Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine details the reaction of “Conservative” blogger Ann Althouse to a debate about the infringements by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on property rights and freedom of association. The discussion took place at a Liberty Fund colloquium.
Broadly speaking, the topic falls perfectly within the purview of the conference, which aims to “shed light on the role of liberty in human life,” to quote Bailey. Speaking specifically, this conference tackled the role of federalism in freedom. Read Bailey’s most reasonable entry here. And follow the links to Althouse’s response.
(Althouse, incidentally, is competing for the title “Grande Conservative Blogress Diva,” the sort of communal enforcement bloggers engage in, much like mainstream media. They too are always awarding their own for conformity. I digress, but, in any event, that’s the string of honorifics explained.)
I too attended a Liberty Fund colloquium in the UK earlier this year, but none of the participants dissolved into a puddle, a la Althouse, over disagreement. I had a jolly good time with some brilliant (and beautifully spoken) Englishmen and (two) women.
As for tearing up and labeling as racists proponents of states’ rights or advocates of freedom of association, as Althouse apparently did, why, this only indicates Liberty Fund is not selecting its participants very carefully. Althouse reached for the smelling salts instead of arguing her case. How feeble. How Peggy Noonan.
Can there be any doubt that civil rights laws coerce individuals, often against their better judgment, into involuntary associations? Can one deny that under antidiscrimination law employers have lost a great deal of control over their businesses? Is it not the duty of reasonable, freedom-loving people to explore the effects on liberty of such legislation?
As I told the conservative Comanche, Dr. David Yeagley, “race is intricately and ineluctably tied to freedom because we live under a state which circumscribes liberty by enforcing codes of hiring, firing, renting, and money lending, among others. In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Race has become such an issue because we labor under nominal property ownership, and are subject to what is flippantly called political correctness, but is in fact codified and legalized theft and coercion.”
Althouse accuses libertarians of the sin of abstraction. If anything, Althouse’s formulations rely on the idea that America is merely a proposition, bound to abstract ideals, rather than a community of flesh-and-blood individuals, each with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.
Update: James Wilson (scroll down to the comments) contends that Althouse’s apoplexy over the exercise of individual liberty is a hangover from “the influence of the Christian Right on conservatism, [whereby] government’s role is to stamp out evil, pure and simple. And since racism is evil, the federal government must do something about it, just like it must fight drugs, pornography, obesity, etc.”
I’m not convinced. I would say (as I did in this January 29, 2003 column) that, neoconservatives, being “‘illiterate leftists posturing as conservatives’ have, largely, helped make Martin Luther King Jr. more important, historically, than the Founding Fathers. They’ve also helped conflate the messages of the two solitudes, even though the Founders’ liberty” is unrelated to the egalitarianism promoted by the commie King.
