Theory and Practice

Senate candidate Rand Paul's critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has caused quite the furor these past few days. It got me thinking about the gap between theory and practice, and the unflattering things that said gap says about our society.

First, for Paul's critique. Paul, and most libertarians, feel that the Civil Rights Act should not have applied to private businesses. All civilized people believe that public institutions (i.e. schools) that receive government funding should not be allowed to discriminate. But what about private businesses?

Paul says that the government has absolutely no right to tell private businesses who they must serve. He says that in a free country, bigotry is allowed. He says that a store owner should have the freedom to post a sign out front reading "No Negroes" or "No Jews" or "No people over 6 feet tall" or anything else. And in theory, he's absolutely right.

Let's take a relatively benign example. What about gyms that only allow women to join. Is that unconstitutional? Well, technically, under the Civil Rights Act, it is. And doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that the federal government would intervene in such a case? Of course it does.

Now let's take a more realistic example. Let's say the owner of a chain of restaurants refuses to serve black folks. Should that be legal? According to Rand Paul, it should be legal, however distasteful it may be.

And here's Paul's explanation of how such bigotry would be prevented from spreading like the cancer that it is: if one restaurant owner refuses to serve blacks, citizens (black and white alike) would boycott that racist businessman and therefore drive him out of business, thereby disincentivizing such bigotry. Makes sense, right? In theory.

But what about practice? What can we look to for an example of practice? Well, unfortunately, we have plenty of case studies. We need simply look at how private businesses operated before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when bigotry was legal.

When private businesses could serve or refuse to serve citizens at their own discretion, how did they behave? Were bigots weeded out by the immutable moral force of the free market? Were racists boycotted? Did white people boycott "white only" businesses? Did businesses who served everyone fair better than those that did not?

No. When private businesses were free to decide who they would serve, the huge majority of them chose not to serve blacks. What did this look like in practice?

If a black family was driving through the South to visit relatives, the adults would carry empty jars with them? Why? So that their children could urinate into them, since they knew very well that attempting to use a bathroom at any private business would lead to humiliation if not violence.

We gave private businessmen a chance to do the right thing. They failed to do so until they were forced to do so by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is of course very unfortunate that it took the full force of the federal government to ensure that black folks would have access to toilets, beds, and cheeseburgers, but it did.

The only reason to second-guess this law now would be the assumption that people no longer harbor the bigotries they did 50 years ago. Is this a safe assumption? In large part, it is. How do I know this? Well, take a look at our president, for starters.

But do we really want to put that assumption to the test? In fact, a huge part of the moral revolution that led to the election of Barack Hussein Obama lay in the 1964 Civil Rights Act; forcing white people to let black people sit next to them at the lunch counter was not quite as trivial as it seemed at the time; it was the foundation of an historical moral awakening.

In theory, the libertarians are right, but in practice libertarianism in businesses led to institutional racism on a scale seldom matched in the history of the world. In theory, free people do the right thing by each other. In practice, unfortunately, they rarely do.