43. Whose Business Is It Anyway?

One of the great things about blogging is that it offers a quick way to "say" some of the things you wouldn't otherwise have a venue or opening to say. I can run-off a list of my favorite ice cream flavors (something I'm pretty passionate about) in 10 minutes and keep it moving. If I forget a flavor, no biggie. I'll get it in volume 2.

For some things though the "quick & dirty" nature of blogging makes writing a lot harder that it probably ought to be. For instance, I've been wanting to do a post on immigration for a while. But it feels like the kind of think I have to get "right." I can't have an oops when I'm talking about people's rights to work, and study and raise their families in a safe space. I don't want to have to come back and say, "I think I may have gotten this wrong."

So most of my politics posts have been sitting in my brain being revised and edited for accuracy since I started this project last month. Today I think I have a politics post I can bang out pretty quickly.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a piece up about Rand Paul's opposition to parts of the '64 Civil Rights Act. Paul doesn't believe that the government ought to have the right to tell private citizens who they can and can't offer services to. It's a private transaction.

I've actually kinda felt this way for a while myself. I'm all for the Civil Rights Act, but I've always wondered what the Constitutional basis was for telling a private citizen that if she's going to serve anyone she has to serve everyone. There's no law prohibiting anyone from boycotting businesses on the basis of race, and I don't see how you could enforce one. But would it be so different?

Someone told me it was a commerce issue and the right of the government to regulate commerce gave them the ability to enforce non-discrimination in commerce. That makes sense. I think moreso though it's a practicality issue. As Paul said in an interview, he's against systemic discrimination. I think the problem is that the distinction between private and systemic discrimination is a false distinction.

The systems that run our lives are made up of lots of privately owned components. If private grocers and restaurants won't serve black customers, they can't eat. If private employers won't hire them, they can't work. If privately owned banks won't give them credit, they can't buy homes or start businesses of their own. So private discrimination self-arranges into systems of discrimination affecting large populations of people.

Maybe this has always been obvious to everyone else. But it's taken me a while to think through it. And I still think that if one could make a rigid distinction between private and systemic discrimination, a government check on private behavior would be difficult to justify. This seems to be about means and ends. The incursions into the private sphere serve a compelling public interest. That's an unfortunate reality for me. But a necessary one of course.