Liberty Maven

We interviewed Rand Paul the first time back when he was trailing Trey Grayson in the Kentucky GOP primary by 11 percentage points according to polls at the time. As everyone now knows he ended up winning the primary and the first money bomb (or blast) is scheduled for tomorrow (June 28th).

Dr. Paul was kind enough to take time out of his insane campaign schedule to answer some questions for us. Check out Rand Paul’s second interview with Liberty Maven below.

And don’t forget to participate by donating during the money bomb!

Donate at RandPaul2010.com now.

LM:  Immediately following your landslide victory over Trey Grayson in the primary, the left-leaning media began attacking you and the attacks have not eased up. Thinking back, prior to your primary victory you probably anticipated being attacked from the left, but did you believe the attacks would be so unrelenting and national in scope as they have turned out to be? Do you fault yourself for inviting the initial attacks a bit, by agreeing to go on Rachel Maddow’s show the day after your victory?

Rand Paul: Our election night victory was spectacular. We won by 24 points. Over 500 people gathered for our victory. We had satellite TV trucks from every network and did 15 national interviews the next day. But it didn’t take long for the media to decide that they were going to be less than neutral after our victory. Since then it has been relentless attacks from the left-wing media in Kentucky and the left-wing media nationally. I joke with people that it was like Dickens wrote in the Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But the good news is that the polls still show us with a double digit lead, despite all of their attacks. I think the mood of the country is for reigning in big government, for controlling the deficit, and for bringing attention back to a government that should be restrained by the Constitution.

It’s always easy to look backwards and say I could have, or should have done one thing or another. In retrospect, going on a Left-leaning network that apparently had an agenda since they had been discussing it all afternoon and misconstruing my position was probably not a good idea.

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Is there no end to what the President can do — or, rather, what progressives think he should do?

According to Washington historian Doug Brinkley, in an interview with Anderson Cooper, there are plans to force BP to pay for the redirection of the Mississippi River as part of a large Gulf Recovery Act.  See the interview here:

Who knows if there is any validity to it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they attempt it. The Obama administration is likely to do whatever it takes to appear “on top” of the situation.

by Neeraj Chaudhary, Investment Consultant, Euro Pacific Capital

It’s starting to look like Chinese labor has had enough. Led by workers at the Honda Motors plant in Zhangshan, and perhaps spurred by the suicides of ten workers this year at Foxconn Technology (a supplier to high technology companies such as Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard), Chinese factory workers and other laborers across the country are going on strike. In so doing, these workers are defying the orders of their government-run unions and risking dismissal by their employers. I believe that this monumental step in the development of China’s economy will result in a positive outcome. From an international perspective, these strikes may do more than improve working conditions in Chinese factories; they may, in fact, force a currency reform (long-delayed by the Chinese Communist Party) that will have serious implications for the global economy.

Since at least 2001, when China acceded to the World Trade Organization and accelerated its dramatic export-led growth, American businesses and workers have complained bitterly that Chinese manufacturers enjoy an unfair advantage by virtue of the PRC’s currency manipulation. The argument – which Americans also alleged against the Japanese in the 1970s and ’80s – is that by inflating its currency, the government of China is deliberately keeping the prices of its goods low, thereby taking market share from US businesses and jobs from US workers.

The Economic Policy Institute recently estimated that the United States lost 2.4 million jobs since 2001 to China alone. Economist Peter Morici estimated that the US economy would likely be $1 trillion larger than it is now were it not for our trade deficits with China.

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What if there was a third choice for reality-seekers? Something other than the red pill or the blue pill. What if there was a purple pill? The purple pill is the gateway drug to liberty for those that aren’t quite ready to have an ice-cold-water-on-the-face wake-up call.  It is a soothing alarm clock that gradually opens eyes to the truth. Rand Paul is the purple pill.

He already has his foot in the libertarian door thanks to his father, Ron Paul. This gives him legitimacy and support from many of his father’s more libertarian-minded supporters. Yet he softens what many Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh conservatives would call the crazy edges of his father. Ron Paul is a true red pill. There is no doubt about that.

Rand represents someone conservatives, Republicans, and even neo-conservatives can be comfortable supporting without wounding their own interventionist-minded pride. This becomes a problem for the more steadfast libertarians among the Ron Paul faithful who demand an A+ on the libertarian purity test.

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Declan McCullagh writes at CNET:

A new U.S. Senate bill would grant the president far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of or shut down portions of the Internet.

I wish this surprised me. I wish I didn’t just nod and say, “of course”, when I read this.

It appears that  “national security” ranks right up there with the Constitution’s Commerce Clause as the top two excuses given by the U.S. government to bend you over and forcibly extract freedom from your nether-region.

Apparently, our elected masters aren’t happy with just killing humans in no-win wars. Now they want to be able to “kill” the Internet, whatever that means.

The idea of an Internet “kill switch” that the president could flip is not new. A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and another from senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to “order the disconnection” of certain networks or Web sites.

How can anyone support something like this? Apparently it’s something to “laud” and “commend”.

On Thursday, both senators lauded Lieberman’s bill, which is formally titled the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA. Rockefeller said “I commend” the drafters of the PCNAA. Collins went further, signing up as a co-sponsor and saying at a press conference that “we cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government realizes the importance of protecting our cyber resources.”

