Property Wrongs

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul got some attention last month for equating universal health care with slavery. Really:

With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies; it’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services – Do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have a right to food? … You’re basically saying that you believe in slavery… that you believe in taking and extracting from another person. Our founding documents were very clear about this. You have a right to pursue happiness, but there’s no guarantee of physical comfort [or] concrete items. In order to give something concrete or someone’s service, you gotta take it from someone. So there’s an implied threat of force. …

Before I get to my remarks, I believe the good Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable has something he would like to briefly add in response:

While it’s tempting to merely scoff and laugh Paul’s statement off, I point to it, because I think it helps clue us in to something significant about the absolute property rights-minded libertarian / tea party-ish folks that occupy a large corner of the right wing.

When it comes to things like taxes, health care, and this-or-that government regulation, we hear so much bellowing from this crowd about theft, forced labor, and imagined slavery and oppression. Yet, if you press people like Paul, you’ll find that their preoccupation with absolute property rights causes them severe discomfort with moments in our history when government stepped in to curtail actual slavery and oppression, and/or some discriminatory injustice and expand human rights.

For example, last year Rand Paul got even more attention for expressing his disapproval of the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which outlawed discrimination in privately-owned public accomodations. Paul was basically saying that, while racial discrimination is bad and government shouldn’t engage in it, private business owners nevertheless should be left free to engage in such discrimination if they so choose.

A lot of people seemed shocked by this, and I wondered why. This is, after all, the son of Ron Paul whose similar rigid dogma surrounding property rights we should be familiar with by now. And sure enough, Ron Paul recently told Chris Matthews pretty much the same thing as his son regarding the ’64 Civil Rights Bill.

I think this is pretty important stuff to realize. There are quite a few things I don’t like about the Pauls’ brand of libertarianism. But I think the line was really first drawn for me when I looked a little closer at Ron Paul, and especially some of his more doctrinaire friends like Lew Rockwell. It was then I discovered that many in this cohort tend to essentially be apologists for the South’s ‘massive resistance’ to desegregation and even the Confederacy, so deep is their unwavering commitment to absolute property rights and ‘states’ rights’, and their hatred of the federal government.

What all this boils down to is a position that stubbornly and cruelly holds property rights above people, and most other related concerns, regardless of the negative social consequences or imbalance of economic power. Now, that’s not to say such libertarians necessarily agree with or like any such negative consequences. It is merely to say that their worldview demands that they shrug and allow for those consequences, while refusing to accept any direct government / legal action to address such problems.

Of course, the irony, as Brad DeLong points out, is that these “get the government out” types implicitly want, nay, need, the government to protect and enforce the preferences of the propertied, even if those preferences severely disadvantage and limit the liberty (or shall we say limit ‘the pursuit of happiness’) of others. But then they apparently can’t abide the notion that the same government that gives their property claims teeth should also be able to temper those claims in the name of protecting the rights and equality of other members of the public and/or other elements of the public good.

So whenever you hear the Pauls, et al, going on about more freedom and liberty, you’d do good to first ask yourself, “more freedom and liberty for whom and at whose expense?”

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