libertarianism and Jim Crow

A reader writes:

“Paul has consorted with racists, and for that reason alone I find him detestable and worth voting against.

But I’d like to complicate what you say about libertarianism and civil rights. During Jim Crow, restaurant owners didn’t have the right to serve multiple races. Lunch-counter sit-ins were illegal because the law stated (to quote South Carolina’s statute) that one couldn’t ‘furnish […] meals to white and colored passengers in the same room.’ Racism was an obligation, in other words, due to regulation and government intervention.

So a straightforward reading of libertarian doctrine would say that this law infringed a restaurant owner’s right to furnish meals to whomever he damn well pleased.

This isn’t to say that libertarianism has an adquate response to racism in the old South — just that it could plausibly have identified an immoral law and opposed it.”

But my point wasn’t that libertarians would support Jim Crow laws. Obviously they wouldn’t, for precisely the reason the reader gives: under Jim Crow laws, a non-racist restaurant owner would not have been permitted to open the restaurant to all races.

My point was coming from the opposite direction. Namely, I think the government is perfectly right not to permit individuals the choice to discriminate when they are running public establishments.

In short, the problem as I see it with Jim Crow laws was not that they curtailed free individual choice, but that they permitted the existence of racial discrimination in public establishments (you obviously can’t force anyone to have friends or spouses of other races if they don’t wish to do so).

This is one of the reasons I’m not a libertarian; I don’t see why individual choice should always be sacrosanct. Nor do I see what’s so evil about federal use of force to end discrimination in the Old South, nor do I see why income tax is evil theft from the rightful individual owner of all earned proceeds. Nor do I even see why pulling the U.S. out of everywhere is always the right foreign policy, seductive though it may sound to some after events of the past decade.

What I dislike most in politics are auto-pilot ideologies that allow anyone who adopts them to have a purportedly superior, purportedly irrefutable answer in advance to every issue that arises, with the accompanying implication that anyone who doesn’t have access to that same list of auto-pilot answers is either corrupt, confused, or both. It’s too much like religious zealotry– like the travelling preachers I once sat next to on the airplane who initially pretended to be interested in the fact that I was a philosopher, but quickly proceeded to expressions of thinly veiled pity for my spiritual confusions, which could never lead to salvation through the one and only medium of Jesus Christ. They’ve found salvation? Good for them.

My experience has been that libertarians tend to go on auto-pilot too much, just as Marxists tend to go on auto-pilot too much. I prefer to see the finessing of individual, ad hoc issues, which takes a lot more intellectual work to do.