I SAY! BUT SURELY YOU DON'T HAVE TO HIRE THEM AS WELL?

Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review rags on Wendy Davis and sees in her ordinary political maneuvering, as he sees in everything, the thin end of the Liberal Fascist wedge, resulting in this:

In this manner, too, have we come to discuss the ever-diminishing scope of private property rights, our debates centering nowadays not on whether individuals should have a general right to decide whom they will serve, but on why anybody would be asking these questions in the first instance. Think you should be able to decide who comes into your bar? Drop the act, Bubba, you must be in the Klan.

Cooke, relatively new to this country, seems not to have fully accepted that here in the states you can't just tell certain types to stay out of your bar ("the law says I have to serve him," like this man says), and that the sheeple have lived with this injustice for so long that they no longer question it. Well, that just gives Cooke another freedom to fight for!

Like Chris Christie expressing his impatience with the minimum wage, this is a useful reminder of what these guys are really about.

UPDATE. It's always nice to have someone who knows what he's talking about in comments, so take it away, Scott Lemieux:

Hmm, let's see what one radical Trotskyite had to say about the "general right" of "individuals" to "decide who they will serve":

"[I]f an inn-keeper, or other victualler, hangs out a sign and opens his house for travelers, it is an implied engagement to entertain all persons who travel that way; and upon this universal assumpsit an action on the case will lie against him for damages, if he without good reason refuses to admit a traveler." -Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

You'd think someone with an Oxford education might be aware of this, but...

UPDATE 2. Cooke's reactions to Scott -- basically "sputter, sputter, asshole!" -- are worth noting and indeed @squarelyrooted has noted them.