Late last week Ron Paul said that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act "because of the property rights element, not because they got rid of the Jim Crow laws." But Jim Crow was actually a government-imposed attack on property rights, as Doug Mataconis explains:
It's … worth noting that Plessy v. Ferguson involved a Louisiana law that was designed to prevent the Pullman Company from offering equal seating options to blacks. That, in fact, was the entire purpose of Jim Crow laws. Even if, for example, the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina had wanted to serve the four black college students who sat down at their lunch counter on February 1, 1960, the laws in place at the time told them that they couldn't. Racial segregation in the South wasn't a product of the free market, it was the product of a state imposing racial prejudices under the threat of criminal prosecution. For that reason alone, it was a violation of the 14th Amendment and the Federal Government was entirely justified in trying to bring it down.
McArdle tries to imagine counterfactuals.
The Dish 