There is a dangerous view that threatens to derail the anti-woke movement. According to many people, unfortunately including some “libertarians,” the trouble with Woke programs is that they are untrue to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law was intended to ban discrimination against people because of their race. You couldn’t refuse to hire someone, or rent an apartment to hm, because, say, you don’t like black people. The law said we should be “colorblind” and treat everybody the same. But now, these people say, the woke movement requires people to give special treatment to people because of their race. If you own a business, for example, you must hire a certain number of blacks, even if they aren’t qualified for the job. It’s also perfectly all right to discriminate against white people. The solution, they say, is to return to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Murray Rothbard held a completely different view and, as always, he is our best guide on all political questions. In his opinion, employment, renting an apartment, etc. rests on the voluntary nature of the transaction. If an employer offers you a job, and you accept his offer, that’s all you need. If you are an employer who doesn’t like black people, you are perfectly free to refuse to offer him a job, in exactly the same way in which a black person can refuse to accept a job offer.
Rothbard saw the Civil Rights Act as a violation of the fundamental principle of freedom of contract. “On the entire question of legally and judicially imposed ‘civil rights,’ we have been subjected to a trap, to a shell game in which ‘both sides’ adopt the same pernicious axiom and simply quarrel about interpretation within the same framework. On the one side, left-liberalism, which in the name of equality and civil rights, wants to outlaw ‘discrimination’ everywhere, has pushed the process to the point of virtually mandating representational quotas for allegedly oppressed groups everywhere in the society; be it jobs and promotions, entry into private golf clubs, or in legislatures and among the judiciary But the Official Conservative opposition, which includes not only neocons but also regular conservatives, conservative legal foundations, and left-libertarians, adopts the self-same axiom of civil rights and equality. In the name of the alleged ‘original’ civil rights vision of Martin Luther King, conservatives also want to outlaw discrimination in jobs and housing, and to allow federal courts to mandate gerrymandering of electoral districts.”
A good recent example of what Rothbard is talking about is the recent effort of the Trump administration and MAGA supporters to use charges of “discrimination” to force universities to institute programs to combat anti-Semitism. According to the New York Times, “Columbia University will pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it failed to do enough to stop the harassment of Jewish students, part of a sweeping deal reached on Wednesday to restore the university’s federal research funding, according to a statement from the university. In exchange for the return of hundreds of millions in research grants, Columbia will also pledge to follow laws banning the consideration of race in admissions and hiring and follow through on other commitments to reduce antisemitism and unrest on campus that it agreed to in March. The deal, which settles more than a half-dozen open civil rights investigations into the university, will be overseen by an independent monitor agreed to by both sides who will report to the government on its progress every six months. Columbia will also pay $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”
Let’s continue with Rothbard’s analysis. “But while Official Conservatives fully endorse outlawing racial and other discrimination, they want to stop there and claim that going beyond that to mandating affirmative action measures and quotas is perverting the noble original civil rights ideal. rest of the civil rights movement have tragically gone beyond that doctrine and come ‘precariously close to approving quotas.’ The original sin of ‘civil rights,’ which would have been perfectly understood by such ‘old conservatives’ as the much maligned Nine Old Men [of the Supreme Court] who tried to block the measures of the New Deal, is that anti-discrimination laws or edicts of any sort are evil because they run roughshod over the only fundamental natural right: the right of everyone over his own property. Every property owner should have the absolute right to sell, hire, or lease his money or other property to anyone whom he chooses, which means he has the absolute right to ‘discriminate’ all he damn pleases. If I have a plant and want to hire only six-foot albinos, and I can find willing employees, I should have the right to do so, even though I might well lose my shirt doing so. (Of course, I should not have the right to force the taxpayers to bail me out after losing my shirt.) If I own an apartment complex and want to rent only to Swedes without children, I should have the right to do so. etc. Outlawing such discrimination, and restrictive covenants upholding it, was the original sin from which all other problems have flowed. Once admit that principle, and everything else follows as the night the day: Once concede that it is right to make it illegal for me to refuse to hire blacks (or substitute any other group, ethnic or gender or whatever you wish), then left-liberalism is far more logical than official conservatism. For if it is right and proper to outlaw my discriminating against blacks, then it is just as right and proper for the government to figure out if I am discriminating or not, and in that case, it is perfectly legitimate for them to employ quotas to test the proposition.”
As you would expect, Rothbard was even more radical in his challenging the orthodoxies of the Left, mostly definitely including so-called “left -libertarians.” They said that private businesses should be free to discriminate, but that the government should not be. Rothbard rejected this too. “To return to the fallacies of Left-Libertarianism: apart from the question of what to do with government facilities, left-libertarians are being grossly unrealistic by saying that anti-discrimination laws should only apply to strictly government operations, while private operations must be totally free. The problem is that, particularly in our State-ridden society, the line between ‘public ‘and ‘private’ has grown increasingly fuzzy, and it is precisely because of that fuzziness that left-liberalism has been able to expand very easily)!, and with virtually no opposition, the original application of civil rights from public to all sorts of private facilities. Everywhere, for example, and in front of or next to every private property; there are public streets and roads. 
Virtually every private business sells some service or produce to some government agency; every private business sells across state lines and is therefore subject to the ‘commerce clause’ of the Constitution; every private school or cultural institution receives, directly or indirectly, government funds; restaurants are somehow invested with a ‘public’ nature because they have doors open to the public; social clubs are not really ‘private’ correctness in high theory; are left totally irrelevant to the current social scene. So what is the remedy for all this? Certainly not to take the standard libertarian path: to endorse civil rights for public operations and then, if they are interested at all in the real world, to try to sort out precisely what is private and what is public nowadays. The result is that there is nothing ‘private’ left, and left-libertarians, as usual content with correctness in high theory; are left totally irrelevant to the current social scene. What has to be done is to repudiate ‘civil rights’ and anti-discrimination laws totally; and in the meanwhile, on a separate but parallel track, try to privatize as much and as fully as we can.”
Let’s do everything we can to get rid of the phony “civil rights” laws of the 1960s!
