Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a reminder from Time that Rand Paul's libertarian stand for freedom against the Civil Rights Act (in which freedom means having the right to oppress other people) is as principled as some say:
'They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I'm not a libertarian,' Paul says between Lasik surgeries at his medical office, where his campaign is headquartered, with a few desks crammed between treatment rooms. 'Frankly, I'd rather be coming from the right than from the left like Grayson, who not too long ago was a Democrat and Bill Clinton supporter.' (Grayson voted for Clinton in 1992 before switching parties and entering politics in the mid-1990s.)
As Paul pointed out earlier, everyone draws the line of where the government shouldn't take action somewhere. As a whole, libertarians draw their line closer to no government intervention in anything, but you're not seeing Paul taking a principled stand that the government should get rid of child-labor laws and let the market sort itself out on that score (though he may believe that). He's drawing the line at race, and I think this comes both from his failure to take the freedom of African Americans into account and from the appetite for and tolerance to racism in the groups he's speaking to.
-- Monica Potts
