Whenever any would-be borrower approaches a lender for a loan, he must be prepared to offer collateral, just in case he cannot repay the loan. If he defaults, the lender wants to be able to gain possession of the collateral, and obtain it quickly.
Every government that uses bond sales to maintain its level of expenditures must offer collateral. This collateral is its ability to extract sufficient revenue from those people under its jurisdiction so that it can make interest payments on the bonds.
In the South of 1850, a planter could buy slaves on credit. He pledged the future productivity of his slaves as collateral for the loan. He made sure that he extracted sufficient wealth from the slaves to pay off his loans. He lived well. They didn't.
Why did he borrow? In order to buy more slaves. He used leverage. He built his plantation with borrowed money and the heirs of kidnapped victims. It was good business.
The typical voter thinks of himself as a free man. After all, he has the right to vote. He does not think of himself as a slave. While trade union organizers – a truly hopeless career these days – still use the phrase "wage slave," it never made any sense, either legally or economically. A worker can legally walk away from his employer. A slave cannot.
Washington has borrowed more heavily than any planter ever dared to or could do. Why so much debt? To get more leverage today. What is being leveraged? Promises. Voters trade votes for government promises. This system requires an ever-increasing supply of slaves in order to pay the interest on the debt. Problem: the rate of population growth is slowing. There will not be enough slaves to pay off the debt.
Voters have not thought through the implications of government debt. They do not perceive themselves as collateral for loans. But they are. This is the meaning of the phrase, "the full faith and credit of the United States government."
"FULL FAITH AND CREDIT"
Whenever you hear the phrase, "the full faith and credit of the United States government," an image should pop into your head: a slave overseer in Alabama 1850, whip in hand, sitting on a horse at the edge of a cotton field. The field is filled with slaves, bent down, fingers scarred, dutifully picking cotton. You are not the overseer. You would be lucky to be his horse.
The public buys government promises to pay future money in exchange for present votes. The trouble is, the promises are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. That means the overseer will handle the payment system.
The U.S. government is borrowed short and lent long. To understand this arrangement, you must understand the currency. The Treasury borrows money on average for about five years. (http://bit.ly/USdebtMaturity) It spends this money to meet its obligations. These are political obligations. The politicians bought past votes with promises of future payments. Today's expenditures are these payments, which come due day by day. The government must borrow about $1.3 trillion a year to make good on past promises. This is in addition to $2.5 trillion in tax revenues.
Candidates for office continue to make new promises to voters. The benefits of votes accrue to the elected candidates when they take the oath of office. The costs are postponed. The price of votes keeps rising. The politicians promise to make even larger future payments.
The federal government is borrowed medium-term in the credit markets: a five-year rollover of the debt. It needs cash to pay off past promises. So, it borrows long: promises to pay far more money over the next 75 years: Medicare and Social Security.
This is a Ponzi scheme.
Why do voters consent to this? Because they, like the planter in Alabama in 1850, think this system can go on forever. But there is this crucial difference. The planter never worked in the fields. The voters do.
Voters think of themselves as buying the right to sit on the veranda and sip mint juleps in their old age. Those who got into the Ponzi scheme early did just this. Ida Fuller is the classic example: $24 paid in, $23,000 pulled out. But most voters will spend most of their days in the fields. There will be no mint juleps for them.
"WE OWE IT TO OURSELVES!"
This one became popular in the New Deal in the mid-1930s. It was still popular in the 1950s. We do not hear it as often these days, which is a good thing.
We need a mental image for this, too. There is a crowd in front of a large domed building. There is a much larger crowd behind it. Members in the crowd in front have gray hair, white hair, and no hair. They are all sitting in battery-powered carts. There is a large sign in the middle of the crowd: "Ourselves." The people lined up at the back door also are marked by a large sign: "We." Everyone has his wallet open. The people in front of the building have the money slots facing up. The people at the rear have the money slots facing down. On the domed building, there is a sign: "Promises R Us."
The implications of the credit/debt relationship are not understood well by voters. The system is based on differences in time. Voters see themselves as spending their golden years in one of those battery-powered carts. They believe that if they pay for a ticket to a cart through their working years, they will get their carts. They lend long (working years) in order to receive the fruits of their investment (retirement).
