Disclaimer: I’m neither an expert on or an enthusiast of orthodox libertarianism. I think it is yet one more narrow utopian social philosophy that a band of economic puritans want to impose on society. To their credit, it is a scholarly economic theory. But it seeks to validate and legitimize the most selfish and materialistic impulses of our primate sensibilities.
I have a comment on the recent public flare up on comments by candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Randal Paul, son of Ron Paul, seems to be very much influenced in his thinking by his father and by Ludwig von Mises. I would characterize father and son as ultra-orthodox libertarians (if only by virtue of their scholarship) along the lines of the Austrian school but lacking the John Birch Society fascist and theocratic elements. I sincerely acknowledge their understanding of economics and history. However, I must differ in regard to their understanding of the non-mathematical aspects of civilization.
Rand Paul’s recent expression of his views on the civil rights act comes straight from the Austrian view on statism. It is right out of the textbook. The man is not a racist. He just does not approve of the intervention of the state into the affairs of a property owner. I think he would prefer to see market forces solve the problem in the domain of private property.
The problem is that market forces have a substantial element of greed. And greed is what greed does. Social justice is orthogonal to greed forces. American slavery did not end because the market found a way out of it. The slave states were deeply dependent on the economic advantages in labor overhead that slavery provided. The nonmarket forces- government- that are inevitable in civilization intervened and put an end to it.
The impulse to accumulate power is expressed in the market and in government. Power is the ability to allocate resources. The domains of both government and business need to be watched closely because both are subject to the corruption of greed. Both socialism and libertarianism are utopian in their conception. Both tend to fail because adherents must rely on the adoption of their tenets by diverse groups. Both require a kind of homogeneity in thinking that is inherently unstable over large populations. Neither seems willing to accomodate a bell curve of views and behaviors.
Just read history. You can’t even get large populations to agree on how to enable or even what is meant by the meaning of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I fail to understand how people who do not trust big government can somehow trust a business system which can fund methods to override the checks and balances of a natural market. The notion that consumers actually have power through the allocation of their dispersed resources is perhaps partially valid in a village market. It fails in contemporary society because businesses are focused and populations tend to be defocused.
Advertising works. Consumers are subject to suggestion by advertising influence. Consumers are not perfect, rational economic units. In some ways, we are fish in a barrel. Businesses can obtain patents or assemble local monopoly and dominate a market in a way that consumers are powerless to respond. Look at how big box stores can move into a local market and dominate. They do provide lower prices, but they also offer a channel for foreign suppliers to cross the border and invade a market for the profit of corporate owners who live elsewhere. They apply instant globalization to local markets that are ill equipped to compete. Economic purists would say that local businesses are unfit in this circumstance.
The proclivity to trend into big-brother influence seems just as certain with business as with government. The purpose of civilization is to buffer the Darwinian forces of nature and make life less brutal and short. Government provides a way to accumulate resources and focus effort on large scale infrastructure and allow access to all. Access to infrastructure facilitates innovation and economic growth and diversity. If you don’t like infrastructure, move to Haiti or Somalia where you’ll be blissfully free of it.
Government can grow to the detriment of all. And, arguably, it is in such a position now. But to abandon this important element of our culture in favor of a more Darwinian approach to everything is a utopian dream that will not come to pass. Libertarians need to develop some pragmatism.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
One should not be too quick to condemn slavery. Look at your paycheck. Who is rowing the ship and who is waterskiing? The way without diversity worked better.
Rand Paul is no Friedman, that’s for sure. He can’t maneuver his way through these sound bite traps that easily. He’s definitely not his father, who would’ve just avoided the issue all together by quickly moving onto minimum wage, drug war,school zoning and licensing which are some of the most racist regulations in history.
Libertarians are far more concerned with freedom of association when it comes to that last part in the civil rights act. They don’t want to get into the nasty business of telling clergymen they need to allow women in their ranks. They don’t want to tell women’s fitness clubs they should also accommodate men. It really is a private matter. Libertarians really like the separation of state and race that is the civil rights act. They don’t want to tell private black association they need to include whites. In private, do what you want with race, as long as it’s not violent.
In contrast to what you said, libertarianism acknowledges the complexity of life. They seek to tolerate as much of it as possible by limiting one size fits all measures of government. They want to divide up power using market forces and stop relying on majority rules. The minority is far more oppressed by democratic legislation then they are on the free market.
But what about race? Wouldn’t it seem like a no-brainer to attach penalties to any sort of discrimination in services provided or employment? Not really. Attaching penalties to these private activities automatically turns minorities (especially blacks) into liabilities. They wont even get past an interview. No company wants to risk a charge of racism by hiring a black person at a lower wage, just because that person may not be as attractive on the sales floor to the many white customers. Black unemployment has remained twice as whites since the CVA.
Your interpretation of greed is awful here. Businesses that served all races would make a substantial profit compared to their selective competitors. Even if a business owner was racist, they would most likely realize they are paying a heavy price by not serving a larger volume of customers. The market makes people pay for their prejudices. The last segment of the CVA punishes minorities far more than businessmen.
Soon after the CVA, the drug war, welfare, medicare/medicaid came around, doing even more damage to anyone that was a racial liability. The numbers definitely bear this out. Blacks are doing as bad or worse then the 1960’s in employment, income, govt dependence, incarceration, health, you name it. If we followed libertarian philosophy on those issues, they would’ve been far better off. No drug war, no welfare, no minimum wage, no school zoning, etc.
Libertarians get a lot of crap for seeming to ignore life’s complexities. We fully acknowledge them actually. We are just saying that life is so complex that state regulations tend to do a lot more harm than good. Rand definitely seems foolish because of this misinterpretation. We libertarians can win any argument based on the numbers. But we can’t win in politics. People want powerful politicians, with giant salaries, pensions and big government ideas. Libertarians want to turn in blank sheets of paper, deny themselves pensions and press the delete button a lot of times.
For an example of someone who tried to run a nation based on Milton Friedman’s “Free To Choose” (standard libertarian reading for the layman) listen to the NYTimes podcast at:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/freakonomics-radio-what-would-the-world-look-like-if-economists-were-in-charge/