Almost everyone in American who is burdened of politics knows what a fuss Rand Paul, a senate candidate from Kentucky, raised through his remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Paul and his father are libertarians, but also candidates of the Republican party. The left has made great sport of the younger Paul’s remarks, not simply as his remarks, but as an attack on libertarian philosophy itself.
There have been many prominent defenses of this venerable political view, one worthily and easily defended. Terry Michael’s “In Defense of Libertarianism” in Reason is one of them.
I’ve had a commenter write twice to mention Ron Paul. (I assume it’s the same commenter, writing two posts, a week apart.) He’s not shown up this week, but then it’s a holiday.
Michael styles his defense as an open letter to the left, part of which appears below:
To my left-liberal Democrat friends:
As you engage in intellectual dishonesty using Rand Paul’s silly comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to misrepresent libertarianism, perhaps you might want to consider a little history of the political philosophy of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, the original libertarian. Let me help you escape your ignorance about libertarianism without a capital L, a political philosophy far from conservatism….
Classical liberalism, on the other hand, has lasted centuries. It was a natural fit for an Agrarian Era, with self-sustaining farmers, frontiersmen, and shop keepers. When the Industrial Era arrived, these individualists railed against “wage labor.” They wanted no part of centralized industry and its abuses. Corporate excesses fed Progressive Era reformers, who promoted one-size-fits-all government to address the sins of the Robber Barons.
With adoption of the income tax and world wars, a depression, and a big tax-paying middle class after World War II, Big Government was in full bloom by the 1960s, complete with a tax-hungry Cold War military industrial complex, entitlement programs that devoured revenue, and government dependency by both an impoverished underclass and a corporate welfare class.
Then came the push-back that brought Ronald Reagan to power….
Concurrent with abandonment of the New Deal and Great Society by large blocks of voters, there arrived the third great economic wave, the Information Age, which intellectually empowers individuals, allowing them to enjoy more control over their own economic lives….
Of course, Rand Paul was ridiculous questioning four-decade-old settled law that recognized slavery and segregation as conditions justifying the coercive power of the state to prohibit discrimination. We libertarians could give you a long list of things, like fighting crime and enforcing contracts, we regard as appropriate for state intrusion. We just insist the use of government power be minimal, consistent with individual liberty and responsibility.
I’d agree.
I’ll write more about Rand Paul’s remarks over the weekend.