To facilitate this, the federal government issues tens of millions of dated tickets: "Good for a free cart and all that goes with it." But the ticket refers the holder to a web page. There, in obtuse legal language, we find a qualification: "Subject to revision by the issuer." This means that the date on the ticket can be changed. A wheeled walker can be substituted for a cart. A cane can be substituted for a walker. Finally, a card that says "Think Vertically!" can be substituted for a cane.
"I OWE YOU SOMETHING"
An IOU is a promise to pay. The value of this IOU depends on four factors: (1) the solvency of the borrower, (2) the expected future value of the asset promised, (3) the length of time before the IOU comes due, and (4) the current interest rate for a loan of that maturity. Through competition, a price is set by the market.
A government-issued IOU is different from a legal contract between private parties. A debtor government is the enforcer of the loan. It can therefore change the terms of the loan at any time. So, the public must have great trust in the government. Voters must assume that the government's word is law. They are correct: it is law. This is the problem. The law can be changed at any time by a new crop of politicians.
With respect to solvency, the U.S. government is assumed to be the most solvent borrower on earth. The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency for central banks. The U.S. Treasury today pays about one one-hundredth of a percent for 90-day IOUs. There is nothing else like this anywhere. There has been nothing like it ever since the Great Depression.
Yet the level of federal debt is growing rapidly: by $1.3 trillion a year in the on-budget world, and even faster with respect to unfunded Medicare and Social Security debt. The vast majority of economists insist that the United States can and will grow its way out of these obligations. This means that the government's collateral – you and I – will increase our productivity and also consent to have at least 25% of it removed by federal taxes.
Federal solvency will not be maintained for another decade. The numbers point to a default. But investors do not care. Every large nation's solvency looks equally bad or worse. By comparison, the dollar is the one-eyed man in the world of the blind.
The other national governments are running huge deficits that are also unsustainable. Because the politicians of every large nation sell promises for votes, the international exchange rate of the dollar is holding up. The liars in other nations indulge in the same exchange. Their lies are no more believable than ours, and maybe less.
What about the market value of the asset designated by the IOUs? What about the long-term purchasing power of the U.S. dollar? Today, price inflation is low. Lenders assume that they can sell the government's IOUs if this low rate starts up. This assumes that most investors will sell their bonds in time. Sell to whom? At what price?
The dollar will fall in value because the Federal Reserve will inflate. But this question confounds investors: lower compared to what? Gold, euros, yen? Real estate? What? When? How fast? How soon?
The IOUs of the world are based on digital currencies manipulated by central banks. The dollar looks good in the future because of how bad the other currencies look. The Federal Reserve is trusted by investors.
The longer term the IOU, the more opportunities for default, inflation, and new legislation to destroy investors' hopes. This is why 30-year bonds are risky. But with the FED twisting – buying long-term bonds and selling short-term bills – the low long rates on T-bonds can be maintained for years. People say that there will soon be a popped bubble in 30-year T-bonds. This threat always exists. If commercial banks start lending to the public again, thereby converting the FED's more than doubled monetary base into M1, the money multiplier will increase. So will prices. But this has not happened. There are few signs that it will happen in 2012. So, twisting keeps T-bond rates low. Also low are Fannie/Freddie mortgage rates.
So, the U.S. government's IOU-something still has a strong market. It owes U.S. dollars, which are in high demand as the euro moves towards the precipice. The Treasury is in the catbird seat. It can sell its IOUs at historic low rates.
MISSING COLLATERAL
Residents in any nation are collateral for various government's loans. The politicians have pledged a substantial portion of the taxpayers' future productivity.
But there is a problem facing lenders: this collateral votes. Collateral for all loans except loans to a government is inanimate. It can be collected by the lender after the debtor's default. This is not true of human beings. They cannot be transferred to the lenders after the bankruptcy.
This is why it is not possible for a private lender to collect payment from a civil government that decides it will not pay. The lender is left with a dead IOU: "You should have read the fine print, dummy." The fine print says that civil governments are sovereign. They pay their debts at their discretion.
When voters at long last recognize that the promises made by the government have become too expensive to fulfill, voters will send this message to Washington: "Stop payment." It will take several election cycles to elect enough politicians who will be in a position to issue a "stop payment" notice to the Treasury, but it can be done. More than this: it will be done. The escalation of the debt is so rapid as to make "Stop payment" inescapable.
The political battles after the election of 2016 will focus on which departments will receive the "insufficient funds" memo. If the answer is "none," then the political question will be this: "How high a rate of price inflation will the voters tolerate?"
