Rand Expectations 0

Some time ago, a fellow named George Fitzhugh wrote a book called Cannibals All, which purported to prove that black folks were suited only to be slaves. It was, by the standards of its time, a “scientific” and “intellectual” response to the abolitionist movement. It attempted to cast a cloak of rationality over chattel slavery. (Somewhere I have a copy; I bought it when I was doing grad work in Southern history. I’ve never worked up the nerve actually to read it.)

Such an argument is no longer socially permissible in American society.

So new arguments are necessary.

Rachel Maddow deconstructs how Libertarianism excuses racist behavior. It’s 11 minutes. It is worth every one of them.

Via the Richmonder, which points out

. . . the key distinction is between speech and conduct. If you want to say “I don’t like Black people,” then the 1st Amendment to the U.S Constitution protects your right to do so. But if you want to run a business that serves the public, you are out of luck: you can’t discriminate between who you serve based on race. Sorry, but that’s the deal: if you serve the public, then you have to serve the whole public.

Libertarianism addresses many more issues that racism, but its arguments that would excuse racist conduct expose it for what it is: intellectual three-card monte.

It is quite clever. So is three-card monte.

It is also, like three-card monte, dishonest.

I suspect that it deceives its proponents more than it deceives anyone else. It allows them to pretend to themselves that they are Deep Thinkers who Take Political Theory Seriously, when, in fact, they are traditional American rightwing whackjobs dressing their whackjobbery in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.

Rand Paul has done a service by most unwilling and unwittingly demonstrating this.