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However, while the same political principle applies to both, the same moral evaluation does not. The listener see that the first example is okay, while the second is immoral. So, his mind goes to thinking that the law should (perhaps) allow the first and disallow the second.

This is exactly the integration that is missing from the average left-fascist's thought processes. You can see it in almost all of the comments, like this one from Politico:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37577.html

"Rand Paul is not only a RACIST, but he’s a cowardly RACIST! He didn’t have the guts to just say what he truly feels: That privately owned businesses should have the right to not service blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It’s called WHITE-SUPREMECY"

They are unable to distinguish between one having the right to do something, and whether or not doing that thing is right, so they are unable to distinguish between one recognizing the right to do it, while condemning it morally. If you recognize the right to do it, then you must believe it is good. I used to fall into that trap too, there is a lot of ethical fog to break through, a lot of bad premises sunk deep into the culture.

Edited by 2046
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Racists judge character based on non-essential characteristics instead of consciously held convictions. Denying service to a KKK member is not the same thing; refusing service to a KKK member because of his allegiance to said organization is a judgment based on consciously held convictions. This KKK analogy would make more sense if Rand Paul were accused of being an anti-semite.

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A couple take-aways:

Politically, libertarians are inept. If his father campaigned away from the Iraq war and "empire" (which were a non-issues to the American public in 2008) and more toward economic issues he would have had more support. Rand is having his "Ron Paul vs. Giuliani debate" moment now. Remember when the GOP base attacked Ron Paul after he purportedly blamed the US for the 9/11 attacks in the debates? Even if he was right, it's not smart move against Rudy.

Philosophically, libertarians are inept. Instead of bring up the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its flaws, Rand should be out praising small businesses and the morality of self-interest and self-reliance. Take the focus from politics and start hitting home economic and political freedom as a MORAL issue not just a political or economic issue.

Even with those flaws, which Rand Paul is not entirely at fault for, where can I send this guy a check to get him to Washington?

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Yes, a more Voltaire style response would have been better. Something along the lines of.

"While I do not condone what some people do with their property I will defend to the death their right to own it"

The left would spin it. Tomorrow's headlines would read: 'Rand Paul vows to Fight to the Death for Segregation".

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This is the problem with trying to instruct the public on philosophy through a political campaign. The minute you say something that contradicts the status quo it will be twisted and smeared into emotional soundbites and appeals to tradition and authority. What's even worse though is Rand Paul's backtracking, it's making it look like he has something to hide, that he's ashamed of standing behind his own views. What a disaster...

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This incident shows Rand Paul's political inexperience. He should know that this is not the kind of issue you can debate in sound bites and it's also completely irrelevant at this time. There is nothing to be gained politically by even entertaining this discussion. He should have simply said that he supports the 1964 Civil Rights act and left it at that. Instead, he let the discussion go forward and it has now damaged his chances to get elected and may prevent him from dealing with the important issues that are facing this country. In politics, you have to know where and when to pick your fights. This was a bad choice on the part of Rand Paul.

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A caller on a local radio show brought up that exact counterpoint and the host was stumped. All he could say was almost straight out of James Taggart or Ferris' mouth, "But that's just theory! No one's going to walk in with a KKK hood on! You have a right in this country to get a cup of coffee! You can't but property rights over someone's right to get a cup of coffee!"

I say someone should test this out by filming just such an encounter, and when the owner objects, invoke the Civil Rights Act to show just how rediculous it is.

There was actually a short video I saw once where a guy did just about that. He was called the 'amazing racist', I think. It didn't go over real well.

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Another oops.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as national Republican officials seek ways to limit damage from Rand Paul's unorthodox remarks, the Kentucky Senate nominee raised more eyebrows Friday by defending the oil company blamed for the Gulf oil spill.

"They know they messed up" by allowing liberal show host Rachel Maddow to draw out Paul's thoughts on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the official said. Paul told Maddow he abhors racial discrimination, but he also suggested the federal government shouldn't have the power to force restaurants to admit minorities against their will.

