imperial pretensions of politicians who would use the interstate commerce clause to cover any of an endless multitude of sins. All Dr Paul and his fellow libertarians are asking of the rest of us is for We the People to use our power of choice in the political marketplace. Nothing else. But, that is more than enough.

Palin Gets Some History Right

The Geek likes Sarah Palin. It's not as if he would vote for her should she run for president. He wouldn't. The reason is not that she is a woman. Nor is it her position on abortion. It is not even that she went to a no-name, generic university.

Rather it is her lack of experience relevant to the office of president. Having been the gov of Alaska just doesn't cut it.

Sometimes lack of experience matters as the less than spectacular presidencies of such under qualified occupants of the Oval as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and the current incumbent demonstrate all too well. Ms Palin belongs in the same category.

She does have some truly admirable qualities. Chief among them is her often demonstrated ability to jump back into the fray after one more undeserved attack by members of the self-appointed elites, the hoi oligoi of our country. Anther is her capacity to have unadulterated fun before an audience. With this comes her unmatched skill at turning attacks back on those who berate her. (Remember the billingsgate which came after a photo showed she had written notes to herself on the palm of her hand?)

Many of these features she shares with the Republican icon, Ronald Reagan. She also holds a deep seated faith in both herself and the American people in common with Mr Reagan. That is a very important and vastly underrated factor in her successes to date as it was thirty years ago when Reagan bested the dour, pinched, think-small Jimmy Carter.

Now, Ms Palin has added yet one more aspect to her public persona which gets the thumbs-up from the Geek. She can actually get aspects of American history right. Better, the getting-it-right is on an area of our history too often overlooked or willfully ignored by the proponents of feminism over the past forty years.

In her speech to the Susan B. Anthony List convention over the weekend, Ms Palin correctly noted the existence of an older, more robust form of feminism which was a hallmark of the American frontier, the American West, the farmlands of this country for many, many, generations. She characterized this earlier American feminism as "gun-toting" and "tough."

Her word choice is accurate. So also was her observation that the men of the frontier, the West, and the more-than-slightly demanding grain-belt-to-be, so appreciated the fact that the women in their lives were tough, competent, and quite willing to carry their end of the log that the right of women to vote and hold public office came first to the states of the West.

During the Nineteenth Century the status and role of women were sharply demarcated between the urban based "cult of domesticity" which characterized the civilized, long-settled regions of the East Coast, tidewater South, and portions of the Midwest and the callus-handed, sunburned women behind plows, wagons, and guns on the frontier and in the West.

In the East the rise of industrialism, the splitting of work from home, and the relative peace and prosperity meant that society, particularly the overly polite society of the new middle class, could afford the luxury of putting half the population into comfortable purdah. In the West, on the frontier, and in the very hard pressed urban working class, the consigning of women to a segregated pedestal, a civilized sort of harem, was prohibited by the stern demands of life, of survival.

While Ms Palin, unfortunately, does not include the legions, the generations of immigrant and working class women who lived lives of a rigor which can be scarcely imagined today from her ode to "pioneer" women, she at least properly gives credit to the rugged women who raised families, spent hours staring at the south end of north bound mules, chopped wood, drew water, and, on more than a few occasions, fought Indians. From the days of earliest settlement, when the "frontier" was found only a couple of miles in from the Atlantic Ocean on to the years just before World War II, women carried their end of uncountable logs along with the men in their lives. Life, not just its quality but its very continuance demanded equality of effort, equality of sacrifice, equality of ability.

Raised as he was in the lingering culture of the Apache as well as the far from dead frontier ethos of New Mexico, the Geek has always been very well aware that success of the most basic unit of society--the committed relationship of man and woman--depended upon fundamental equality. It is only by the meshing of complementary capacities that individual weaknesses can be countered for the benefit of the unit. The more demanding the context of life becomes, the recognition of essential equality likewise emerges as ever more critical.

Ms Palin makes specific reference to the sort of feminism found in the faculty lounges of Eastern universities and compares it with the more blunt, more robust sort imposed by the nature of life in the West or on the frontier. Her comparison was both apt and amusing.

As the Geek listened to the plaints and wails of his feminist co-workers at a couple of different universities back East he always made a mental comparison of just how little basis existed for the lamentations of these successful albeit spoiled products of the suburban middle class when considered in conjunction with the routine "sufferings" of women in the New Mexico Territory only a century earlier. How many of these damsels in distress could have done what women of the New Mexico Territory did after the Apache had burned down the house, wounded, or killed their man, despoiled the crops, run off with the cattle and other indigenous amusements?

Or, how real were the complaints and resentments of the faculty feminists faced with the purported abuses of the pale penis people in comparison with those undergone by the wives of miners as the Pinkerton agents and state militiamen opened fire to break the strike? It is all well and good to end the lingering disabilities imposed primarily on the women of the more civilized eastern US as part of the "cult of domesticity," but at the same time it must be acknowledged that these disabilities were accepted by women of an earlier day as a sign of the stability, prosperity, and security of urban middle class existence.

In the ruder, cruder, far more raw life of the urban working class, the new immigrant, the sod-busting farmer of the Great Plains, the Western miner, rancher, logger, the degree of inequality inherent to life was far, far less because inequality like the failure of a man to cherish, respect, and celebrate the woman in his life would be tantamount to a collective suicide note. Coming as she does from Western roots and an Alaskan context, Ms Palin intuitively understands and appreciates this as she does the vast historical gulf between the ladies of the eastern urban middle class and the women of the West.

