Category Archives: Ron Paul

Ron Paul Revolution: Here Comes the Sun…..

Posted on by

“Literally, in the dark hours of the morning at the end of the year, it has become tradition for the Appropriations committee to rush the famous omnibus bill to the floor for a vote, mere hours after it is introduced…..
Of course, the most well-known example of this phenomenon might be the Patriot Act. Legislators passed the 300+ page bill less than a day after it was introduced, many out of an urgency to do something.…..This has long been a concern of mine, and for this reason I have reintroduced The Sunlight Rule. (H.RES 63) This proposed rule stipulates that no piece of legislation can be brought before the House of Representatives for a vote unless it has been available to members and staff to read for at least ten days. Any amendments must be available for at least 72 hours before a vote. ….”

More at Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul.

Go Ron!

or, lyrically,

“Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it’s all right…..

Little darlin’ I feel the ice is slowly meltin’
Little darlin’ it seems like years since it’s been clear
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it’s all right
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
It’s all right, it’s all right…”

Or something like it…..

Ron Paul on Bill O’Reilly: Blow-back

Posted on by

Well – I have to say that Bill O’Reilly surprised me by letting Ron Paul actually get a sentence in edge-wise.

And then – wonder of wonders – we heard about the overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran’s one-time PM, and US involvement in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Now, when was the last time you heard that on Bill O’Reilly, or on any other popular talk show?

Of course, the pleasant feeling quickly disappeared when Paul was replaced by Michelle Malkin, FOX’s resident constitutional genius on civil liberties, who averred that the Petraeus ad represented the low point of American politics.

Tsk Tsk.

We have the worst strategic blunder in US postwar history (forget the humanitarian angle), a 50% chance of a recession bigger than any since the 1930s, and a presidential candidate who is at last getting up and telling the truth about American foreign policy.

But what are the talking heads bloviating about?

An ad…

Perceptions…

Style over substance.

Dan Abrams at 9 PM was at least honest:

“We are changing the way we are talking about it [Iraq] because it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to….In essence, we failed.”

And Pat Buchanan, talking to Abrams, was even more blunt . Talking about why we can’t get out immediately (so he thinks), he admitted:

“We have to stay the course to prevent a strategic catastrophe, a humanitarian disaster, and an Iranian take over…”

Nice to figure out finally what “Mission Accomplished” meant.

Ron Paul Revolution: Mr. Paul goes to Washington

Posted on by

“On Tuesday, Sept 11, the anniversary of the WTC terrorist attacks, Ron Paul is giving a keynote policy address at the influential Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.His topic is “A Traditional Non-Intervention Foreign Policy.”

If you wanted to quibble, you could. Personally, I would have preferred it to read,
“A Rational Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”
Or “A Constitutional Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”

Because there are traditions and traditions. And while those of us who are intellectually of a conservative bent tend to give any tradition the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to consider non-intervention a good by virtue only of its history, when history is composted with the bones of institutions that rotted from the inside. Traditions are prone to developing hardening of the categories – as some wit noted – and if we classify non-intervention as one, then we are surely inviting some clever update of it. We are asking for the Monroe Doctrine to be turned into Manifest Destiny

— with gender neutrality and racial sensitivity thrown in to certify it kosher.

But the Constitution of America – whatever its alleged and real flaws (and it isn’t free of them) – has been a guiding light to this nation and countless others not because it is a tradition but because the principles it embodies are rational, in the highest sense of the word, and because they are worthy of emulation. The Constitution is universal in its appeal. But it is universal because its persuades by its reasonableness, not because it imposes itself over the breadth of the globe as the law of an empire.

The distinction is of some importance today.
Because there are those who demand exactly the opposite – an interventionist foreign policy – for exactly the same reason — universality. You could call them ‘liberventionists.’ They are the humanitarian bombers, like Mr. Hitchens…..

More at Lew Rockwell. 


