Rand Paul Only Likes the Easy Part of Freedom

Read Adam Serwer on Ron Paul and “the hard part of freedom”—i.e., opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Especially this part:

Paul would never face the actual “hard part” of his vision of freedom, because it would never interfere with his own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Rand Paul would not have been turned away from a lunch counter, be refused a home, a job, or denied a loan, or told to sit in the black car of a train because of his skin color, or because of the skin color of his spouse. Paul thinks there is something “hard” about defending the kind of discrimination he would have never, ever faced. Paul’s free market fundamentalism is being expressed after decades of social transformation that the Civil Rights Act helped create, and so the hell of segregation is but a mere abstraction, difficult to remember and easy to dismiss as belonging only to its time. It’s much easier now to say that “the market would handle it.” But it didn’t, and it wouldn’t.

In this context, it’s worth recalling that Paul isn’t actually a 100 percent consistent opponent of government activity. He’s a medical doctor. And he opposes reductions in Medicare’s payments to medical doctors. Saying “the Civil Rights Act was morally wrong” might be the hard part of freedom for a black libertarian but it’s not the hard part of freedom for Ron Paul. For Paul, the hard part would be saying that he and his colleagues should get less money from the government. But he doesn’t say that. That’s too hard.

Meanwhile, if your definition of “freedom” entails opposition to the Civil Rights Act that just shows that you’re working with a bad, myopic definition of freedom. I recommend Brink Lindsey’s post on Ron Paul’s illiberal libertarianism from back in 2008. His son is much the same.