There were signs late Friday that Paul was getting the message. His campaign canceled his scheduled appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," accusing reporters of being obsessed with the civil rights flap.

"There's lots of chatter, 'we've got to get this guy some help,'" the official said, adding that he's not convinced Paul realizes the danger of saying yes to so many interview requests.

Washington-based Republican strategists hope to strike a balance. They'd like to persuade Paul to be more selective and disciplined in his remarks but not lose the freshness and candor that appeal to voters seeking a change in Washington.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/m...tame-rand-paul/

People claim that they want a new kind of politician in Washington, so I guess we'll see whether this electorate can actually handle a candidate who says what he believes.

Edited by gags
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Another oops.
Tough to be in politics for some type of principle (rather than power), and not be caught in a truth. In Paul's case, even if a reporter has not done much research, they probably think of him as something like "kooky, libertarian, type". So, they will probe areas where he might find himself unable to hide his views.

People claim that they want a new kind of politician in Washington, so I guess we'll see whether this electorate can actually handle a candidate who says what he believes.
A politician ends up being place in a Gail Wynand situation. If he lies well enough, he will likely find that he has later to go along with that lie to continue to please his public. Edited by softwareNerd
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After reading up on the subject, I have concluded that it was wrong for the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to have been found unconstitutional.

From TeachingAmercianHistory.org

An Act to Protect All Citizens in Their Civil and Legal Rights.

Whereas it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political; and it being the appropriate object of legislation to enact great fundamental principles into law: Therefore,

Be it enacted, That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.

The Supreme Court in throwing out the CRA of 1875 also destroyed the legal basis to challenge the Jim Crow laws under the enforcement provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Jim Crow laws were not private acts and ought to be ruled out by Fourteenth Amendment via the CRA of 1875. So now today instead of eliminating Jim Crow laws with the Fourteenth Amendment we eliminate them with the commerce clause. Expanding the commerce clause in this way creates an indefinitely enlarged federal authority limited only by the subjective sense of current majority of the Supreme Court.

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Three libertarian thinkers on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From Cato Scholar Scolds Rand Paul, Gives OK to Soup Nazi

"I think Rand Paul is wrong about the Civil Rights Act," libertarian Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsey wrote in an e-mail. "As a general matter, people should be free to deal or not deal with others as they choose. And that means we discriminate against those we choose not to deal with. In marrying one person, we discriminate against all others. Businesses can discriminate against potential employees who don't meet hiring qualifications, and they can discriminate against potential customers who don't observe a dress code (no shirt, no shoes, no service). Rand Paul is appealing to the general principle of freedom of association, and that general principle is a good one.

"But it has exceptions. In particular, after three-plus centuries of slavery and another century of institutionalized, state-sponsored racism (which included state toleration of private racist violence), the exclusion of blacks from public accommodations wasn't just a series of uncoordinated private decisions by individuals exercising their freedom of association. It was part and parcel of an overall social system of racial oppression," Lindsey said.

"Paul's grievous error is to ignore the larger context in which individual private decisions to exclude blacks were made. In my view, at least, truly individual, idiosyncratic discrimination ought to be legally permitted; for example, the "Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld ought to be free to deny soup to anybody no matter how crazy his reasons (they didn't ask nicely, they mispronounced the soup, etc.). But the exclusion of blacks from public accommodations wasn't like that -- not even close."

"To be against Title II in 1964 would be to be brain-dead to the underlying realities of how this world works," said professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago. "In 1964, every major public accommodation that operated a nationwide business was in favor of being forced to admit minorities." National chains, he explained, feared desegregating in the South without the backing of the federal government because they feared boycotts, retribution and outright violence.

The problem with the Civil Rights Act, Epstein explained, is "when you say, this is such a wonderful idea, let's carry it over to disability. At this point, you create nightmares of the first order" in terms of problematic government bureaucracies and baseless lawsuits.

"We have to start with some historical context," e-mailed George Mason Law professor David Bernstein, who is also a blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy. "If segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow South was simply a matter of law, federal legislation that would have overturned Jim Crow laws would have sufficed. But, in fact, it involved the equivalent of a white supremacist cartel, enforced not just by overt government regulation like segregation laws, but also by the implicit threat of private violence and harassment of anyone who challenged the racist status quo."