An ex-marine on politics and Ron Paul…

Posted on by

I am a republican and I have been for a bunch of years now. I voted for Harry Browne in 2000, I was a big Alan Keyes supporter and I couldn’t vote for GWB. In 2004, I supported the war in Iraq and I voted for President Bush because of that and the tax cuts.
I had a real eye opener when I heard about Ron Paul’s candidacy on C-Span and when I heard him in the debates. I believed Rush and Sean when they said that the liberals wanted to, “cut and run”. I still do think that much of the opposition to the war from the liberal side is aimed at the President and that a democratic President, (Clinton, Obama, Edwards etc…) would not leave Iraq. When we went to war I believed it would be a cakewalk it was predicted to be. Up until this year I believed, “stay the course” was our only option. The people who predicted easy victory now said that if we left it would be genocide and a vacuum would soon fill with Al Queda.
I decided it was high time to stop believing the people who were wrong and start believing the man who was right from the beginning, Ron Paul. What Dr. Paul has been saying since well before 9/11/2001 is that wars ought to be declared, per the constitution. The track record of our declared wars versus our undeclared wars tells the sad tale. Dr. Paul believes, and I agree, that looking for the motive for a crime is not blaming the victim but an attempt to prevent future crimes. We should remember that we once supported both Bin Laden and Saddam and we should wonder who we are supporting now that we will fight later.
While we are off nation building and intervening in the internal affairs of “certain” other nations, we should be careful to preserve our freedoms at home. What are we fighting for in Iraq if we still lose liberties at home? Ah, safety, that’s it… But is it so important to be safe? The info about the attacks of 9/11 was in our hands. The bureaucracy was too large to allow the info to get to the correct hands. What solution did we offer to make sure this wouldn’t happen again? We added a monster bureaucracy on top of the existing one in an effort to “streamline” information.
The real threat to our freedom is the idea that we should give up freedom and rights at home in order to keep us safe. By accepting this premise we forget the reasons this nation was founded. We are under a more oppressive tax system than the one that led to the Boston Tea Party. We can’t reduce these taxes without changing our welfare/warfare government policies. If the second amendment was fully honored we could have prevented the attacks of 9/11 and the VTech massacre.
“Give me liberty or give me death” has been replaced by “Take our liberty and keep us safe”. This is not American. We are throwing our rights to the government like a wallet to a mugger. The terrorists can only kill us, the government can do far worse. The Army, Navy, Air force and my fellow Marines are bravely risking their lives for our country. Let us, safe at home, have the courage to take a little less security at home and attempt to restore the republic.

From the Moderately Interesting Unoriginal Blog.

Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts

Posted on by

Lila Rajiva (co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” on being Married to the Mob on The Michael Dresser Show tonight, September 5 at 6:00 p.m. EST)

What is it about Ron Paul that attracts as many and as diverse a group of people as are repelled by him?

For a number of people, right and left, it is his consistent opposition
to the Iraq war.

It is a good reason. Moral courage allied with wisdom is as much in short supply these days as chastity at a political convention.

For others, it is Paul’s fiscal responsibility.

Dr. No has been pursing his lips at every form of political candy offered by the junk food vendors at the Capital. While many of his colleagues are letting out their belts, the wiry obstetrician is running marathons at 71.

While they keep getting caught in what used to be called “indiscretions,” he has been married for fifty years. We would be foolish to judge people by the externals of their lives, for saints and sinners, puritans and bohemians not only cohabit, they frequently snuggle under the same skin. Nonetheless, it’s a relief to have a few people around in politics to remind us that it’s also perfectly all right to live uneventfully, even stodgily.

I say this as someone who has spent a large part of her life among musicians, writers, and now, financial newsletter writers – whose professional lives depend on their eccentricity and even contrariness.

There is however one critical difference between selling financial advice and intellectual nostrums on the one hand and delivering babies on the other – which is what Dr. Paul has done for most of his professional life. The success of obstetrics is pretty easy to verify. Either the child breathes and lives – or it doesn’t.

One can’t be a good obstetrician on theory alone. The practice is all.
Check the track record of the average stock tout and you might find nothing but bankruptcy filings and credit card debt. That, of course, will count for little with the tout’s avid customers who would mortgage their four walls and roof for his advice. And toss in their wives as a bonus.

As for the pedant, you wish he’d trip over one of his obtuse, meandering sentences and break his scrawny neck before he stuck it into the real world. But does anyone care? No. His pet theories may have driven the nation into premature recession if not down-right impotence, but the expert will be given not only an institute of his very own at some Ivy League, but the whole Earth along with it……. to run as he wishes.

There, winsome coeds will no doubt ornament every step of his way to a Nobel Prize.

Theory is easy. Any biped with a larynx and functioning synapses can come up with one.
It is practice that separates the goats from the sheep.

