Sunday, May 23, 2010

Fundamentals of the Social Contract: Why Rand Paul Is Wrong

According to aspiring legislator, Rand Paul, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went too far in prohibiting racial discrimination by private businesses. All the while asserting that he would have voted yes for the Civil Rights Act, Rand nonetheless believes that private businesses should be allowed to refuse goods or services to black people, at least that's what he told Rachel Maddow in an interview. His words have thrown the GOP into something of a frenzy as they try to distance themselves from his remarks and yet reap the benefits of his popularity with the tea party contingency.

PhotobucketI have a very personal reaction to Paul's observations. I grew up in the era of Jim Crow when segregation was the norm. White Only and No Colored Allowed signs were as common as traffic signs. All businesses were legally allowed to discriminate, to deny goods and/or services based on the color of the consumer's skin. I don't have any desire to return to the good ole days. I also don't hold with the thinking that given time to evolve, Jim Crow would have died a natural death. Jim Crow wasn't born. The system of racial discrimination known as Jim Crow was artificially and intentionally created as a response to the post civil war efforts of black people to claim their rightful place in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of this country. There was nothing natural about it. It couldn't die; it had to be executed. I have no doubt that without government action legal segregation would still be a part of the fabric of this nation.

Rand Paul's position is seriously flawed; however, based on the comments littering the Internet on this topic, there are a lot of folks out there who have succumbed to the same flawed thinking. Much of it stems from worship of the cult of individuality. A characteristic of this cult is a belief that my individual rights supercede all other rights. Of course this is totally irrational. If my rights are more important than your rights, then aren't your rights more important than mine? What about Mary Sue next door, where do her rights fit in this hierarchy? Although said much more eloquently by such diverse thinkers as Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Hobbes, it's this tension regarding individual rights balanced against the needs of the whole that necessitates the formation of governments. (My listing of only western philosophers is not intended to suggest that only white males have wrestled with these issues. It's just that as a product of a limited American public education, I am most familiar with the works of Eurocentric writers, which is an entirely separate topic to be addressed someday.)

Society is the whole, individuals are the parts. Societies were formed by the individuals to create a system in which the individuals could agree to live governed by rules to protect the common good. Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Jefferson and many others have defined this concept as it relates to the purposes of goverment. Those who do not wish to agree to the social contract are free to live outside of it but cannot then also benefit from it. (i.e. you don't have to own a business) This is the basic flaw of Rand Paul's argument that a private business has the right to engage in discrimination. Businesses are by definition public enterprises. Its goods and services are sold to the public and as such the business is part of our system of commerce. The regulation of commerce is constitutionally assigned to Congress. If the businessman wishes to engage in discrimination, he may do so but not via his public enterprise. It's up to him to figure out how to run a profitable business enterprise without engaging in public commerce, if he wishes to engage in discrimination as to whom may partake of his goods and/or servces.

The most extreme example of those who place individual liberties tantamount to the society as a whole are those who commit crimes. The thief believes that his/her needs are superior to the needs of all others thereby justifying their right to take what they need. Indeed, if we follow the argument of the superiority of individual rights to its logical conclusion, then those who commit criminal acts are merely choosing to place their individual needs above the needs of the whole. Under this logic, our prisons are populated by true libertarians.

However, in a society, we all agree to subvert our individual liberties to the benefit of the function of the whole. To not do so results in anarchy and a society in which no one has any security. Whatever property that I may have secured would constantly be at risk of being taken by someone who had the strength to do so in a world governed by the supreme right of the individual. Instead, we have laws, enforcers, and systems of punishment to maintain order so that property rights, mine and yours, are not subject to the arbitrary will of might makes right. Which brings me to the final element of the social contract, governments are not instituted to protect the rights of the strong but rather to ensure that even the weak have protections. Otherwise, in the words of Hobbes,we would be in a constant state of war, and man would be a solitary being living an existence that is nasty, brutish and short.