I’d much rather our lawmakers laud, commend, and follow the Constitution. You know, that document that they swore an oath to defend, but apparently is now so dangerous that it must come with a warning label.

I hope for a timely mass awakening before the alarm clock sounds signifying the end of freedom. Remember, there is no snooze button on this alarm clock.

When lawmakers think it is perfectly fine to propose liberty-sucking bills such as this isn’t it time to realize that they firmly believe this is their world and we just live in it?

Make no mistake. It is not us and them.

It is us or them.

The strategy is threefold: nullify, repeal, and vote them out.

The following is an educational service of the Downsize DC Foundation.

As we said yesterday, millions of Americans believe . . .

We need the government to regulate business people, otherwise they will run wild, laying waste to the environment, and selling us bad food, bad drugs, and harmful products.

One big reason people believe this is because they attended government schools and were taught about a famous book, “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair’s book supposedly demonstrated that . . .

* Once upon a time, before government regulation, meat packing plants were endangering Americans with poison food
* The motivation for this poisoning was profits.

But here’s what most people don’t know . . .

* “The Jungle” was a novel, not a factual report
* Most of what Sinclair wrote was pure fiction, un-connected to reality

This is your chance to learn the truth.

“The Jungle” was intended to dramatize working conditions, NOT food safety. In fact, Sinclair’s fictional claims about food safety were limited to a mere 12 pages, but these pages got all the attention, leading Sinclair to later write, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” (Source: Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967, p. 103.)

Sinclair’s novel caused a sensation, and led to Congressional investigations, even though many politicians were skeptical of Sinclair. For instance, here’s what President Theodore Roosevelt wrote about him in July 1906 (even though he shared Sinclair’s distrust of big business):

“I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.” (Source: letter to William Allen White, July 31, 1906, from “The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt,” 8 vols, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54, vol. 5, p. 340.)

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The following is an educational service of the Downsize DC Foundation.

Millions of people believe . . .

We need the government to regulate business people, otherwise they will run wild, laying waste to the environment, and selling us bad food, bad drugs, and harmful products.

It would be silly to claim that business people never do these things. After all . . .

* Not all people are good.
* Neither are people who are mostly good, consistently good.
* And sometimes goodness has nothing to do with it — sometimes people simply make mistakes, out of ignorance or carelessness.

But politicians and bureaucrats are people too, and subject to these same failings. Do we really solve the problem of human imperfection by giving one small group of imperfect people vast power over all the others?

That last sentence is so important that it bears constant repeating:

Do we really solve the problem of human imperfection by giving one small group of imperfect people vast power over all the others?

To this we might add, “Is there any form of human being more imperfect than the politician?”

To give this question its proper weight, do not think only about politicians you love (if there are any). Do not cherry-pick the evidence. Instead, think also of the politicians you hate. Should such people have great power over other people?

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Wasn’t a major part of the housing bust due to the fact that too many loans were given to those who never really had the means to repay?

In a bid to stem taxpayer losses for bad loans guaranteed by federal housing agencies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn) proposed that borrowers be required to make a 5% down payment in order to qualify. His proposal was rejected 57-42 on a party-line vote because, as Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) explained, “passage of such a requirement would restrict home ownership to only those who can afford it.“

What’s wrong with these people?

Ron Paul introduced the aptly named “Private Option Health Care Act” yesterday. It is meant as a replacement for Obamacare, to:

correct the mistake it made last month by replacing the new health care law with health care measures that give control of health care to individuals, instead of the federal government and politically-influential corporations.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly given the author of the bill, it utilizes the Constitution’s Commerce Clause the way it was intended, to keep commerce between the states “regular”. The clause is invoked to permit health insurance consumers to obtain health care plans across state lines.

This bill also creates a competitive market in heath insurance. It achieves this goal by exercising Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause to allow individuals to purchase health insurance across state lines. The near-monopoly position many health insurers have in many states and the high prices and inefficiencies that result, is a direct result of state laws limiting people’s ability to buy health insurance that meets their needs, instead of a health insurance plan that meets what state legislators, special interests, and health insurance lobbyists think they should have. Ending this ban will create a truly competitive marketplace in health insurance and give insurance companies more incentive to offer quality insurance at affordable prices.

Read Ron Paul’s full introduction of the bill here.

Should the federal government force your local government to unionize its police and firefighting employees? If you oppose this proposed new federal mandate please tell Congress that using our “cut regulations” campaign.

You can copy of borrow from my sample letter . . .

Please do not entangle us in more top-down federal regulation. Specifically, oppose the attempt to attach Amendment 4174 to the latest appropriations bill (H.R. 4899), or to any other bill for that matter.

This amendment would force local governments to unionize their police and firefighting employees. This is a decision that MUST be made by local ELECTED governments, and NOT by the increasingly dictatorial federal government.

I would add to this that the unionization of supposed public servants appears to be a real problem. Government employees seem to be looting the taxpayers they are supposed to serve. For instance, according to the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/27v8jbq

1. Roughly 3,700 retired “public servants” in New York are receiving pensions in excess of $100,000 a year
2. 22 retirees receive more than $200,000 per year, and one receives more than $300,000       Read More »