Quote Originally Posted by BrushStart View Post
Puzzle me this: Why would Ron Paul make a campaign stop in Highland Park, Michigan, which is 93% black and a place he absolutely no chance at winning?

Answer: Ron Paul is not a racist.
Ron Paul may or may not be personally bigoted against racial minorities [[and the location of one of his campaign stops is hardly conclusive evidence one way or the other), but that question is missing the whole point. The real issue with him is that his policies would create a world in which racial minorities are substantially worse off, and in which the range of opportunities available to them is substantially curtailed.

If you're interested, here is an excellent, on-point analysis of Paul's worldview and its real-world implications, written by an economics Ph.D student at U of M.

An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call "local bullies."

The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society - the government [[the "big bully") and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.
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Not surprisingly, this gigantic loophole has made modern American libertarianism the favorite philosophy of a vast array of local bullies, who want to keep the big bully [[government) off their backs so they can bully to their hearts' content. The curtailment of government legitimacy, in the name of "liberty," allows abusive bosses to abuse workers, racists to curtail opportunities for minorities, polluters to pollute without cost, religious groups to make religious minorities feel excluded, etc. In theory, libertarianism is about the freedom of the individual, but in practice it is often about the freedom of local bullies to bully. It's a "don't tattle to the teacher" ideology.