And that is the principal reason that the pundits are afraid of that revolution of the people that is the rise of Ron Paul.

Ron Paul wants to put the practice of citizenry back in the hands of citizens and take it away from the theorists.

Oh, the critics will tell you differently. They will tell you that Ron Paul is a theorist himself – and a crack-pot theorist as well. A patron of fringe economics. A gentlemanly loon. Or at least, dangerously far out on the right bank of the mainstream.

Since the mainstream has just finished wrecking a whole country abroad in a manner that Genghis Khan would have been proud of and is busy adding yet another to its sights; and since, in the meantime it’s also managed to find the time to dismantle several centuries worth of legal structure at home, you wonder why anyone would worry about that, anyway.

But there you have the sad truth about man. He isn’t much concerned about anything besides how other people think of him. That’s all he thinks about all day long. For that he sweats and schleps, roils and toils.

Status. Image. In groups. Out groups. Pariahs. Brahmins. The sum total of it all is — what does the other fellow think of me?

Right or wrong counts for far less. His conscience or soul — for nothing at all. If he feels a pang, he swigs gelusil and turns on the hypnotic lights of his TV set.

And why? Because with no real, concrete practical knowledge anywhere between his ears, his skull rings with the lethal chatter of newspaper headlines and talk shows.

The patter of Those Who Know Better.

Hedge-fund managers who promise that all risk can be ironed out of your portfolio and make you pay for the wrinkles that aren’t.

Political scientists who invade a country from their desktops, but don’t know how to boot it up again when it crashes.

Hucksters who dream up great stories for their products — and make a punch-line out of the patsies who buy them.

We live in an empire run by experts.
But in the empire of experts, the man with horse sense is king.

And Ron Paul has horse sense.

The horse sense of mustangs, not geldings.

The kind of horse sense that bucks and sends you for a toss just when you thought you had everything under control. The horse sense that stops you from thinking about things so far off you couldn’t possibly have spotted them — while tripping over things so close by you shouldn’t ever have missed them.

The experts would have you believe that they can control your life and the life of entire nations by thinking long enough and hard enough about it. This is a theory so full of holes it puts Swiss cheese to shame.

Studies have even shown (Philip Tetlock, “Expert Political Judgment – How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”) that canny laymen do as well as experts when it come to predicting the future. In fact, many do even better.

But it’s the experts who have broken us in.
The reason is simple. Experts promise us a simple, sharp tool to dissect the complexity of the real world.

But a dissection that thorough can only be a post-mortem. Cut through the warm body of society that fiercely and you turn it into a cadaver.

Gray is all theory, says Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust. The golden tree of life is green.

Here, we will improve on the devil. Between book covers, theory may be gray – but it is an intricate gossamer of gray – like the tracery in a Gothic cathedral or the mysterious depths of an engraving by Gustave Dore


I have no quarrel with theory. In fact, I have a weakness for it, as I have for all rich, superfluous things.

But a map is not a road, and a silhouette is not a human being. The trouble begins when experts begin to take their expertise so seriously that they forfeit their own road sense and their readers’. When they are so neutered by their reasoning that they cannot act – or worse yet, cannot stop acting. And the trouble grows into disaster when their credulous followers, junkies of every news and TV show, rush behind them like rats behind the Hamelin piper — into every frippery and fad, every financial folly and military madness.

And that is what we have today in our empire of experts. Worse than any war – which must at some point end — is the ideology that makes for war.

That tells us that “what is” is also “what must be.” You see, empires are made for experts as experts are made for empires. Without their theories to hold it up, the flimsy scaffold of government would fall of its own feebleness. And without that scaffold, the little men on top would be cut down to the same size as the rest of us.
And that, my friends, is the real reason why the experts fear Dr. Paul and the people love him.

Update:

This article was one of the top 10 articles on LRC. First time I made it. They all look like good pieces too.

