Liberscarianism

Why I Cannot Support Ron Paul

The old progressive model is creaky and on the verge of collapse. Even some liberals will admit it is financially untenable. The orthodox statists scream for more taxpayer money, but everybody else realizes we can’t tax our way out of this.

Libertarianism is gaining a hearing from a populace that had previously viewed it as the milieu of nudist dope smokers, anarchists, and bow tied theorists. People are looking for solutions, but raw libertarianism is still too scary even for many small government types. It will take time, and the right people, for libertarianism to gain mainstream currency. Paul Ryan is not a libertarian, but he’s the kind of guy that will be needed: Smart, articulate, and able to deliver it all with a smile.

What's Wrong with Gary Johnson?

Gary Johnson is an affable guy with a solid small-government record as governor of New Mexico, but his talk of legalizing heroin scares people. And libertarians shouldn’t accuse those folks of fearing liberty. Reasonable people are afraid that mainstreaming drug use will unleash deleterious effects, just like blasphemy, pornography and hundreds of other societal poisons did once we stopped combating them. So the fears, while debatable, are well founded.

Retreat will not bring Safety

Ron Paul's foreign policy is naive and dangerous. His rEVOLution rhetoric warmly unites liberty loving libertarians, leftwing Kucinichites, Neo-nazis, 9-11 Troofers, Isolationists, and sensible small government conservatives, but it is folly to believe that "If we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone."

Just because the gunslinger hangs up his spurs and spends evenings by the fireside doesn't mean old rivals won't still be gunning for him. And "them" is generally understood to refer to practitioners of a religion that split into two rival teams after the founder died and then set themselves to the grim task of slaughtering one another. 1500 years later they are still at it. Is Ron Paul really so naive as to believe that people who nurse thousand-year-old grudges will let The Great Satan go gently into that good isolationist night with fresh sins yet staining his unrepentant soul?

Sunni terrorists are not fighting for deposed Iranian secularists

Then there is the ridiculous contention that our meddling in Iran in the 50’s has spawned Sunni Islamists.

Our CIA deposing secular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh has been proffered by hoarse-throated lefties as the reason "they hate us." I am dismayed to see many of my fellow conservatives hoist this Noam Chomsky banner, because there are several problems with such simple-minded thinking. First, “they” are Islamists, and they have always been set in opposition to the leftwing intellectual professoriate class that Mossadegh represented. Had we not removed him, his fate would have been that of the secular intelligentsia who teamed with the Mullahs to topple the Shah in 1979: The Islamists slit the throats of their revolutionary partners of convenience, and the rest is history.

Blowback!

I am also dismayed to see some of my fellow conservatives pick up the blowback banner. Iranians didn't carry out the string of terrorist attacks bookended by the WTC bombings. The people we defended from Saddam Hussein carried out those attacks; and they are Sunni extremists who hate the Shia Persians!

We stopped aggression when we chased Saddam out of Kuwait, as we did when we went into The Balkans. Was the Kosovar Muslim who murdered US Air Force personnel at Frankfurt Airport blowback for our defense of his kith and kin against the bloody predations of Orthodox Christians?

The problem with the blowback argument is that world history is full of chain reactions. Blowback is nothing but the physics of human and societal interaction: humanity's equal and opposite reaction. We’d be wise to remember that good men doing nothing will also cause the dreaded blowback.

A Tower of Babble: False Dilemmas upon Logical Fallacies

In addition to Paul’s historical mis-readings and the logical fallacies they have spawned, we also must suffer breathless false dilemmas from his hard-core followers (thankfully, I don't hear these memes from my fellow Right Blogistanis who Support Dr. Paul) :

* Ron Paul is a constitutionalist -- If you don't vote for him you hate the constitution.

* If you aren't with Ron Paul on Israel you are a neocon.

* If you disagree with his foreign policy you are in favor of endless wars.

* If you agree that the CIA has done bad things then you must support dismantling it.

I don’t believe we should intervene everywhere; but we should never tie our hands and forswear intervening anywhere. I can concede that yes, the CIA has done some bad things, but it does not follow that the entire intelligence apparatus must be dismantled. Do Paulistas really want to gouge out America’s eyes and plug our ears? I don’t want us pulling dirty tricks on countries that do us no harm, but I do want us spying on enemies.

