An Embarrassment of Libertarians

Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wonders, politely, why the fuck the libertarians get all the weirdos, riffing on Rand Paul’s aide and co-author, Jack Hunter, in a piece titled “Rand Paul’s Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy.” Full-bore libertarian Matt Welch expresses similar thoughts at Reason, under the snappy title “Rand Paul Co-Author Jack Hunter Used to Write Weird Crap Like ‘John Wilkes Booth Was Right’.” Neither seem to notice, very much, that Ron Paul, and, I strongly suspect, Rand Paul, think that the Civil War was all the North’s fault, that secession was/is constitutional, and that the South should have been allowed to solve its own problems (i.e., slavery) in its own way (that is, never).

It’s the misfortune of Yankee libertarians that the most anti-government area of the U.S. is also the most socially conservative and the most suspicious of free thought, not to mention largely unwilling to face honestly its ghastly history of racism. Ron Paul is on record as saying that the North should have averted the Civil War by buying up the South’s slaves.* Surprisingly, he doesn’t suggest that the southern slave owners should have granted their slaves freedom and paid them a massive indemnity for having, you know, enslaved them. Nor does he suggest that the slaves should have rebelled against the racist masters and, you know, murdered them. Shouldn’t Nat Turner be the real libertarian hero, rather than John Wilkes Booth?

Even today, many libertarians, like Rand Paul, insist that the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbidding businesses to practice racial discrimination were/are unconstitutional, because they believe the constitution enshrines their definitions of property rights. Somehow, they just can’t give up that Dixie State of Mind.†

Afterwords
Republicans in the House of Representatives recently gave us an example of libertarianism, southern style, when they voted to split the farm bill into two halves, the “farm subsidy half” and the “food stamp half,” the argument being that the old-fashioned farm bill was a Democratic trick to get rural and urban legislators to vote for each other’s pork.

So what happened when Republicans were free to vote the taxpayers’ interests, instead of the special interest groups, and passed a farm subsidies package on its own merits? According to Politico, “Significant reforms are made, including the termination of direct cash payments to producers. But the 10-year cost is $195.6 billion, and the commodity title goes much further than the Senate in using government-set target prices as a safety net for farmers. … Powerful cotton, rice, peanut and sugar cane interests worked with [House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank] Lucas and the GOP to round up votes.” “Cotton, rice, peanut and sugar cane”? That’s what I like about the South.