  1. The Government-Created Subprime Mortgage Meltdown by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
  2. The Ultimate ‘Success Through Failure’ Manual by Gary North
  3. Phase III of Bush’s War by Patrick J. Buchanan
  4. Ron Paul and the Four Horsemen by James Ostrowski
  5. ‘They’ Hate Our Freedoms by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
  6. What Is Wikipedia, and What Is It Good For? by Dick Clark
  7. A Busy Week for the Front-Runner, Ron Paul by Rick Fisk
  8. The George W. Bush Freedom Institute by Karen Kwiatkowski
  9. Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts by Lila Rajiva
  10. Ron Paul’s Inaugural Address by Johnny Kramer

Ron Paul’s American Revolution: land of the free:

Posted on by

Here are the sorts of people who support Ron Paul. Tell me, does she make sense? Isn’t this what this country is supposed to be about and not the well-heeled, smooth operators who clutter up the news and the gullible camp followers who trek behind them like rats behind the piper of Hamelin?

Claire Wolfe at the Backwoods Home Magazine writes:

12 QUALITIES OF A FREE MAN

THE FIVE OUTWARD-LOOKING VIRTUESThe free man within society

A free man:

Keeps his word. A good man’s word was once his bond. Now we expect our credit score to be our bond — but such data measures only one infinitesimal part of us. You cannot build feedom on a base of lies or habitual unreliability. Free men mean what they say and do what they promise.

Does unto others as he would have them do unto him. Helps those who help themselves. Commits random acts of decency. Aids those who are striving to be free. Does not meddle in the non-violent behavior of others, but is a good neighbor and powerful ally when one is needed.

Shuns indebtedness. This means more than shunning debt (though that, too). A free man owns his own life and thinks carefully before giving any part of it away. He rejects false loyalties and guilt trips (unwarranted claims on his life energies). If he accepts a favor he pays it back or pays it forward so others benefit by the aid he received.

Rejects coercive power. He neither seeks power over others nor accepts the right of others to hold such coercive power. You will never hear him say, “There ought to be a law.” He sees humanity not as an ignorant mass to be managed or mothered, but as individuals capable of running their own lives.

Is independent and self-responsible. A free man prefers the risks and rewards of self-reliance to the temptations of “security” provided by others. He takes care of himself and his family. The ultimate corollary to this virtue is self-defense; a free man does not delegate responsibility for his own sustenance, and certainly not for his own survival.

THE FIVE INTERIOR VIRTUES
The free man within

A free man:

Solves problems creatively. Thinks out of the box. Is fascinated by new ideas. Is perpetually self-educating. Anyone who spends a large chunk of his life sitting and whining about all the factors holding him back is by definition neither free nor ready to free himself.

Acts with daily courage and fortitude. While we await the jackboot in the door, tyranny arrives in daily demands for our collaboration. We require courage to say, “No, I won’t give that information”; “I have no interest in working for somebody who forces me to pee in a bottle”; “I won’t pay you to kill people in my name”; “My baby doesn’t need a government inventory number”; “That’s politically correct nonsense”; “Not without a warrant, you won’t”; or “It’s time for you to stand up and take care of yourself.” Free people own that kind of courage. It’s food for their souls. (Which is why I list it as an Interior Virtue rather than an Outward-Looking one.)

Lives by well-considered principles. A free man doesn’t just parrot “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not steal.” He doesn’t behave just because he fears God or government may be watching. He has examined his morality. He knows why he acts or refrains from acting. Sound principles also provide the platform for standing up with courage and saying, “No” to intolerable acts.

Seeks balanced excellence. It may be a fine thing to make a million dollars or build a better mousetrap (or a more efficient solar cell or an innovative computer game). Free people do those things better than serfs. But our life is our #1 creation. Truly free people put as much energy into becoming good, wise human beings as they do into material accomplishments. To do otherwise is to remain off balance — and therefore very easy for “authorities” to push over.

Loves life. No, this does not mean a free man always goes around with a happy-face painted on his mug. It does mean that conscious, human life is the foundation of freedom. Despite its manifold flaws, human life is a miracle to be appreciated and defended against forces that waste or destroy it.

THE TWO FOUNDATION VIRTUES
What all the rest is built on

A free man:

Is self-aware. He knows who he is, what he loves, what he finds intolerable. Knows his own inner drivers, good or ill. Self-knowledge enables us to set satisfying goals and effective boundaries. It shows us our true path. Without self-understanding, we find ourselves constantly in bad relationships and bad jobs, living in conditions we hate — unable to say no and unable to articulate why we want to say no.

Has a spiritual center. A few years ago I’d never have put spirituality on any list of a free man’s traits. Now, I see it’s a foundation stone. Spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean religion. A person can be spiritual without even believing in God. Spirituality is simply the sense that an individual life has a deeper meaning than is evident on the surface. When daily temptations, disappointments, or demands for collaboration threaten to push us off course, transcendent purpose keeps us walking the path.

