Of Liberty and Race

Statement

Once again the advocates of public corruption have cloaked their dishonesty with a veneer of "justice" by ignoring the well reasoned and principled views of Rand Paul and John Stossel in order to shift attention away from big government failures and their own dishonesty with specious accusations of racism. In this debate, I stand for Liberty: boldly and without equivocation.

The claim that advocating Liberty is somehow racist is not merely nonsense, it is just as ridiculous as it sounds. Liberty is the antidote for racism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made great strides in combating government enforced racial segregation, but the infringements on personal liberty and private property contained in the Act have been much less effective than the simple removal of a compulsion to discriminate.

Racial segregation throughout history - in the United States and elsewhere, has always depended upon government sanction. There is not a single example in all of human history of systematic segregation or large scale racial discrimination absent government coercion. Not a single one.

In American history government mandated racial segregation, first by upholding slavery, then by enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws. Since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the end of government imposed racial segregation, Americans have reverted to our natural instinct to work together. Liberated from government coercion to segregate, private businesses have almost universally opened their cash registers to customers and clients of all races. America today is far more integrated as a result of voluntary association.

To be sure, many aspects of Twenty-First Century America remain segregated along racial lines, but like Nineteenth and Twentieth Century America, racial segregation is government mandated. In Twenty-First Century America, government prohibition against parental choice of schools denies many children access to education. Those children denied education and therefore effectively barred, by government, from the fruits of a modern information age economy are disproportionately African-American. Predictably, those children denied education by their government are far more likely to spend their lives in poverty and become either perpetrators or victims (or both) of crime.

Defenders of Liberty have long sought to redress injustice by removing government coercion to discriminate based on race. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 played a critical role in ending government oppression, which has led to a more integrated society based on voluntary association. The imposition on personal freedom and private property inherent in a portion of the Act has born meager fruit at best, and Liberty advocates are right to point out the dangers of government coercion wherever it is applied.

A government empowered to strip away liberty to enforce "justice" is a government empowered to strip away liberty to enforce "injustice" as well.

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