Several articles on Rand Paul:
Kentucky libertarians: Rand Paul might not be libertarian enough
[ Well, of course he isn't. He won a primary, didn't he? Sure, he partially redeemed himself by going on MSNBC and letting liberals define him as a crackpot but still he might win the general election so the libertarians better put up a third party candidate against him. ]
posted at 8:36 pm on May 26, 2010 by Allahpundit
Here’s a good way for libertarians to prove they’re serious political actors: Mount a third-party challenge to their best shot at a Senate seat in ages because he — Ron Paul’s son — isn’t quite 99 and 44/100 percent pure.
“He had gone from being an outsider candidate to a tea party candidate to an establishment candidate in the past nine months,” [state Libertarian vice chairman Joshua] Koch said. “It’s a complete identity crisis. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Insisting Paul is no Libertarian, Koch called Paul and his Democratic opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, “faces of the same bad coin.”…
Koch said Paul’s views on a variety of subjects differ from the Libertarian Party, including his promised support for any measures to ban abortion and his opposition to same-sex marriage.
“Trying to impose a national standard for that would throw the whole system out of balance, and that’s definitely not Libertarian,” Koch said.
Koch also said Paul is out of step with Libertarians in his unwillingness to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
I’m intrigued by the fact that they think he’s on the level about Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve always assumed that was Paul’s version of Obama’s lie about his supposed opposition to gay marriage, which the left has the good sense to indulge in the name of electability. Seriously, it just so happens that Rand Paul, novice candidate, has sharply different views from his old man in the one area that made Ron Paul electoral poison to so many conservatives in 2008? C’mon. Anyway, the filing deadline’s August 10. The question: Is a party that struggles to crack two percent of the vote in a general election really a threat to Rand Paul in Kentucky? It’s hard to imagine Conway winning 49/48/3, as most purist libertarians will probably hold their nose and vote Paul if the race is that close in the end. But I guess if the purists can get the meme going that he’s a phony, maybe enough people stay home or refuse to donate that it really does end up hurting him. Quick, Rand: Condemn the Civil Rights Act before it’s too late!
Incidentally, they’re quite right about Paul bucking the libertarian tide on abortion. His father’s pro-life too, but Rand is really pro-life. Really.
hotair.com
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Despite his pedigree as the son of former Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, Libertarian Vice Chairman Joshua Koch said Rand Paul has betrayed the party's values with stands he's taken, and they were considering finding a candidate to run for the seat.
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Insisting Paul is no Libertarian, Koch called Paul and his Democratic opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, "faces of the same bad coin."
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Koch said Paul's views on a variety of subjects differ from the Libertarian Party, including his promised support for any measures to ban abortion and his opposition to same-sex marriage.
"Trying to impose a national standard for that would throw the whole system out of balance, and that's definitely not Libertarian," Koch said.
Koch also said Paul is out of step with Libertarians in his unwillingness to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The reason why we would even consider running somebody in this race is because we're not going to let Rand determine what a Libertarian stands for," he said. "I'm here to say Rand does not have the Libertarian ideology."
msnbc.msn.com
Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle — but it isn’t a path to political victory.
May 26, 2010
- by Clayton E. Cramer
The news media and blogosphere are all abuzz about Republican Rand Paul’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited businesses from discriminating against customers based on race or national origins. I confess to having conflicting reactions to Dr. Paul’s principled opposition to big government.
On the one hand, there is a very persuasive theoretical argument that free markets will punish irrational discrimination. Thomas Sowell’s Markets and Minorities (1981) makes the case that if Business “A” refuses to do business with 10% of its customer base, it is reducing its sales and profits; A’s competitors will benefit from having 10% more customers. Over time, A will suffer economically for irrational behavior, while its competitors will benefit.
