Reality, Race and Ron Paul–addendum I was wrong, Ron Paul IS a racist!

I believe that property rights should be protected. Your right to be on TV is protected by property rights because somebody owns that station. I can’t walk into your station. So right of freedom of speech is protected by property. The right of your church is protected by property. So people should honor and protect it. This gimmick, Chris, it’s off the wall when you say I’m for property rights and states rights therefore I’m a racist. That’s just outlandish.

(Ron Paul on Hardball with Chris Matthews 13 May 2011)

With all due respect to the Distinguished Gentleman from Texas, I beg to differ.

Now, I’m not saying he a racist.

At this point I have to say that I do believe he is a racist. I certainly believe that he does not believe himself to be a racist. I have never met the man but I am willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt. It would be easier if he were a racist, in fact. I think he is a libertarian and that he truly believe that markets will, given the fullness of time, correct any social ill even one as deeply entrenched as segregation was in America, specifically in the Deep South. Racism was everywhere but Jim Crow was The Way Things Were in both a de facto and de jure since. America had had a century between the end of the Civil War and the year of my birth to run the experiment that Mr. Paul and other libertarians believe would have resulted in the kind of social changes that the Civil Rights Act brought about. The mere fact that the CRA and then the VRA were not passed until three years before I was born in the late-60s is ample evidence that the market had had plenty of time to work its magic.

In the year I was born, the Supreme Court got around to deciding that black people were human enough to be allowed to marry white people in every state in the nation. Most forms of segregation were no longer legal but were still de facto in force regardless of what the law said. We know how it played out. Mr. Paul says he is not a racist, I believe him. Rather, I think that Mr. Paul is simply indifferent to what it would mean for the market to take its time making changes without changes in the law. I accuse Dr. Paul not of racism but of callous indifference. Jim Crow wasn’t happening to him it was happening to other people. People who looked nothing like him and that he had no reason to identify with.

The Libertarian belief that markets would have dealt with the problem of segregation is demonstrated to be false with the following two thought experiments.

Scenario 1:

Imagine you are a white business owner in a town of, say, 20,000 in Alabama or Louisiana. You have a restaurant on the main drag and across the street is a competitor. In a moment of conscience you decide to desegregate your restaurant, your competitor across the street does not desegregate hers.

A day or two after you announce your decision and seat your first black customer like they were a human being and not some inferior species, you lose your serious pro-segregationist customers. Maybe the three or four guys at the auto shop down the street stop coming there. Only one or two of them are serious segregationists but they pressure the other two not to go. Maybe the clerk at the accountant’s down the block stops going because his kid got teased or beat up by the kids of one of the mechanics at the garage because his dad went to the integrated restaurant. Maybe the woman who runs the dress shop forbids her employees to go on threat of being fired. Maybe the gas station owner tells his black employees that if they ever set foot in the restaurant they’re fired. Would these kinds of things have happened? Yes, they would have. Mr. Paul seems to have not noticed that Jim Crow was a total system of segregation, it wasn’t just laws it was social pressure and social custom.

So here you are, trying to stay afloat. Your former customers are either too upset or intimidated to patronize you any longer, your potential black customers are bullied away from your door. Given the reality of this why on Earth would any rational business owner put themselves through this? Every libertarian will tell you that the purpose of a business is to make profits and if you are going to lose business on some deal because of social realities, you are not going to take that risk. Why would you since it is a lose-lose proposition?

Now some might object that this would only work in places where the community is such that this pressure would work. But a restaurant or motel along the interstate would have everything to gain and nothing to lose, right? Wrong.

Scenario 2

Now, admittedly, some place along the interstate may or may not have the same kind of social pressure (there is likely to be some no matter what) but the remoteness is going to mean that the idea that the market would only prefer integrated restaurants has no more basis in reality than the example above.

So you don’t work for a chain, you are a small, independent motel owner. There’s a restaurant on the premises. A black family pulls into your motel and suddenly there are no vaccines They have to move on down the road. Six months later they aren’t going to remember the name of your motel and, at any rate, for a boycott to work there would have to be a stream of blacks crossing the country by car. In the 60s blacks made up ~11% of the US population spread out over a vast swath of the North American continent. Most of your customers are white with the occasional black family pulling in. If you get a black family once a week (and I’m being VERY generous with that number assuming you are along a spot of, say, Interstate 80) and you turn them away you have not lost a lot of money. You’ve lost one customer. Even if that person complains to the NAACP you would see, at most, 52 black customers a year out of the hundreds that might be staying at your motel (say on average 5 rooms rented every night over the course of the year). If your margin is so tight that those 52 customers make a big difference over the course of your fiscal year, your business is in serious trouble and you should probably sell and get out now.

Libertarians, in making this argument, are taking the world of the early 21st century and casting the America after the Civil Rights laws were passed and pretending that the America of the 1960s would have behaved precisely the same as the America of the 2010s. There is no reason to believe that would have been the case.

I will not rehash the insults and assaults on our dignity that I watched my parents have to choke down on our trips across the country in the 1970s. Suffice it to say that until you have had to watch your parents explain why you have to sleep in the car when you’ve been passing motels all evening you have not had your fill of life’s cornucopia. It’s the kind of thing that stays with you even three decades later.

I am sure that Ron and Rand Paul are men of integrity and I take them at their word that they are not racist. In the limited sense that they do not harbor any active hostility towards blacks nor do they wish blacks–either in the particular or specific-any harm. I think they are simply untroubled by what the demonstrable conditions would have been had the civil rights laws of the 60s not been passed.

Here, then, is the core problem with both Libertarianism and Objectivist philosophy generally–it is callous and uncaring. It encourages callousness. One can believe, as Ayn Rand did, that blacks do not deserve to be discriminated against while at the same time being willing to observe that discrimination happening provided that it means that business owners have the freedom to discriminate in hiring or services on the basis of skin color.

One last point; if you are reading these words and are white consider this. How many of you have worked in companies where there were no blacks or other non-whites? Did you notice? Did you quit because of it? How many of you, when interviewing at some company, walked out because there were no whites or non-whites? How many of you have ever asked, upon walking into a store or hiring some service if there are any blacks or other non-whites employed? How many of you have walked out of some store or refused to do business with this or that company because you could not see any non-whites working there?

If you are honest with yourself, I am willing to bet that the number of you who have done any of those things is the the whole integer between -1 and 1. Not because I think you are racist but because I think you are white in a nation that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white and is still a majority white nation although that majority is nowhere near as absolute as it was 40 or 50 years ago.

The Libertarian view of what would have worked regarding the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United States is not even wrong. It gets it wrong on the history, it gets it wrong on the economics, it gets it wrong on the sociology and it gets it wrong on the demographic realities of the situation.

All of the above can be true without ever saying that Dr. Paul or, for that matter, any Libertarian who believes as he does, is a racist.