This weekend, Barack Obama evoked the pre-civil rights reality that in large parts of the US, some people were by law not allowed to sit at lunch counters with other people because of their skin color. This got me thinking...always a dangerous thing!

The orthodox libertarian view seems to be: It's OK to be racist, to exclude people from a business because of their skin color. That's completely a function of property rights in the Lockean tradition.

But, I wonder: Were Jim Crow laws and segregation that at all? The institutionalized, state-enforced segregation were -- as I see it -- GOVERNMENT policy. While there may be a case that a lone tavern owner having a whites-only policy might have a "right" to do that, does that not miss the forest for the trees? And was this not all an aftermath of slavery, and some states contention that it was the "right" to have slavery and, later, Jim Crow laws?

I doubt that the nation would have much cared about the lone racist tavern owner. But, when there are hundreds of tavern owners, backed up by all-white police, backed up by voting laws that excluded Blacks, is there not a larger problem here, beyond a narrow, methodological individualist analysis?

My answer is Yes. In retrospect, it seems quite reasonable to oppose some of the specific measures that were used to end state-sponsored segregation. Perhaps affirmative action, bussing, and some voting law changes made things worse, not better.

While I don't endorse Obama and would likely not vote for him, I applaud his reminder that, not that long ago, segregation was the law in many states. And let's all take a bow that we've come so far as a nation that Sen. Obama can be considered a serious contender for the office of the president. The color of his skin doesn't seem to exclude him from the job, which it well may have -- in effect -- perhaps as recently as 10 years ago.

-Robert Capozzi