There it is. A free man is, in his own realm, an astonishingly civilized and moral being. To those who live by controlling others, however, he is a wild beast who can’t be tamed and who is too tough to make good prey.

A free man is also the cause of freedom. The sole cause of it.

When we have sufficient free individuals, political, social, and institutional freedoms will follow. They will arise not through revolution or politically driven reform, but from who we are and the choices we make every day.

We don’t require superhumans. We don’t even require a majority of free people. We do, however, require a larger minority of free individuals than we have today. “Doing your own thing” is one part of being free. But lasting freedom is a consequence of that old-fashioned and presently out-of-favor ideal: personal character.

We require that to create what so many of us crave: freedom that lasts.

My question for next time: “Can we create Sustainable Freedom?”

Ron Paul: Slander from the left of them….

Posted on by

I love Bill Blum’s work, so I was sorely disappointed to find this in his latest anti-Empire report (please read it, since it also has some exquisite tidbits on the imperial mindset that pervades the current crop of jacks-in- office…)

“Libertarians: an eccentric blend of anarchy and runaway capitalism


What is it about libertarians? Their philosophy, in theory and in practice, seems to amount to little more than: “If the government is doing it, it’s oppressive and we’re against it.”

LR: Bill, that seems to be your way of looking at it. No one who has read Mises, or Rothbard, or Hayek would see it that way.

BB: Corporations, however, tend to get free passes.

LR: From Murray Rothbard onward, true libertarians have been criticizing corporate boondoggles far more than many liberals I know. And talking about income differentials. Don’t confuse some brands of libertarianism with the whole of it, or I will start tarring all socialists as Stalinists and Maoists?

BB: Perhaps the most prominent libertarian today is Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who ran as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988 and is running now for the same office as a Republican. He’s against the war in Iraq, in no uncertain terms, but if the war were officially being fought by, for, and in the name of a consortium of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, and some other giant American corporations, would he have the same attitude?

LR: Oh, this is an argument? Suppose, I said the same about the left: If the war was for “the people” — then you would be fine with mounds of dead bodies? Isn’t that putting words in your opponent’s mouth? Where has Ron Paul supported wars for corporations? In fact, right now he opposes the war, because he thinks it was fought for corporations, which use the state as their tool. That is precisely the libertarian position about the corporatocracy and the corporate state.

In fact, the antiwar position is absolutely central to libertarian thinking, because for libertarians, it is the war economy that legitimates the command economy. Anyone who doesn’t know that simply hasn’t studied any serious libertarian theorists. Or is confusing the prowar positions of some libertarian writers at magazines like Reason (others at Reason disgreed) with authentic libertarianism. I suppose I could confuse the prowar position of some journalists at the Washington Post with the left-liberal position too.

Here is Rothbard about the the 1991 Gulf War:

“Bechtel, the Rockefellers, and the Saudi royal family have long had an intimate connection. After the Saudis granted the Rockefeller-dominated Aramco oil consortium the monopoly of oil in Saudi Arabia, the Rockefellers brought their pals at Bechtel in on the construction contracts. The Bechtel Corporation, of course, has also contributed George Shultz and Cap Weinberger to high office in Republican administrations. To complete the circle, KA director Simon’s former boss Suliman Olayan was, in 1988, the largest shareholder in the Chase Manhattan Bank after David Rockefeller himself.

The pattern is clear. An old New Left slogan held that “you don’t need a weatherman to tell you how the wind is blowing.” In the same way, you don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see what’s going on here. All you have to do is be willing to use your eyes….” (Why the War? Lew Rockwell, 1991).

Here is a piece on Rothbard’s belief that right libertarians were historically, left of the current left (See, Wally Conger, “Why Not Reclaim the Left, Strike the Root, 2002).

Ron Paul has been the one voice of sanity about the Federal Reserve’s reckless creation of credit, which is the real reason for the season of mad money lending we’ve just survived and which is now on the verge of tearing apart the economic fabric. That, Mr. Blum, is not the fault of “capitalism,” any more than a gold-digging trophy wife is an indictment of marriage as an institution. It is central bank induced financialization by a transnational oligarchy.

