Bruce Bartlett eloquently makes a point I was trying to make yesterday when I wrote that "black people had been living in the 'leave it to the states' nightmare since Reconstruction, during which the war-weary North abandoned black people to the terrible lawlessness of a vengeful South."
In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn’t work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.
We don't need the thought experiment. We have history.
-- A. Serwer
