Rand Paul

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Watching the news the last few days has been hilarious. It seems that everyone is shocked and surprised at the idea that Rand Paul is against the civil rights act from 1964. I don’t know why they are surprised, there were articles on this in a Kentucky newspaper earlier, besides, this is basic Libertarianism. They want the government out of everything.

Imagine if people could do whatever they wanted on their property, which is one of the main Libertarian principles. Anyone could keep any kind of person they wanted out of their shop which operates in the public domain. In one place that is owned by a Muslim there would be no Jews or Christians allowed, or if he wanted to charge black people twice as much he could do it. Nor would he need to follow even the most basic safety needs.

Libertarians say that the free market will work these things out for themselves, someone restricting certain people from their establishment would not be able to stay in business long, or if people started dying in there people would stop shopping there. The problem with that is - people have to die first! You would think that maybe we could do something that keeps people alive - well we have, it’s called regulation.

And businesses in the South stayed open during 100 years of Jim Crow laws, so the market doesn’t always correct itself and sometimes there is a huge price to pay when there is a correction. The Libertarian view is that freedom doesn’t come cheaply, besides, they think only stupid people would get hurt and who cares about them, anyway?

The free market is a fraud, it doesn’t exist. It would be like a football game with no rules, brutal and no fun to watch. On top of that without government interference it’s the rich who are in control. Over time all the small businesses get swallowed up by the big corporations and when there are only a few places someone can work the corporations effectively have slaves who have to accept whatever ridiculous wages and working conditions they want. So in a very real sense it’s like a football game where all the rules were written by one team and only for their benefit. Any doubts who would win?

So libertarianism and smaller government is not about freedom, at least not about the freedom of you or me. It’s all about the big corps being able to do whatever they want at any cost. This is what we have seen happening because of the 8 years rule of the Bushies. The idea is that business can “self-govern” - what a joke. The banksters were self-governing when they crashed the world’s economy. British Petroleum was self-governing with that oil rig, where the spill is in the process of destroying the Gulf. They couldn’t even be bothered to have an emergency plan in place just in case anything did go wrong.

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