This debate is four decades old

The Tea Party folks had only begun celebrating the lop-sided triumph of Rand Paul in the Republican Kentucky Senate primary when the victorious candidate stuck both feet in his mouth. Who would have thought that a 44-year-old congressional debate and 44 years of settled law would become a topic in a 2010 Senate campaign? But that's where Paul, the son of 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul, has taken us.

Paul follows his father's Libertarian philosophy, and you have to respect the elder Paul's principles. As a member of Congress, he declined overseas trips and largely paid his own way on almost everything. He believes in limited government with a big emphasis on limits. But as his son's conundrum shows, that path leads into some mushy swamps. Soon after his electoral victory, Rand Paul began trying to explain his belief that every business has the right to decide whom it will serve. It's unfair for the federal government to force a business to adopt practices it opposes.

If that argument sounds familiar, you're old enough to remember the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law banned discrimination based on race, creed, religion, color, national origin or sex, and opponents of the law made the same argument Paul is making now: Businesses should be allowed to decide with whom they will conduct business. The argument has some measure of sensibility. Barry Goldwater made the argument in voting against the Civil Rights Act. But before you sign onto the notion that businesses should be free to determine their own trade policies, recall what society was like in 1964 and what the Civil Rights Act sought to correct. Statutory racism allowed business owners to refuse to serve African-Americans. It barred African-Americans (and other racial, ethnic or religious groups) from many jobs. It prohibited minorities from use of public facilities, such as bathrooms, water fountains and parks. It prevented African-Americans from eating out in most restaurants. It maintained a morally and economically indefensible dual society in which minorities were barred from contributing fully to the dominant social and economic structure.

Perhaps Paul can make an argument in favor of shopkeepers' freedom to choose their own customers, but he cannot claim that the old society, which he is too young to remember (he is just one year older than the Civil Rights Act, was a better, fairer or more economically efficient place. Sometimes, foggy principles have to step aside for the moral — and economic — good of society.