(In response to Brian Anderson’s June 1 column, “Rand Paul proves himself an honest politician.”)
The naïveté and historical ignorance of free-market Kool-Aid drinkers were on full display in Brian Anderson’s essay in Monday’s State Press. In praising Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, Anderson agreed with Paul that there was no need for the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination in the private sector because “the free market will take care of racism by means of protests, pickets and advertisement refusals, just like it’s taken care of animal rights and worker conditions in the past. Faster than any court proceeding are the people.”
This would surely come as news to the African-Americans who suffered through slavery and Jim Crow laws. Where was the Swift Hand of Capitalism hiding for the first 200 years of our great and freedom-loving nation? Why did the federal government have to step in and end segregation? Perhaps the free market, just like God, works in mysterious ways. Maybe capitalism wanted African-Americans to suffer for reasons that mere mortals like me—with my tiny, civil-rights-loving brain—can’t even begin to comprehend.
The Civil Rights Act was passed at a time when a substantial portion of the private sector was excluding African-Americans from access to the opportunities enjoyed by white people. In small towns in the South, this usually meant that there were no alternatives for those who had to deal with the effects of racial hatred. But according to Anderson and Paul, that’s just the price we—I mean they—pay for freedom.
Jeremiah E. Scott
Ph.D. candidate