P.S. A good friend, Mark Olmsted, writes for the Huffington Post. In his most recent piece, People and Property: What Rand Really Wants, he presents an astute assessment of Rand Paul's disturbing views which suggest that civil rights should be optional. Check it out.

12 comments:

  1. Who needs the Huffington Post? The Swash Zone has Sheria and this is an astute assessment of a horse's ass! I am just blown away by your well reasoned rebuttal.
    Are we ever going to start living in the 21st century? These blatant, racist arguments made by folks who want us to believe they have America's best interests at heart are sickeningly debased.
    I am so tired of the continued ignorance and arrogance. How dare anyone in America try to defend the practice of discriminating against a fellow American and call it constitutional and patriotic - idiotic is more like it!
    Now is the time for decent, intelligent Americans to take a stand against any attempt to reinstate any portion of Jim Crow - never again!
    I am totally disgusted with this whole section of our citizenry.

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  2. Excellent! You articulated a lot of ideas that I've been chewing on for years over the whole ridiculous Libertarian philosophy.

    I've always said, from day one, that most Libertarians are simply conservatives embarrassed by the religious fundamentalists who have taken over their party. However, even in Rand Paul's case that's not entirely true, since his own "cult of the individual" beliefs stop at a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy.

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  3. Sheria,

    That was so beautifully presented.

    With your permission I would like to post this at my blog, with a link to yours.

    When two rights are in conflict, the one that promotes the greater good should prevail.

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  4. Even the liberal media - if there is such a thing - have been denying that all this ugliness is based on racism. Paul has just proven they're wrong - as we've been saying from day one.

    Excellent article and comments.

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  5. Let me join the chorus -- I'm so glad you're here: excellent work!

    The dogma, as explained by John Fund Friday night on Bill Maher's show, is that faced with an unfriendly Woolworths, black sustomers will simply find a different lunch counter and competition will solve social problems. Need I explain the absurdity? Competition augments the separation, the segregation.

    Look at slavery: we had competing economies, one with slaves and one without and it didn't end until that BIG GOVERNMENT stepped in and the TYRANT Lincoln ended it. To such idiots, we were a better nation in 1860 than we are now and it would be a better thing to suffer slavery and persecution and witch burning than to have a government (the people) do something about it. At heart, it's a denial of democracy, a denial that the people are the government and an attempt to make that sick idea so.

    Fund, as though to jettison his credibility on purpose, asserted that Jim Crow laws were the result of interference by big government in Southern affairs. Can we really judge such a man kindly or give such ideas the dignity of considering them?

    Unregulated markets move toward monopoly and restraint of trade. Huge concentrations of wealth and power eat away at democracy like a cancer and foster feudalism and even fascism.

    Without regulation, the market pendulum becomes a wrecking ball, the strong dominate the weak and get stronger and wealthier as the rest become poorer and helpless. That's the lesson of history -- no wonder they'd like to rewrite it!

    Listening to Small Paul and John Fund and all the other cultists is like watching medieval academics argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin without any concern as to whether angels exist at all.

    We're not going to change them of convince them or argue successfully against them, we have to defeat them and defeat them hard.

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  6. Sheria, thank you for your excellent post. Of course, you realize that according to Sister Sarah's and Rand's followers, your insistence on presenting a well-reasoned, reality-based, search-for-truth-rooted argument makes you part of the lamestream librul media with its biased agenda and insistence upon violating the First Amendment rights of conservatives by disagreeing with them....

    But seriously, you offer one of the most cogent descriptions of ideology: ideology might be said to have its source in the conflation of what is natural with what is artificial. What is declared "natural" is then fetishized as sacred and immutable: thus private property's status amongst libertarians, and of course the sacred levers and workings of the so-called free market. (And even, for the uber-libertarians, I suppose, something like a debased individualist conception of the Nietzschean Wille zur Macht, or Will to Power) When you can say something is natural, you can then intone something like the Alexander Pope line, "Whatever is, is right."

