In today’s Wall Street Journal, the editors have an editorial denouncing Kentucky candidate for the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul. It’s strange. Here’s the ending sentence of the first paragraph:

But before we move on, it’s important to understand why Mr. Paul was wrong even on his own libertarian terms.

So that would lead a reader to expect that the editorial would say why opposing laws that would violate a business owner’s freedom of association is wrong “on libertarian terms,” right?

But that’s not what the editors do. Instead, they lay out the grisly history of local and state governments’ assaults on the rights of black people. The editors write:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964–and its companion laws, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965–were designed to address abuses of state and local government power. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up in the South after Reconstruction and prevailed for nearly a century were not merely the result of voluntary association. Discrimination–public and private–was enforced by police power and often by violence.

Exactly. And notice that Rand Paul did not defend these state and local government assaults. So how exactly was Rand Paul wrong on libertarian terms? Blank out.