Please. Like many on the left, Mr. Blum’s opinion about what the right thinks or doesn’t think is drawn from hearsay and innuendo, by other leftists.

BB: And one could of course argue that the war is indeed being fought for such a consortium. So is it simply the idea or the image of “a government operation” that bothers him and other libertarians?

LR: Where does Paul say that?

BB: Paul recently said: “The government is too bureaucratic, it spends too much money, they waste the money.”[9]

Does the man think that corporations are not bureaucratic? Do libertarians think that any large institution is not overbearingly bureaucratic? Is it not the nature of the beast? Who amongst us has not had the frustrating experience with a corporation trying to correct an erroneous billing or trying to get a faulty product repaired or replaced? Can not a case be made that corporations spend too much (of our) money? What do libertarians think of the exceedingly obscene salaries paid to corporate executives? Or of two dozen varieties of corporate theft and corruption? Did someone mention Enron?

LR: I did. (here’s a piece I did on Enron: “Malcolm Gladwell Checks in at the Hotel Kenneth Lay-a”).

Murray Rothbard never stopped talking about corporate bail outs. I differ from him on some of his positions, quite strongly, but nowhere does he support the use of fraud, force or war in support of enterprise.

Neither do most genuine ethical libertarians.

But no corporation can raise a standing army or tax citizens or enjoy the legitimacy of a state. And some of us (a good number of right libertarians) think that corporations would not reach the size they do, without the state granting licences and privileges.

Gabriel Kolko argues for that as well.

BB: Ron Paul and other libertarians are against social security. Do they believe that it’s better for elderly people to live in a homeless shelter than to be dependent on government “handouts”? That’s exactly what it would come down to with many senior citizens if not for their social security.

LR: This is a false alternative. The alternative to social security is not homeless shelters. Look what a low opinion of people the left really has. According to them, people are blind, deaf and dumb; they can’t save, they can’t plan…they can’t do anything without the commissariat of soviets to do it for them. Does that make sense? Don’t you think that without government interference, people could still sit down and figure out what they really needed, instead of being forced to pay for things they don’t need? Half the waste would disappear; costs of insurances would decline sharply; variety and flexibility would increase; all the various leeches and parasites on the system (many of them middle and upper class….don’t let that tired class rhetoric about the aged poor scare you) would fade away. Scaled back and scaled down, we would get back to the scale of the human.

BB:

Most libertarians I’m sure are not racists, but Paul certainly sounds like one. Here are a couple of comments from his newsletter:

“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”

“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”[10]

LR: Paul had an opinion based on some mistaken statistics being circulated then. It was a misguided opinion. A dumb over-generalization. It wasn’t fundamentally racist but crude and insensitive. And apparently, he made a sweeping statement about the opinions he thought black people hold about economics. Asians make such generalizations all the time too, about whites and blacks. ..and other Asians (or to be fair, I should say browns or yellows or yellow-browns, maybe). Bill Blum just made one about libertarians that was all wrong. So do all groups — whether they are prepared to say so in public is another thing. Nor do I want to live in a society which demonizes people for saying such things. Let him apologize and move on.
By the way, if we are going to bring it up, some of the most “racist” attitudes I encountered in this country were not from the right. But from the left – which continues to feel that its model is the only one that serves minorities and people from the third world, in general. And demonizes anyone who falls out of step. (Not, mind you, that paternalism or even feelings of superiority expressed by other groups bothers me much. My thinking is that if an ideas strikes you as right, you should adopt it, regardless of who holds it and whatever their attitude to you might be. Racism runs a good second to mass killing in my mind and does not necessarily lead to it, either, contrary to what some people seem to think.

BB: Author Ellen Willis has written that “the fundamental fallacy of right libertarianism is that the state is the only source of coercive power.” They don’t recognize “that the corporations that control most economic resources, and therefore most people’s access to the necessities of life, have far more power than government to dictate our behavior and the day-to-day terms of our existence.”

LR (sigh):

And there are no socialists who are not unreconstructed Maoists? But does that make me confuse democratic socialists in the US with the Great Leap Forward? Please.

We expect better from our socialist friends.

There ARE many libertarians who fail to apply their critical skills to corporations and fail to see that they don’t embody free enterprise. They should start to do it in no uncertain terms.

But they should do it in libertarian terms and not in the tired, dead-end rhetoric of the left-right divide.

