Liberty Maven

Oh yes. Doug Wead is now officially calling for Ron Paul to enter the race for 2012 in his own eloquent way. Doug Wead’s speech at the Rally for the Republic was one of my favorites. This persuasive article sums up all of my hopes and dreams for Ron Paul 2012.

Ron Paul is certainly his own man, but if he were to read this I don’t see how he could not be moved to enter the 2012 fray and do it soon, perhaps even before Obama is sworn in. Here is an excerpt:

Sure, he has to be sensitive to sacrificing principle to win when that is the very reason people support him and the very reason they are angry at Democrats and Republicans. But the fact is that Ron Paul has lifted the whole, aging, stifling, outdated Neanderthal right wing out of the ditch and up onto dry ground and hitched it to a populist, neo-libertine wagon train. And he has done all of this single handedly, on his broad generous, courageous shoulders. And he has done it without breaking the China.

Oh, there is much, much more. He has woven a slender thread through the crimson cloth of Evangelical Christians and the pink cloth of Gay America, making one garment out of a people who have decided that they never really wanted or needed power, just the guarantee that government would stay out of their lives and not intrude. Who would have thought that this was politically possible?

He has gathered the hurt and wounded families of America who have suffered the extremes of our glorious “War on Crime,” which has become almost Soviet in its unintended consequences.

It is an amazingly diverse and complicated political fabric, with great demographic possibilities.

Still, the question remains, what did it all accomplish? Were the national debates the high watermark? What happened to our new Paulista congressmen and school board members and the remaking of the GOP?

The political reality is this, just as Ron Paul accepted the fact that he had to run in a two party system, he now must accept the fact that he cannot oversee the remaking of the GOP as a coach on the sidelines. Surely the lesson of 2008 made that clear. He has to get in the game. He has to play quarterback. He has to run for president. Again.

Read the entire wonderful can’t miss article here.

(cuing RBurnett in 3-2-1…)

Dave Weigel at Reason magazine sat down with Bob Barr for a kind of exit interview for his failed bid to become the first Libertarian President of the United States. The Ron Paul phenomenon is discussed openly except for one particular answer about access to fund raising lists.

reason: What did matter? Campaign funds? At the convention, Russ Verney told me that he hoped to raise $30 million, and the campaign eventually raised about $1.2 million.

Barr: If certain things had happened that we expected to happen early on, like gaining access to certain lists very quickly, I think we could have gotten there. But those lists turned out to be not available, unfortunately, and that prevented us early to turn over and over again into significant fundraising. We didn’t get that seed money early on that we anticipated. We realistically anticipated it. We didn’t sit around say ‘it would be nice to have all that money.’”

reason: Was one of these Ron Paul’s fundraising list?

Barr: All I can say is that it appeared very realistic that we would have a list that let us raise a large amount of seed money that we could build on. And that didn’t happen.

Read the full interview

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “Today’s political candidates are proposing a new fiscal spending stimulus, when what we really need is a “deregulatory stimulus.” We need to roll back the regulatory state and free up the wealth-creating sector. We cannot afford today’s bull market in government regulations.” — Clyde Wayne Crews & Ryan Young

Subject: They could do this instead

The Big Three automakers came to Washington last week, begging for $25 billion in loans.

The Detroit automakers can’t say why they need so much, how they would spend it, or that they won’t be back again, asking for more. After the bungled handling of the banking bailout many lawmakers are reluctant to give the automakers what they want. As of now, there’s no deal, but the danger hasn’t passed.

Proponents of a bailout argue that without it the money will instead be spent on unemployment checks and income tax losses when one or more of the Detroit 3 file for reorganization under the bankruptcy laws. So why not just go ahead and do the bailout?

We need to push our own counter-arguments. Let’s start with a few startling facts . . .

• The U.S. has the second-highest corporate tax rate in in the developed world. We’re losing the world-wide tax-rate competition. With lower corporate taxes we could attract businesses and create jobs.
• U.S. businesses spent $148 billion in 2005 complying with a complicated and inefficient tax code. Meanwhile, revenue from the corporate tax was only $272 billion.
• Some companies spend millions trying to find tax loopholes. This is money that could go to create products, services, and jobs. In 2008, the combined cost of corporate taxes and tax compliance is likely to be about half a trillion dollars.

Why should the politicians . . .

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As Obama continues making public his choices for his cabinet more evidence mounts that his version of change is just more of the same. One of his first announcements was Rahm Emanuel for his Chief of Staff. Many have criticized this decision as a partisan move. Other establishment choices followed, including the recent choice of Timothy Geithner for Treasury Secretary. Welcome to change Obama style. In other words, welcome to Bush 2.0.

Who said the following?

…the economic crisis facing the country is “an opportunity to do things you could not do before. You never want a serious crisis to go to waste…”

These are the scary words from incoming Obama Chief of Staff Emanuel. I thought Democrats were against such talk after the accusations George Bush received after “using” the 9/11 crisis to remove more and more of our civil liberties in the years since. I suppose we will find out what Emmanuel meant by those words in the years to come. I’m worried, aren’t you?