"Therefore, to break the Jim Crow cartel, there were only two options: (1) a federal law invalidating Jim Crow laws, along with a massive federal takeover of local government by the federal government to prevent violence and extralegal harassment of those who chose to integrate; or (2) a federal law banning discrimination by private parties, so that violence and harassment would generally be pointless. If, like me, you believe that it was morally essential to break the Jim Crow cartel, option 2 was the lesser of two evils. I therefore would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act," Bernstein concluded.

This is sound, reality-informed reasoning.

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This is sound, reality-informed reasoning.

I get that it was a problem, but I still fail to see how it wasn't more political expediency than principled reasoning.

All I'm getting(in the Soup Nazi example) is that it's OK to discriminate against a subset of people who lack good enunciation but not blacks, because people who could not enunciate were not routinely discriminated against before. So the principle is, if an arbitrarily decided "large enough" number of people discriminate against another group of people, then property rights can be justly disregarded. Could you explain in more detail why you see the reasoning as sound?

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Here you go, folks. When I said "left-fascists," I meant it: "People and Property: What Rand Really Wants"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-olmsted...y_b_584111.html

I at least appreciate Dr. Paul's willingness to come out of the closet on this kind of conservative thinking, which is basically a fundamental belief in the primacy of the individual over the group.

[...]

I understand Ayn Rand. She arrived at her philosophy as a reaction to the nightmare of Stalinist Russia in which she believed the will of the individual was always subverted to the will of the state. Fair objection, but it had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, in which the will of all individuals was completely subverted to will of one individual -- Josef Stalin. In a democracy such as we have, the power is diffused among millions of people. You may call that collectivist, but it's hardly monolithic or dictatorial (unlike, for example,a corporation in which all power flows downward from a politburo-like regime made up of the CEO, CFO and Board of Directors.)

The Rand (Paul or Ayn) philosophy, by putting private property rights at the same level of human rights, equates the status of things with the status of human beings. If property is considered equal to human beings, then it's not a very big leap to considering human beings as property. I believe this country is already familiar with this philosophy, manifested 150 years ago as slavery.

[...]

People who put property rights on the level of human rights need to spend some time picking cotton or weaving carpets 12 hours a day, in a dark-skinned body, being paid subsistence wages by a warlord or factory owner who screams that he has a right to run his business as he sees fit. A few years should do it.

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Three libertarian thinkers on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From Cato Scholar Scolds Rand Paul, Gives OK to Soup Nazi

This is sound, reality-informed reasoning.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree on that one as well. I don't think "a large amount of people" wanting to privately discriminate makes the initiation of force okay, or that the "overall system" makes the immoral parts of the Act permissible. That's really all Rand Paul was saying, that any part of the Act wich violated property rights was wrong, not that "the system" was in any way okay.

The other argument, that was "the only way" to end the immoral Southern racists' laws is a false alternative. One could support the just portions while opposing the section that banned racial discrimination by private businesses. If the bill came down to me as the deciding vote by some strange twist of fate, I would vote "yea" because I think it did more good than harm, but otherwise I would cast a symbolic "nay" vote.

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I get that it was a problem, but I still fail to see how it wasn't more political expediency than principled reasoning.

All I'm getting(in the Soup Nazi example) is that it's OK to discriminate against a subset of people who lack good enunciation but not blacks, because people who could not enunciate were not routinely discriminated against before. So the principle is, if an arbitrarily decided "large enough" number of people discriminate against another group of people, then property rights can be justly disregarded. Could you explain in more detail why you see the reasoning as sound?

If you were the one white guy that wanted to make some extra cash by dealing with black customers you would be harassed, assaulted, your business boycotted or burned. Local law enforcement would condone the private use of force by willfully not investigating or failing to charge anyone. If all businesses at the same time must accommodate black customers then there is no one to single out for punitive action to be an example to keep the rest in line. The alternative would be an overwhelming police presence by an expensive imported force because the locals can't be trusted to police themselves.

edit: add

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree on that one as well. I don't think "a large amount of people" wanting to privately discriminate makes the initiation of force okay,

Numbers have nothing to do with it. The private force backing up the Jim Crow cartel was the problem.

