There’s been a controversy over remarks that Rand Paul, a Republican candidate for U.S. senate made, about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While on an MSNBC program, Paul (the son of libertarian-leaning Republican Ron Paul) implied that he supported the right of private private businesses to decide whom to serve. (The 1964 Act prohibits the kind of discrimination Paul was discussing).
The next day, Paul announced that he was not advocating a repeal of any of the Civil Rights Act’s provisions, including those that ban private discrimination.
Paul was right to support all of the Act’s provisions. Although libertarians, as I am, favor as few government restrictions as possible, the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act was necessary to remove entrenched, discriminatory legal and social discrimination at the state and local level. Cathy Young, writing in Reason, takes a similar position:
As some strong champions of free markets, such as legal scholar Richard Epstein, have pointed out, racial segregation and discrimination by private businesses in the South was not simply the result of owners’ personal choices but of powerful societal pressure as well as coercion by state governments. Businesses that refused to discriminate were targeted for officially sanctioned or condoned harassment and intimidation.
Would “whites only” business practices have crumbled fast, as some libertarians believe, if the federal government had limited itself to dismantling the public foundations of segregation? Or was bigotry too pervasive, too deeply entrenched in minds and morals? The latter seems more likely. Moreover, for generations this private bigotry had been not only enabled but fostered by public policy, from slavery onward. Writing in The New Republic, John McWhorter, an insightful, iconoclastic black commentator, defends Paul’s and Stossel’s right to express their unorthodox views but also asserts that “the social rejection of racism was driven in large part by the head start, authority, finality, and even the drama of the legal banning of segregation.”
I am sure Epstein and McWhorter are right, and that the 1964 Act was necessary to overcome entrenched, enabled, immoral discrimination. To argue for limited government is to argue against the kind of locally-sanctioned bigotry that millions of Americans faced. Some laws are necessary to overcome far worse ones. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was necessary to overcome entrenched, active bigotry.
It’s simply unrealistic to argue against the Act, although there were a few men who were truly opposed to discrimination who did so at the time. (Young acknowledges this, too.)
Threats to liberty sometimes come not from a distant federal government, but for states and local governments that disregard fundamental principles of liberty, and act contrary to a centuries-long tradition of expanding freedom and consequent prosperity.
See, Racism, Civil Rights, and Libertarianism: Lessons from the Rand Paul Controversy.
For more on the Paul family, see Life with the Pauls, a Libertarian Family.