Apparently, those Democrats castigating Bush for politicizing the 9/11 attacks are the fairest of fair weather fans. They cry foul not based on principle but based upon which team is swinging the bat.

Here is Ron Paul’s speech at the Houston End The Fed rally. It is in four parts.

Part 2|Part 3|Part 4

With Barack Obama set to continue to wage the war on terror in a different locale it is important to understand that justification for such actions is no better than Bush’s old justifications for going into Iraq. One of the best arguments against such actions comes from David R. Henderson.

The question arises, “Should Canada’s government remove its military presence from Afghanistan in 2011, remove it earlier, or keep it past 2011?” This question arises for other members of the occupying coalition besides Canada. To answer it, I propose that we step back and consider how good the case was for invading and occupying Afghanistan in the first place.

Henderson continues his argument using hypotheticals that reinforce his overall point quite clearly. This article is a great one to send off to your war on terror loving neo-conservative friends and family.

Read the entire article.

Perhaps it is unflattering, and potentially offensive, to suggest that Ron Paul’s effort to restore the Constitution as the rule of law in America is a jihad, but a jihad it is. He has devoted his life to this cause. While the majority focus on the violent definition of the word, there is also such a thing as a non-violent jihad.

Ron Paul often speaks with praise for those that practice peaceful civil disobedience. He lists Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi among his heroes. Both men were practitioners of non-violent jihad.

From Wikipedia:

In Modern Standard Arabic, jihad is one of the correct terms for a struggle for any cause, violent or not, religious or secular (though كفاح kifāḥ is also used). For instance, Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence is called a “jihad” in Modern Standard Arabic (as well as many other dialects of Arabic)

Ron Paul, thanks mostly to the media, has earned the “extreme” label. Indeed some even transformed the word “libertarian”, as applied to Ron Paul, into a snarling invective. American politics has devolved into something akin to professional wrestling: numb skulls blustering into microphones followed by false maneuvers that excite zealots, but leave thinking people incredulous at the lunacy of it all.

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As a teacher for 25 yeas in the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), I find myself increasingly isolated in defending public education to my conservative and even liberal friends.  Unlike many of them, I continue to appreciate the fact that public schools in the U.S. are already in place, at a huge investment, and that they help millions of children, many more than they hurt; I must say, however, that as the years have passed, government, with the help of teachers unions, has made it increasingly difficult for me to face my critical friends, because what’s good about American education in recent years has been in spite of  government, not because of it.  From the U.S. Department of Education to state boards and even to many local boards and districts, teachers face dictums from imaginative dilettantes who are never asked to be responsible for their actions.  A brief history of my career will make the problem clear.

My first assignment as a new teacher was in South Los Angeles, in what was then a predominantly black neighborhood.  The school population was entirely low income and thus eligible for substantial Title I money, designated for schools with at least 40% low income population under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.  So much Title I money flowed into the school that we had a designated office just to manage it.  The school was filled with hundreds of brand new computers in fully staffed labs.  Music and art programs abounded.  All classrooms were air-conditioned years before any schools in the much hotter but largely affluent San Fernando Valley.  It would be mean spirited indeed for me to begrudge the children at my school any of these benefits, and I did not.  What I did notice, however, was that test scores at the school had not risen at all over the years of federal largess.   It appeared that money, by itself, was not sufficient to help these children.  It took me a few more years to learn what was missing.

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Lew Rockwell sat down with Peter Schiff yesterday to discuss our current financial mess. They first talk about the current “deflation” and how it will lead to inflation at some point. Schiff goes on to explain what he sees for us in the coming years. Surprise! His outlook is far from good.

The discussion is both educational and dire.

Listen to the Lew Rockwell Show with Peter Schiff here.

On November 10, 1977, Friedrich A. Hayek gave a lecture at the Gold and Monetary Conference in New Orleans in which he described how a currency based on the gold standard functions.  Basically he says that “the gold standard is a partly effective mechanism to make governments do what they ought to do in their control of money.“  Then, he goes on to describe how a truly free-market monetary system could work, which is described more fully in his book Denationalization of Money.

I do believe that if today all the legal obstacles were removed which prevent such an issue of private money under distinct names, in the first instance indeed, as all of you would expect, people would from their own experience be led to rush for the only thing they know and understand, and start using gold. But this very fact would after a while make it very doubtful whether gold was for the purpose of money really a good standard. It would turn out to be a very good investment, for the reason that because of the increased demand for gold the value of gold would go up; but that very fact would make it very unsuitable as money. You do not want to incur debts in terms of a unit which constantly goes up in value as it would in this case, so people would begin to look for another kind of money: if they were free to choose the money, in terms of which they kept their books, made their calculations, incurred debts or lent money, they would prefer a standard which remains stable in purchasing power.

Interesting stuff.  Read the whole lecture here.