Edited by Grames
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Numbers have nothing to do with it. The private force backing up the Jim Crow cartel was the problem.

I see your argument Grames, and it seems very strong, but that is not necessarily what happened. The likelihood is that the bigoted businesses had been losing market share to businesses that would sell to everyone. If everyone, including the government officials, in let's say the entire state of Alabama were racists, then why would they need to pass laws mandating segregation? Obviously they did it because the needed protection from less irrational businesses. If the liberals were truly liberal, they would have to support capitalism as the enemy of racism, but as you can see, that is not why that section was implemented, and not why the left-fascists support it, they cared nothing about the minimization of force being initiated. They do so out of hatred of capitalism.

Edited by 2046
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I see your argument Grames, and it seems very strong, but that is not necessarily what happened. The likelihood is that the bigoted businesses had been losing market share to businesses that would sell to everyone. If everyone, including the government officials, in let's say the entire state of Alabama were racists, then why would they need to pass laws mandating segregation? Obviously they did it because the needed protection from less irrational businesses. If the liberals were truly liberal, they would have to support capitalism as the enemy of racism, but as you can see, that is not why that section was implemented, and not why the left-fascists support it, they cared nothing about the minimization of force being initiated. They do so out of hatred of capitalism.

And what the left-fascists want, we should be against? That is not objective. What the motives of the left-fascists were or are is irrelevant.

Furthermore, the CRA of 1964 was not the product of left-fascist thinking, even if they have since then tried to claim the moral credit for it.

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If you were the one white guy that wanted to make some extra cash by dealing with black customers you would be harassed, assaulted, your business boycotted or burned. Local law enforcement would condone the private use of force by willfully not investigating or failing to charge anyone. If all businesses at the same time must accommodate black customers then there is no one to single out for punitive action to be an example to keep the rest in line. The alternative would be an overwhelming police presence by an expensive imported force because the locals can't be trusted to police themselves.

Those things are already crimes, and if the criminal activity were that pervasive, than a temporarily increased police(or military) presence may have been necessary to restore order. If so, than shouldn't that have be done, rather then a permanent attack on individual property rights? Beyond that, how does attacking property rights enhance enforcement in a circumstance like this?

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Those things are already crimes, and if the criminal activity were that pervasive, than a temporarily increased police(or military) presence may have been necessary to restore order. If so, than shouldn't that have be done, rather then a permanent attack on individual property rights? Beyond that, how does attacking property rights enhance enforcement in a circumstance like this?

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was enacted at the insistence of the southern states to prevent deployment of a military presence to restore order. There were not enough police to patrol the whole south. The public accommodations provision of the CRA of 1964 changed the power dynamic and gave law enforcement the initiative. Now the small number of feds could swoop in on the law breakers and keep the rest of the bigots in line by making examples of them.

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The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was enacted at the insistence of the southern states to prevent deployment of a military presence to restore order. There were not enough police to patrol the whole south. The public accommodations provision of the CRA of 1964 changed the power dynamic and gave law enforcement the initiative. Now the small number of feds could swoop in on the law breakers and keep the rest of the bigots in line by making examples of them.

That's what I am trying to understand. How does making a law that private institutions have to serve blacks coffee "change the power dynamic and give law enforcement the initiative" in increasing the following of existing laws? I see no causative relationships between the two.

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That's what I am trying to understand. How does making a law that private institutions have to serve blacks coffee "change the power dynamic and give law enforcement the initiative" in increasing the following of existing laws? I see no causative relationships between the two.

I think I explained that. Now the small number of feds could swoop in on the law breakers and keep the rest of the bigots in line by making examples of them. This the same mechanism that kept integration from happening. Call it intimidation if you want, but it is less intimidating than a pair of soldiers toting machine guns on every street corner.

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