Libertarians should attack corporations for what they criticise governments for — bureaucracy and anti-individualism. And the left should start reigning in its knee-jerk thought-police for the very thing they attack the right for — intolerance.

Like it or not, the revolution in thinking is from the right, his time. And has been so for some time. Only it got high-jacked by a bunch of neoconservatives — who were actually ex-leftists originally.

But the real right is awake at last.

So now, move over, Trotsky.

(Defend your honor, as they say, or people will think you have none…)

Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell: Then and Now

Posted on by

Update:

In hindsight, I can see I was deceived by this pair – the gentlemanly converso who fronts and the political hatchet-man behind.

Now I know better.

Ideology seems to be a pose hiding subservience to the Sanhedrin.

ORIGINAL POST

LAWYER: The fact remains that Ron Paul is now a real world candidate for president, and you guys are playing with fire every time you publish a positive article about him.

Sure, you might win the argument that you are not political, but you have some powerful enemies, the pro-war crowd, for example. They would love to destroy you, and if they can use the levers of power against you, they will.

And by the way, given the way you are legally structured now, you also can’t run articles or blogs that are critical of other candidates. No going after Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Giuliani, Thompson, or McCain.

So here are your choices as I measure them: You can stop publishing articles and blogs on Ron Paul and other candidates (and cross your fingers), or you can shut down LRC immediately. Total closure is what I recommend, and right now.

BLUMERT: Abandon Ron Paul? Never.

Close down LRC? You might as well cut off Lew Rockwell’s fingers.

I’ll pretend I didn’t hear either of your suggestions.

Look, LRC is too important to silence. It has become the most significant libertarian website in the world. Literally thousands of people, from all over the world, have told me that LRC has been key to their intellectual development, and a source of sanity in this Age of the Neocon.

Of course, we also get hatemail; we’re “anti-Semites” for opposing endless Mideast wars; we’re “traitors” for resisting the omnipotent executive; we’re “pro-terrorist” for fighting the police state; we’re “mean-spirited” for supporting the free market; we’re “conspiracy nuts” for criticizing the Federal Reserve; and we’re “anti-American” for working against the empire.

But even our enemies can’t stay away; vast numbers of people visit the site every day, to learn, to cheer, or to boo, because this is where it’s happening – for everyone dedicated (or opposed) to freedom and peace.

As to Ron Paul, we have some history here. In 1988 I was chairman of Ron’s first presidential campaign. Lew has been his friend and associate since 1975, and served as Ron’s chief of staff in Congress. We both know him very well, and, like all who know him, think the world of him, as a man of great integrity and as a leader. This is not political; it is supporting the ideas we have loved and promoted for decades.

Of course, it’s no coincidence that Ron calls LRC his favorite website. Bail on him? Never. Lew and I have worked all our lives for this moment. And we will keep working.

As Ron himself has said, “More important than the man is the message for liberty.” And after today’s debates, primaries, and elections, are over, LRC will still be spreading that message.

LAWYER: Okay, okay, Blumert, I get the message. To protect both LRC and CLS, and you and Lew, you only have one prudent course of action. You must spin LRC off from CLS. The good news: CLS will stay as it is. The not-so-good news: donations to LRC will no longer be tax-deductible, though it still can be a non-profit educational effort.

More at Lew Rockwell.

(Oh, by the way, I notice some reader — this shows up on my dashboard — rushing off to investigate (in all seriousness I am sure) “Lew Rockwell, nuts.”

Poor dear. Let me save her the trouble.
Why not try “Lew Rockwell, crazed wing nuts” or “Lew Rockwell, southern secessionist historical revisionists” (ooh – maybe that’s just a shade too close for comfort).

Of course, there’s always “Lew Rockwell, Nazi-KKK”, that  reliable war horse, or better yet, “Lew Rockwell, idealogue,” said with all the sangfroid of the determined realist convinced that mountains of dead babies in some inconvenient place off the TV screen are simply part of the calculus of peace through war — and so-oo much better than those, well, idealogues.
And, for the last time, libertarianism is NOT an ideology; it’s not an ‘ism’ at all, though it might — for want of a better word — sound like it….the whole approach is actually anti-ideological; it’s axiomatic. It’s “Hands Off.” Yes — that’s what it is. It’s we the people saying “Hands Off” in no uncertain terms to everyone who wants to “handle us.”