Along with the economic costs and benefits, public accommodation laws like CRA64 also protected bigots from the economic consequences of their decisions. At least when A put out the sign “No Negroes served here,” you knew who the enemy was – and not to put money into A’s pocket. The “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycott campaigns of the 1920s through 1940s forced Northern department stores to hire black workers, at a time when governmental action was unthinkable. CRA64 drove such overt discrimination underground — making such a boycott strategy far harder to implement.
There is also plenty of real-world evidence that free markets were an enemy of racism. Especially in the South, state governments did not simply allow businesses to discriminate — they often required discrimination. The landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, involved a Louisiana law that punished railroad companies if they did not segregate their passengers. There were similar laws into the 1960s in many Southern states requiring segregation of interstate bus customers — hence, the Freedom Rider campaign, in which blacks used the whites-only lunch counter at the Greyhound station.
One could make the case that CRA64 was necessary to break a longstanding government policy of encouraging – even requiring – racial discrimination. It wasn’t just state governments, either. The federal government, starting with President Woodrow Wilson, segregated government offices and stopped accepting blacks into the Navy except in menial roles. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, the Federal Housing Authority, which subsidized the growth of suburban housing, strongly encouraged developers to add racially restrictive covenants to deeds – keeping some neighborhoods all-white by law.
Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism? I would like to think so – but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests. You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.
This isn’t an abstract concern; the discrimination that CRA64 sought to prohibit was widespread and profoundly destructive. I went to church with a man named Lindsay in California. He had some stories about what things were like before CRA64 similar to those that I have heard repeatedly from other blacks. In the 1950s, when Lindsay’s band went to perform in what is now politically correct Sonoma County, California, Lindsay often had to sleep in his car: there were no motels there that would rent to a black man.
Nor is this all ancient history. As recently as 1993, blacks were discriminated against in a Denny’s in Annapolis. How do we know that they were discriminated against for being black, and not because they were badly dressed? These were on-duty Secret Service agents attached to the president’s security detail – and you know the Secret Service is pretty demanding about dress code.
Did CRA64 reduce racial discrimination? Many liberals argue that such laws have an “educative” function – that by punishing stupid and destructive behavior, such laws teach people that racism is wrong. They send a strong and unmistakable message that the majority has standards of appropriate behavior that everyone must follow. If you want to argue that CRA64, representing majority will in the U.S. in 1964, is a legitimate use of governmental power, then a lot of other laws that are “educative” in their effects are equally legitimate: abortion bans, marijuana prohibition, and laws against homosexuality. Antidiscrimination laws impose the majority’s moral code on the minority (as do all laws). What makes CRA64 “educative” and those other laws “oppressive”? It’s only whose ox is being gored.
As I said at the beginning, I have conflicting feelings about antidiscrimination laws. Racism is offensive and contrary to scripture. Big government worked long and hard to create the level of racism against blacks; a certain amount of big government trying to eradicate it has a certain rough justice to it. But where does this end? Can government prohibit employment discrimination against people with facial piercings? Santa Cruz County, California, passed such an ordinance a few years ago. Is it “unfair” for restaurants to discriminate against people that haven’t bathed in weeks, and refuse them service? How dare they put up discriminatory signs like, “No shirts, no shoes, no service.” Why should a fashion modeling agency be allowed to discriminate against the obese and ugly?
Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle – but it isn’t a path to political victory.
pajamasmedia.com
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Ione
Libertarianism in its pure form is as Utopian as socialism. Both depend on the goodness of human nature. I am libertarian by philosophy but a conservative pragmatic for this very reason. The Constitution is by and large a libertarian document and all the founders said it was written for an “educated and moral” electorate. Since Logic and Objectivism have been kicked out of the schools and God and a moral compass have been kicked out of the culture, laws have been made to compensate for the deficit. This will continue until the end of time unless and until the people turn back to objective truth and moral standards. In the mean time we have the current situation. The Constitution didn’t come first; moral men, educated in objective truth (history, science….)came first. Then they wrote the Constitution.
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