Rand Paul is not a racist. He's a theorist. As a fellow theorist, I can sympathize with him. Sure, he's a naive, stupid theorist, but everybody has to start somewhere.

Take my pet issue of late, carbon pricing. While, in theory, carbon pricing will reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, I also recognize that, when put into practice, carbon pricing will have unintended consequences. Some of these are predictable: the little old lady on a fixed income will not be able to afford to heat her house anymore. Some are unpredictable, and only experimentation will reveal them.

Take another example: many health care reformers want a single-payer system. In theory, a single payer system will insure everyone and can reduce costs. However, since this theory has been put into practice in other countries, we can observe some of the unintended consequences. A single payer system leaves the consumer of health care no incentive to restrain his health care spending. Therefore, the government must come up with a way to spend limited funds to serve an essentially unlimited demand. As a result, some goofy things happen.

In Rand Paul's theory, the Civil Rights Act was an unnecessary overreach of the federal government's authority. Paul is arguing that, based on free-market theory, segregation would eventually have been eliminated without government intervention. Woolworths discriminates against black people: if you don't like it, you decide not to shop at Woolworths. If we as a country decide we don't want segregation, the market will sort it out for us.

As a theory, that's fine. But his theory relies, as all theories and models do, on a simplified understanding of the the world. The world is complex and messy. A theory tries to distill the world down to an understandable mechanism. But if the theory is overly simplified, then you can miss important information.

In Rand's theory, he's simplified the timescale. Before the Civil Rights Act, there was a history of 200 years of segregation, racism, and worse in this country. The empirical data shows that either the free market was not having the desired effect, or it was not working at a sufficient pace. The time-scale on which the free market was eliminating segregation was insufficient compared to the time-scale of a human life. Or, in other words: while we wait for the free market to kick in, generations of black people live and die in a world where they are treated as less.

A catalyst was needed to increase the rate of a non-segregationist equilibrium. The Civil Rights Act was that catalyst. Theory, experiment, conclusion, action.

A theory is not the end of the scientific method. It is the beginning. Experimentation is just as important. Rand Paul is ignoring the results of the experiment, either because he doesn't understand the scientific method, or he doesn't like the results. He's either ignorant, or he's an asshole. Personally, I'd guess he's both.

That's my theory, anyway.