Congratulations to you, Ms Palin. It is easier now to understand why you have been repeatedly viewed and described as "the wrong sort of woman" by the Ladies of the Lounge. The Geek won't vote for you, Ms Palin, but he appreciates your valuable history lesson.

Gordon Brown's Real Message

In the heat of his election campaign British PM Gordon Brown pulled a verbal boner which surpassed even the American King of Gaffes, Joe Biden. In his car shortly after leaving an encounter with a life-long Labor supporter who had the unmitigated temerity to question Brown's position on immigration, the short-fused Scot was caught on a mic he thought was dead. He said of the person, "that woman is a bigot."

The key word was not "bigot" but rather, "that woman." The real problem was not contained in his words, but in his tone of voice. He uttered his complaint in a way which can be best, most accurately characterized as, how-dare-that-peasant-question-me! By his tone, by the wordview made manifest in it, Mr Brown showed the key defining characteristic of a member in good standing of the hoi oligoi, the Elite.

It is most important to understand that the tone--and the worldview--characterizes all members of that monstrous regiment, the Elite, regardless of the details of political orientation. Left and Right, these self-appointed, anointed by none but each other, the folks of the hoi oligoi feel nothing but fear, loathing, and contempt for the rest of us, the hoi polloi, the (to revert for a moment to that hoary phrase of the Communists) "toiling masses," the common man and woman.

Whether pundits, politicians, preachers, professors, business "leaders," or professional "experts," whether people of the political Left or the Right, all these individuals are united by a belief in their own competence to run the lives of others. They share another commonality: All are convinced that those of us who are not by virtue of birth, position, education (defined as the ability to jump successfully though the artificial hoops of academic "excellence") or the specious metrics of financial success or occupation of a corner office are of the lower orders, in need of guidance, supervision, or even outright custody by our "betters."

To put affairs bluntly: A person enlists in the Elite by thinking that he or she has the ability to tell others how best to run their lives. There may be no rational basis for this, but it is quite comforting to think that one is superior to the vast array of lesser sorts cluttering the human landscape.

As soon as a person comes to hold this most false of hallucinatory gods that person commences a life which is predicated by a constant fear of the masses of peasants. Since fear is unpleasant to experience, particularly as a constant feature, the emotion is covered by a mask of loathing, contempt.

Mr Brown probably believed in all honesty that the grandmotherly sort, Mrs Duffy, really is a "bigot." Who but a "bigot"could question the PM about current and proposed British immigration policy? That is obvious--at least in the World According To Brown. Only a "bigot" who was motivated solely by racist hatred of Africans, East Indians, and Pakistanis.

In addition to the Brown-presumed sin of "bigotry," Mrs Duffy had committed a far greater transgression. She had questioned the Labor Party leader,the PM, a certified member of the Elite. Next thing, Ms Duffy and her neighbors amongst the peasantry would be exhibiting mass unrest, coming after Mr Brown and others of his Elite ilk with pitchforks and torches.

That cannot be allowed!

The fear, contempt, loathing showed by Mr Brown have also been all too evident in the rantings of assorted members of the American Elite about the uppity peasants of the Tea Party movement, the racist xenophobes of the Arizona state legislature, and others who cling to their guns and Bibles. Those many,many commentators who rail against the self-organizing groups collected under the Tea Party banner are simply showing the global anxiety which must be felt at the thought that the peasants have found their pitchforks, torches--and voices.

That cannot be allowed!

The current patron saint (female division) of the Tea Party (and others of the peasant persuasion,) Sarah Palin is universally vilified by the people and instruments of the hoi oligoi simply because she is "not the right sort, don't you know." She did not go to the "right" school(s); she does not hold appropriately "upscale" attitudes; she doesn't act in ways, or use the vocabulary approved by the domestic Elite. She is dangerous--a potential icon for the classic David painting, Liberty Leading the People.

That cannot be allowed!

The assorted denizens of the Christian Right who wish so fervently and work so diligently to conscript the State as the enforcement agent of their vision of moral correctness are no different in having proclaimed their sole ability to tell all of us how to live our lives. They are no different in fearing the "peasants" and covering their fear with loathing and contempt. They are convinced that without the firm, stern hand of their (state imposed and enforced) moral views, the peasants will cheerfully go to hell in a bucket.

That cannot be allowed!

United in fear, united in feeling both contempt for and loathing of the hoi polloi, always contending (and believing) that they are acting for the greater good of those of us who are trapped in the vast swamp of peasantry, the Elite seek to limit, control, diminish, marginalize and make permanent dependents each and every one of us. To question the purity of the Elite's motives, to doubt the brilliance and correctness of their decisions and actions is an act of extreme insubordination.

That cannot be allowed!

Sit down, keep quiet, bow your head to our wisdom, thank us for our generosity, stand in awe of all we are doing for you. That is proper peasant behavior, a proper peasant way to understand life. A proper peasant way to show one knows one's place.

When Mrs Duffy asked her questions, she did not act in the approved manner of subordination, submission. Mr Brown simply responded, when he thought it was safe, in the proper way of an insulted, threatened ME (Member of the Elite.) Other MEs would have done the same--and have.

That should not be allowed!