    And I'm with Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life -- nature seldom counsels anything but crime and selfishness. I suspect that everything good humanity has ever done has owed its all, or at least its much, to artifice.

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  7. But Rocky,

    If it weren't for HuffPo, wherever would we view hastily cobbled together semi-nekkid pictures of Jennifer Aniston with our morning cup of java, or puzzle over the latest outrageously exaggerated screaming headlines in the vein of "Somebody says something about somebody else -- oooohhhhh! Is he gonna take that lying down?"

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  8. Shaw, please feel free to use my post as you would like.

    Y'all make me blush. Thanks for reading and commenting.

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  10. Sheria, I join your admirers and thank you for this brilliant analysis.

    About a libertarian reader who visited us recently (some of you know to whom I refer), I was struck by this comment:

    I resent being called a racist by implication … What percentage of conservatives do you think are racist? Do you tar an entire group of people, around 40% of the country, with this racist brush?” (@ 7:39 PM, March 31, 2010)

    Curiously, other conservatives have been making similar noises recently, and I wondered about a pattern … when I found this, 2010 Multi-State Survey on Race & Politics by Professor Christopher Parker of the University of Washington:

    the Tea Party, the grassroots movement committed to reining in what they perceive as big government, and fiscal irresponsibility, also appear predisposed to intolerance. Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy. When it comes to gays and lesbians, White Tea Party supporters also hold negative attitudes. Only 36% think gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt children, and just 17% are in favor of same-sex marriage."

    Although it may be invalid to accuse a specific person of racism, there is certainly a central tendency towards racism and ethnic intolerance within the Tea Party movement as identified in the above survey; and one cannot separate the TP movement from the political rise of Rand Paul.

    I find it curious that the subject of racism appears spontaneously in Internet discussions, sometimes out of context, almost as if there are TP sympathizers searching for a rationalization that states: Discrimination under cover of ideology does not necessarily make one racist.

    But it does. These days, it is unacceptable to support racism publicly (unless one belongs to a hate or white supremacist group) but there are always more insidious ways to disguise bigotry; and our MSM has turned spin control into a legitimate enterprise.

    Let me offer this thought: After two major political gaffs, we are told, Rand Paul has cancelled all TV and public appearances to work on “message discipline.” I prefer to see him exactly as he is, wearing his bigotry on his shirtsleeve, rather than as a repackaged candidate concealing his true intent.

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  11. I think that the difference between conservatives and what today we can call 'the right' is the whole idea of a social contract.

    You will note that not once will Rand Paul acknowledge a social contract nor will Sarah Palin or Fox News for that matter.

    That is probably one of the basic reasons we cannot have a civil political debate in this country; its hard to debate when there are no shared basic principles.

    Lets not forget that Rand Paul even looks at medicare not as some program to provide healthcare for our elderly but rather as an income stream for doctors. Its going to be real hard for him to cut the deficit without dealing with medicare and he is really going to have troubles dealing with medicare when he thinks he is cutting his own revenue.

    As far as the issue of racism, don't forget that he had his primary night party and all his media interviews at the Bowling Green Country Club, which is a private country club that was white only...and might still be.

    I can assure you, living in the same town Rand Paul lives in, he is racist, he is sexist, and he is elitist....

    He has had numerous opportunities to run for office over the last 8 years but he picked this time because of the organization his father has built up and this is the ideal time to begin the transfer.

    I think the choice of the Bowling Green Country Club is testamont to the fact that he will talk one thing but he will bring home the pork with the best of them....

    Those that own property deserve their fair share you know....

    The whole concept of 'property rights' is just a nice way of saying that the government has been giving poor black people way too much and are coddling illegal aliens....it is racism.

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  12. Fantastic post, Sheria!

    Now if we could only get the libertea-for-all-(white-people) crowd to read it.

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