At some point, voters abandon a hyperinflationary currency. They refuse to offer goods and services in exchange for the currency. The currency falls to zero value. This is what Ludwig von Mises called the crack-up boom. After it ends, a new currency is declared by the government.
Note: there have been few such crack-up booms in modern history. Most came after the loss of a major war. Here is a crucial fact: the replacement currencies were fiat currencies. No government ever since 1914 has gone from a crack-up boom to a precious metal currency. Every government has inflated again. The citizens have never insisted on a gold standard of any kind, let alone a gold coin standard in which the government shuts down both the mint and the central bank. Not even Andrew Jackson did this.
This is political reality. We hear of a supposed reform by some national government to introduce some variety of fractionally reserved, non-redeemable gold standard. I pay no attention to these rumors. First, central bankers are not Austrian School economists. Second, without full redeemability in gold coins, any gold standard is a promise-based standard, a pseudo-gold standard. It is a counterfeit. It is just one more political promise. Political promises have gotten us into the present mess. They will not get us out.
Until there is a free market-based gold coin standard and also the abolition of the central bank, voters have not escaped from their status as collateral. For as long as there is a market for government bonds, taxpayers are still collateral. They reserve the right to unilaterally remove themselves from full liability. When it comes to debt, a government is a limited-liability organization. It can default on all or a part of its debt. That is what the U.S. government will do: declare a partial default. The longer the government runs $1.3 trillion annual deficits, the more extensive the default will be.
There is another possibility, rarely discussed. The Federal Reserve can stop buying Federal debt. If the FED ever decides, as it did under Paul Volcker's early years, late 1979 to mid-1982, to cease buying Treasury debt, that would be the equivalent of "Stop payment." Why? Because the FED would cease to supply the money necessary to make the otherwise unfunded payments. The Treasury would have to sell its debt to private citizens or other central banks. That would mean rising interest rates and broken promises.
CONCLUSION
All debt must have some sort of collateral. If voters understood that they are the collateral for the federal government's debt, they might rebel. They might demand a total default. But I don't think this is likely. The vast majority believe that they will be the folks sitting on the veranda sipping mint juleps.
I would like to think that Ron Paul is Moses, calling the slaves to resist. But I recall their reaction.
And the officers of the children of Israel did see that they were in evil case, after it was said, Ye shall not [di]minish ought from your bricks of your daily task. And they met Moses and Aaron, who stood in the way, as they came forth from Pharaoh: And they said unto them, The LORD look upon you, and judge; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us (Exodus 5:19-21).
Saturday
WHAT I THINK........RAFI FARBER
Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I sit here in my living room in Karnei Shomron, Israel, on the 8th night of Chanukah, wondering what other miracles lay in store on January 3rd and in the months ahead. The name Ron Paul is constantly at my fingertips. I’ve typed it in so many times the past month it’s insane. I’m experiencing an excitement I’ve rarely ever felt, and I don’t even live in America anymore. During the last Republican debate I woke myself up at 3am Israel time to watch an 8pm EST live stream on YouTube, with no fatigue whatsoever. I’m on overdrive, and I can’t calm myself.
I’ve only recently figured out what this excitement actually is.
I first got interested in the whole freedom movement when I heard that Ron Paul wanted to end all foreign aid, including to my country, Israel. This seemed like a spectacular idea to me. I hate the idea of taking American tax payer money I don’t need. The only reason we take it, by the way, is not because we need it. It’s that we don’t want to feel alone, and Jews always feel a deep existential isolation and loneliness. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, this is a people that dwells alone, not counted among the Nations,” says Balaam of the People of Israel in Numbers 23:9. We still feel that loneliness. So we take the money. It’s shameful, it’s theft, it’s destructive, it’s morally wrong, and it makes people hate us for tying them into a conflict they have no business trying to solve. I wanted it to end and didn’t trust any Israeli leader to give it up on his own, so I looked up more about Ron Paul.
What I found was fascinating. On the forums, I learned of people who, back in ’08, literally gave their lives short of death to this man. Some poured money into his campaign they could not afford to give, and some even lost their marriages because of their single-minded insane dedication. This shocked me. I couldn’t yet understand it, but after a few days of listening to him, it began to click.
What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.
The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.
Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.
