When you own a hotel and bar Black people what happens is that if Black people comes in and sleep in the beds you call the police–functionaries of the state–and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass. When you own a bus and require Black people to sit in the back and Black people sits in the front you call the police–functionaries of the state–and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass. When you own a lunch counter and make it whites-only if Black people sit down at the lunch counter you call the police–functionaries of the state–and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass.
Ron Paul’s belief is that the state should assist in amplifying social and political crises and injustices whenever the propertied wish to provoke them.
Private fee-simple property is, after all, an institution established and enforced by the government. You can hardly get the government out of what is, fundamentally, the government’s core business.
From Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality with Both Hands
And this is one of the ways where libertarians lose me.
