The remarkable Paul Craig Roberts:

Columnists Paul Craig Roberts begins a recent column with a criticism of the income tax — something that certainly could be criticized — but then says (emphasis added):

Compare an American taxpayer’s situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today’s taxpayer, a portion of the slave’s money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave’s wages.

Slaves in that situation were as free as today’s American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves.

In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom.

No American today can purchase his freedom from the IRS.

Slaves could also run away. Today, Americans who run away are pursued to the far ends of the earth. Indeed, the IRS can assert its ownership rights for years after an American gives up his citizenship and becomes a citizen of a different country. The IRS need only claim that the former American gave up his citizenship for tax reasons.

     Conspicuously omitted from the comparison: Pre-Civil-War slaves could be sold by their masters. The masters could sell one’s spouse, or one’s children, and you might never see them again. The masters could sell one’s daughters into prostitution. In some states, it was illegal for slaves to be educated. Slaves naturally didn’t have constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech. Masters could, to the best of my knowledge, engage in a broad range of corporal punishment (all of course without any requirement of due process). The masters surely could try to stop slaves from running away, and to my knowledge many slaves were murdered while trying away. Need I go on?

     Seriously, would any of you trade your modern status, even with high income taxes, for being a slave in the 1850 South, even a favored one such as the sort Roberts describes? Hey, I’m a big believer in economic liberty, which too many people wrongly devalue. But it’s ridiculous moral blindness to overvalue it, and to undervalue the panoply of other liberties that we as free men have and that Southern slaves did not. “In fact, [certain pre-1860 American slaves] were freer than today’s American taxpayer” is just an appalling statement to make.

     Oh, and here’s the crowning touch, from later in the column:

The “Civil Rights revolution” destroyed equality before the law. Today rights are race-and gender-based. We have resurrected the status-based rights of feudalism. The new privileges belong to “preferred minorities” rather than noble families.

Readers of the blog know that I’m happy to complain about ways in which civil rights laws (and other laws) restrict liberty, or erode equality. But saying that “The ‘Civil Rights revolution’ destroyed equality” and that “Today rights are race- and gender-based” suggests that somehow before the 1960s we had more equality and didn’t have race- and gender-based rights.

     Jim Crow; segregated schools; legal prohibitions on women working in various jobs; government tolerance of race-based lynchings; routine discrimination against nonwhites and women in a vast range of government jobs; systematic police abuse of blacks — all that somehow didn’t involve inequality before the law or “race- and gender-based” rights. But set up race- and sex-based affirmative action (which, I stress again, I oppose) and other aspects of modern civil rights laws; now, all of a sudden (even though women and racial minorities have more nearly equal opportunities with men and whites than they’ve ever had in American history) that’s “destroy[ing]” some preexisting equality. What sort of moral and practical blindness is this?

     This, of course, is the man who wrote in the Washington Times and in his TownHall.com columns that (all emphasis added):

1. “Recently, a federal judge wrote to me. . . . He was astounded that among almost 100 new citizens [for whom he had conducted a naturalization ceremony], there were only four or five Europeans. Immigration policy has produced an extraordinary change in the ethnic composition of the U.S. population. Experts tell me that it has been three decades since Europeans comprised a significant percentage of new citizens. In 1965, the Democrats, who lost the South, changed the immigration rules in order to build African, Asian, and Hispanic constituencies that would vote Democratic. In effect, native-born U.S. citizens are being “ethnically cleansed,” not by violence, but by their own immigration policy. . . . When I first came to Washington, D.C., 25 years ago, the only international-looking people one saw were in the diplomatic community. Now, it is every third person.”

        As I’ve argued, “international-looking” is presumably the antonym of “American-looking people,” but what exactly does that mean? I assume that it refers to the non-European, “African, Asian and Hispanic”-looking people (what else can it be referring to?). But aren’t there people in our very nation, native-born U.S. citizens with roots in America dating back centuries or at least many decades, who look African, Hispanic, and Asian? It seems to me that there are two options: Either black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are as much part of our nation as Europeans, in which case it’s hard to imagine who’s left to be “international-looking” (I take it that the author wasn’t commenting only about, say, South Asians, many of whom have a “look” that wasn’t visible in large numbers in the U.S. until recently). Or “international-looking” means, well, “non-white” — in which case what does that say about the author’s vision of who is a genuine member of our own nation?

2. “[People] see the demise of the native-born in a recent occurrence in Richmond, Va. There a city councilman, Sa’ad El-Amin, has forced the removal of a mural of Robert E. Lee, the most beloved of all Virginians. When I was a kid even Northerners respect Robert E. Lee. Not a word was heard against him.” The most beloved of all Virginians? More so than Jefferson and Washington? A man who stands for defense of the Confederacy is more beloved than one who stands for liberty and one who is the father of our country? What does that say about the worldview of all Virginians, or at least of all Virginians of the sort that Roberts seems to like? And might it be that some Virginians — perhaps, say, black Virginians — might not have much love for someone who, honorable as he might have been in his own way, is most noted for defending a country that was committed to keeping many Virginians in slavery?
3. “The original U.S. Constitution that [legal scholar Raoul] Berger well understood is now dead. Its essential feature — equality in law — has been replaced by differential group rights based on skin color, gender, disability and, sooner or later, sexual orientation. . . .” Really? The essential feature of the original U.S. constitution, which protected race-based slavery, was “equality in law”? “Differential group rights based on skin color, gender, disability and sexual orientation” are somehow something new, and not a part of the 1787 order? Which history books has he been reading?
4. “In the old feudal system, there were no First Amendment rights. The legally privileged were free to engage in hate speech and to verbally harass others, but any commoner who replied in kind could be sued or have his tongue cut out. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott still has his tongue, but just barely. He used his tongue in a way that gave offense to the new aristocrats. Black Americans have been granted the right to be offended by any words they don’t like and to extract retribution. The offending speaker finds himself forced into contrition and humiliating apologies. Often the penalty is a destroyed career. . . . The spectacle proves — if proof is any longer required — that the First Amendment has been trumped by the race-based privileges of the new feudalism.” Wow — “black Americans” are “the new aristocrats”; and when a public outcry leads to political damage to a politician (the general way in which free speech often works in a free country), that’s somehow the equivalent of “feudalism.”
5. “It was left to the libertarian, Llewellyn Rockwell, to point out that, fundamentally, states’ rights is about the Tenth Amendment, not segregation. Thurmond’s political movement sought a return to the enumerated powers guaranteed by the Constitution to the states. . . . Lott’s tribute to Thurmond is easily defended on principled constitutional grounds. ” Interesting. Did Thurmond’s political movement also seek a return to other provisions guaranteed by the Constitution, such as, say, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? If not — if Thurmond’s political movement actually sought continuing violations of those Amendments — then shouldn’t good constitutionalists be a bit uncomfortable with tributes to Thurmond?

     Quite a remarkable man, Paul Craig Roberts, with quite remarkable opinions and ways of expressing them.

UPDATE: Two readers e-mailed me to point out that Roberts cowrote an anti-free-trade op-ed with . . . Sen. Charles Schumer. I doubt that Sen. Schumer, though, agrees with Mr. Roberts’ views quoted above; he might not even be acquainted with them.