There are two kinds of human beings. Those who want power, and those who want freedom. You can tell which one’s which very easily. Those who want freedom are straight-edged. They are consistent, principled, and you can feel their human soul when they speak to you. There’s a continuum out there of human souls somewhere in spiritual cyberspace, and when you come into contact with one of these souls, you know immediately, because souls are by definition free. You sense sincerity, realness, consistency, a free human being. If you’re a man who seeks freedom and you come into contact with a real human soul, you become instantly addicted and you swallow up anything you can get your hands on. You want to unite immediately, no matter what you disagree on. There are people in the freedom movement that don’t exactly like Israel, especially me being a “settler” and I don’t care. If they want freedom, I sense it and my human drive for individualism suddenly turns into an intense desire to unite into a collective – but a collective of free individuals. It’s a beautiful dialectic, and it doesn’t matter what we agree or disagree on, as long as we agree on freedom.
You get hooked on Ron Paul and you desperately seek more and more, any video you can find from the past, any speeches you missed, anything he said that you haven’t heard yet, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times already in different words. You can’t help yourself. The voracious hunger to be able to use your God-given freedom takes you over entirely. It’s like you suddenly realize you’re human and the Divine Image with which God created you comes alive and catches fire.
But something else happens to you. Once you get hooked on Ron Paul, you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power, and you become instantly disgusted when they start saying words. Before, they were just boring. Now they’re revolting. Listening to Romney or Gingrich or Bush or Obama makes you sick and you don’t know how Ron Paul gets through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that’s so transparent it’s like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you. You can’t bear it.
What’s so maddening about hearing Romney or Gingrich talk is that there’s someone standing there saying things, but there’s no soul in it. These are not free men. These are power men. Not that Romney or Gingrich don’t have souls. They do. They are men just like you and I. But they have practically forfeited their souls to try and attain power, to control others with spin and talking points and contradictory statements like “I want to cut the budget and expand the military!” and they’ll say it with a polished tone and a straight face, just like a soulless recording. Their humanity is so buried under the mountain of lies they have told themselves, that neither they themselves nor you can even sense their souls in the human continuum. The scene of a human body speaking but no soul communicating can drive a free man mad.
The reason that Ron Paul never goes down in the polls is that he’s not “convincing” people in the everyday sense that he’s right on whatever issue. He’s activating human souls, lighting spiritual fires one by one speaking about freedom. Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate. Slowly but surely, Ron Paul activates a few of the individual souls in the mob as they bob from snappy comeback to snappy comeback and he goes up in the polls.
Yet, we cannot expect every man woman and child to understand or get excited about the message of liberty. In fact, most just can’t handle it. Being truly free is as terrifying as it is electrifying. The Bible tells us this very clearly in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses finally accepts the role of deliverer from God, he was assigned to say the following to my great-grandparents the Israelites:
“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am God. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with amazing signs. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.” (Ex. 6:6-7)
And what was my grandparents’ response?
“And Moses told this to the people, but they didn’t listen due to lack of spirit and cruel bondage.” (6:9)
Not everyone can handle the message of freedom. It’s too frightening for some people, and some are just too enslaved. Those are the people that despise Ron Paul, the same types who rebelled against Moses in the desert and attempted to go back to Egypt. Freedom is too much for them and they can’t handle the Divine gift. They want and need someone to control them. Their souls have been too battered by slavery, taxation, and wars.
But nonetheless, God forced my stiff-necked great grandparents to leave Egypt, and as a result I’m here today, preaching freedom once again, fighting not only for America’s freedom, but for my own from America’s influence in my own region.
Vote Ron Paul and let my people go once again! Stop meddling here and stop trying to buy influence by giving me money. Stop trying to be the all powerful Peace Maker and let us work out the problems here on our own! If we think Iran is a threat, we can handle it and we’ll take the consequences. It’s not America’s problem and you can’t afford another war.
Now I understand why people will give everything to this man. Whenever he’s asked the question, “Would you legalize heroin?” Ron Paul answers, “I want to legalize freedom!” Little do these people understand that freedom is a thousand times more addictive than heroin.
American Jews! Wake up! Set your brothers in Israel free! We were the first nation ever to be set free by God, and we brought the concept of liberty to the world when we left Egypt over 3000 years ago. It’s about time we set the example we were chosen to set.
I’ve only recently figured out what this excitement actually is.
