Rand Paul is in the news for expressing (and then apparently recanting) what I've long seen as the standard libertarian view of civil rights legislation:
- Government discrimination should be illegal.
- Private discrimination should be legal.
- Private discrimination is immoral.
Like all decent people, libertarians can identify with the civil rights movement's pleas for meritocracy and against blind hatred. Libertarians can also embrace the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other resistance to state-sponsored discrimination - and point out that libertarians opposed pro-discrimination laws from the start.
... Unlike libertarianism, the civil rights movement rarely distinguished between state and private discrimination - and even more rarely distinguished between discrimination and unequal outcomes.
My understanding of the argument for the civil rights movement's prohibition on unequal outcomes was that we needed to provide a positive correction to rebalance things, rather than simply removing the force and letting them rebalance on their own.
I think this is actually not that bad an idea. In a way, it's saying "the government stole your land, here's reparations." What I think would've worked much better as a positive, equalizing force, though, was actual reparations. That is, instead of affirmative action, just give southern blacks money to compensate for the money that was lost through Jim Crow. It would've been expensive at the time, but by making it a one-time cost – rather than a permanent fixture of life – it would've been both easier to move past and might've ended up being cheaper (when compared to forcing every company to prove they're not racist by hiring 13% black people).
As always, just giving people money seems to be far better than regulating their lives in perpetuity.
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