More "Constitutional" than the Founders?

Ron Paul supporters call him a constitutionalist, but nothing in our constitution prevents us from forming alliances with likeminded people around the world or taking action when authorized by congress.

George Washington invaded Canada, and as president he donned his military uniform to lead a militia army in putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. His protégé, Alexander Hamilton (one of the Federalist Papers authors) set up our nation's first central bank, and when a later congress voted against renewing it's charter, President Madison (another Federalist Papers author, and Father of the Constitution) established the Second Bank of America, another central bank. President Thomas Jefferson sent US Marines to the shores of Tripoli, and "The Last Founding Father" James Monroe's famous doctrine declared that any act by any European power to colonize any part of North or South America would be considered by the US government as an act of aggression to be met with military force. Would Ron Paul call these actions by our founders wrong?

Ron Paul rejects the isolationist tag while throwing up smoke screens about no more endless wars (a lefty trope), but he also thought we should have stayed out of WW II and his stated philosophies would have prevented us from winning the cold war. Western Civilization would look much different today if Dr. Paul's views had held sway. Forming military alliances, providing military assistance, and securing landing rights in other countries is a far cry from war-mongering. On the contrary, those actions, carried out prudently, save lives and money by deterring war.

The world is a messy place, with unprincipled actors brandishing horrible weapons capable of murder on a mass scale. Those who stubbornly stand upon principle will end up standing upon rubble. Between Ron Paul and the trigger-happy statists, there exists a sensible middle, and it is on firm constitutional footing.

I understand the Paulist urge of impatient libertarians and those disgusted with our statist federal monster, but Ron Paul ain’t the guy and America ain't ready for the libertarian full monty just yet.

Nick Gillespie - Ron Paul (a defense)
Yes Virginia, Ron Paul is a 9/11 Truther
Statement from former Paul aid Eric Dondero
Tim Daniel – Ron Paul
Proof Positive - Ron Paul's Foreign Policy
Jeffrey Kuhner - Ron Paul's Moment
Dorothy Rabinowitz - What Ron Paul Thinks of America
Ron Paul’s Mischief Voters
PJ Media - Ron Paul, Troofer

From Jekyll Island to Hyde Park

The Federal Reserve cartelizes the banking industry, allowing individual banks to inflate together, earning them and the government enormous profits, while making sure that they are never held accountable for their fraudulent practices. (Origins of the Fed – Ron Paul)

We elect politicians who don’t know what they are doing. They are naifs in the financial arena, and so they are easily fooled, hoodwinked and cowed into sitting down, shutting up and doing the bidding of the bankers. Just as Satan will use someone’s strengths against himself, Wall Street swindlers especially love ensnaring intelligent politicians who have an overinflated self-esteem and dragooning them into the latest banker bunko scheme. Who’s smarter than Barney Frank? And who knows more about finance than the former Democrat Senator from Countrywide, Chris Dodd?

At least George Bush just read his script with his typical deer in the headlights look and spared us the charade of pretending to understand the economic tsunami engulfing his presidency. Mercifully, he confined his remarks to killing capitalism in order to save it because too many credit stink bombs had clogged the banking toilets, or whatever he said at the time. He should have grabbed a plunger and beat Dirty Hank Paulson and his coven of cronies with it, and kept the treasury shut tight.

Ron Paul is perhaps the only politician alive who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to our money and our banking system.

There is one reason why we have a Federal Reserve System today, and it has nothing to do with what the Fed's publications say. The Federal Reserve exists to give a special privilege to the banking industry. And they have profited greatly from it. But at what expense? The banksters have diluted the value of the 1914 dollar to about eight cents. And its value is still shrinking.

As the Federal Reserve expands the money supply, it reduces the value of all existing dollars. The process happens, though, unevenly because not all prices rise at the same time. The first party to get the new money can spend it at its old purchasing power. Only after filtering through the economy does the money bid up prices for goods. (Origins of the Fed – Ron Paul)

The economic emperors have no clothes, and they have destroyed our currency, which is delayed from a final crash only by the Euro’s even greater peril.

See also:
Ron Paul – The Case for Gold

Ron Paul is Right for America

OK, I hate the way Dr Paul talks about foreign policy, although I largely agree with him, and it disturbs me that he attracts so many neo-nazis and 9/11 troofers.  It's true that the scariest thing about Ron Paul are his followers.

