Reply #159: And he thinks making it illegal hasn't stopped it

[Recursion]

Look, the way to defeat the libertarian argument is to address it, not to pretend it's something it isn't.

Libertarians like Rand Paul think that the Civil Rights Act hasn't worked, and can't work because it's a law that's trying to make people moral. Yes, people of any race can get served in a coffee shop now (though there's a question of how well even that works -- see the Denny's case a few years ago, or try to go into a fancy restaurant being black and looking poor), but most of the underclass is still stuck as an underclass, and things are actually getting worse for them in a lot of ways.

Their (wrong) argument is that racial inequality exists because of government regulation. There are instances where they are right (Jim Crow was, after all, government regulation). But calling someone racist simply for having the opinion that legislation is not an effective tool for addressing racism is a) factually wrong and b) doesn't get us anywhere.