What continues to attract me is his domestic policy.  He has the most comprehensive and fact-based plan of all the candidates.  Romney's may be more detailed, and Gingrich may have bigger ideas with more facets than a rare gem, but Ron Paul focuses in on big government and its big spending ways.  It is a personal freedom and economic liberty agenda.

Cut Spending...

$ Cut $1 trillion in spending during the first year
$ Eliminate five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education)
$ End airport rape and grope operations by abolishing Thousands Standing Around
$ Abolish corporate subsidies
$ Abolish foreign aid
$ End foreign wars
$ Return most other spending to 2006 levels

Regulation...

* Repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley
* Thorough congressional review and authorization before implementing any new regulations issued by bureaucrats
* President Paul will also cancel all onerous regulations previously issued by Executive Order.

Oh, and Ron Paul was right about the Federal Reserve...

No, it's not an evil Zionist cabal, but the GAO audit did uncover a fetid nest of crony crapitalism.  The GAO report is dry and stuffed with diplomatic language like "...opportunities exist to strengthen its conflict policies."  

No kidding. The place is a virtual revolving door of special interests, and it hands its friends the newly printed cash, so they can use it to maximum leverage before it pollutes the larger marketplace, diluting its value. The Washington Examiner reports...

The most troublesome revelation in the GAO audit is the extent to which insiders benefited from their positions and access during the crisis. The GAO found 18 instances in which current and former members of the Fed affiliated with banks and other companies received emergency loans from the board, including General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and JP Morgan Chase. In the case of General Electric, its CEO Jeffrey Immelt served on the New York Fed, which loaned his corporation $16 billion in emergency funding during the crisis.

One of Goldman Sachs' directors, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of the New York Fed. Friedman also owned substantial stock in Goldman Sachs during the same period in 2008 when the New York Fed voted to allow Goldman to operate as a commercial bank as well as an investment bank. That approval meant Goldman got access to loans from the Fed at highly favorable rates. Fed ethics guidelines prohibit a Fed governor from owning stock in a firm being considered for commercial status, but Friedman received a waiver and continued buying Goldman stock.

As for JP Morgan Chase, its chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, was on the New York Fed board when the company got $29 billion in emergency loans. In addition, Dimon was able to secure approval from the New York Fed for an 18-month exemption...   (Washington Examiner)

President Obama is chummy with these crony crapitalists and he's OK with them using taxpayer money as their personal stash.  President Paul would put a stop to it.

Ron Paul for President

OK, I’m not endorsing anyone yet, it's too early!

Ron Paul has consistently stood for small government, personal liberty, free markets and a sound dollar.  He also has the quaint habit of using the US Constitution as his guide.  If we had been following Dr. Paul's prescription for government, we would not be in the horrible mess we now find ourselves.

Ron Paul is the only candidate whose positions have not changed over the years, and his personal integrity is beyond reproach.  He's a pro-life, pro-family values Christian who does not exploit his faith for political gain.  He lives it!

Wes Messamore at The Humble Libertarian has made an excellent Ron Paul video.  It's only one minute long.  Please watch it.




Limited government, strong dollar, personal liberty...  Ron Paul was TEA Party 30 years before everyone else...

In 1976, he was one of only four Republican congressmen to endorse Ronald Reagan for president. (RonPaul.com)

In 1984, he voluntarily relinquished his House seat and returned to his medical practice. Dr. Paul returned to Congress in 1997 to represent the 14th congressional district of Texas. (RonPaul.com)

Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record  (Taken verbatim from RonPaul.com)

• He has never voted to raise taxes.
• He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
• He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
• He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
• He has never taken a government-paid junket.
• He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
• He voted against the Patriot Act.
• He voted against regulating the Internet.
• He voted against the Iraq war.
• He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
• He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Just Say No to Global Community Organizing

Ron Paul is not anti-military and his foreign policy ideas are not dangerous; they echo the ideas of the founders.  He is for a strong defense and secure borders. We are blowing too much money overseas and getting nothing but hatred in return.  He believes in a strong military for National Defense, not global community organizing.

Please go to Ron Paul - National Defense, and read what he believes.  There are two YouTube videos as well.   You won't agree with everything he says, but you will find his views logically coherent and far from the danger his political foes claim they are.