I first got interested in the whole freedom movement when I heard that Ron Paul wanted to end all foreign aid, including to my country, Israel. This seemed like a spectacular idea to me. I hate the idea of taking American tax payer money I don’t need. The only reason we take it, by the way, is not because we need it. It’s that we don’t want to feel alone, and Jews always feel a deep existential isolation and loneliness. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, this is a people that dwells alone, not counted among the Nations,” says Balaam of the People of Israel in Numbers 23:9. We still feel that loneliness. So we take the money. It’s shameful, it’s theft, it’s destructive, it’s morally wrong, and it makes people hate us for tying them into a conflict they have no business trying to solve. I wanted it to end and didn’t trust any Israeli leader to give it up on his own, so I looked up more about Ron Paul.
What I found was fascinating. On the forums, I learned of people who, back in ’08, literally gave their lives short of death to this man. Some poured money into his campaign they could not afford to give, and some even lost their marriages because of their single-minded insane dedication. This shocked me. I couldn’t yet understand it, but after a few days of listening to him, it began to click.
What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.
The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.
Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.
There are two kinds of human beings. Those who want power, and those who want freedom. You can tell which one’s which very easily. Those who want freedom are straight-edged. They are consistent, principled, and you can feel their human soul when they speak to you. There’s a continuum out there of human souls somewhere in spiritual cyberspace, and when you come into contact with one of these souls, you know immediately, because souls are by definition free. You sense sincerity, realness, consistency, a free human being. If you’re a man who seeks freedom and you come into contact with a real human soul, you become instantly addicted and you swallow up anything you can get your hands on. You want to unite immediately, no matter what you disagree on. There are people in the freedom movement that don’t exactly like Israel, especially me being a “settler” and I don’t care. If they want freedom, I sense it and my human drive for individualism suddenly turns into an intense desire to unite into a collective – but a collective of free individuals. It’s a beautiful dialectic, and it doesn’t matter what we agree or disagree on, as long as we agree on freedom.
You get hooked on Ron Paul and you desperately seek more and more, any video you can find from the past, any speeches you missed, anything he said that you haven’t heard yet, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times already in different words. You can’t help yourself. The voracious hunger to be able to use your God-given freedom takes you over entirely. It’s like you suddenly realize you’re human and the Divine Image with which God created you comes alive and catches fire.
But something else happens to you. Once you get hooked on Ron Paul, you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power, and you become instantly disgusted when they start saying words. Before, they were just boring. Now they’re revolting. Listening to Romney or Gingrich or Bush or Obama makes you sick and you don’t know how Ron Paul gets through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that’s so transparent it’s like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you. You can’t bear it.
What’s so maddening about hearing Romney or Gingrich talk is that there’s someone standing there saying things, but there’s no soul in it. These are not free men. These are power men. Not that Romney or Gingrich don’t have souls. They do. They are men just like you and I. But they have practically forfeited their souls to try and attain power, to control others with spin and talking points and contradictory statements like “I want to cut the budget and expand the military!” and they’ll say it with a polished tone and a straight face, just like a soulless recording. Their humanity is so buried under the mountain of lies they have told themselves, that neither they themselves nor you can even sense their souls in the human continuum. The scene of a human body speaking but no soul communicating can drive a free man mad.
The reason that Ron Paul never goes down in the polls is that he’s not “convincing” people in the everyday sense that he’s right on whatever issue. He’s activating human souls, lighting spiritual fires one by one speaking about freedom. Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate. Slowly but surely, Ron Paul activates a few of the individual souls in the mob as they bob from snappy comeback to snappy comeback and he goes up in the polls.
Yet, we cannot expect every man woman and child to understand or get excited about the message of liberty. In fact, most just can’t handle it. Being truly free is as terrifying as it is electrifying. The Bible tells us this very clearly in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses finally accepts the role of deliverer from God, he was assigned to say the following to my great-grandparents the Israelites:
“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am God. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with amazing signs. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.” (Ex. 6:6-7)
And what was my grandparents’ response?
“And Moses told this to the people, but they didn’t listen due to lack of spirit and cruel bondage.” (6:9)
Not everyone can handle the message of freedom. It’s too frightening for some people, and some are just too enslaved. Those are the people that despise Ron Paul, the same types who rebelled against Moses in the desert and attempted to go back to Egypt. Freedom is too much for them and they can’t handle the Divine gift. They want and need someone to control them. Their souls have been too battered by slavery, taxation, and wars.
But nonetheless, God forced my stiff-necked great grandparents to leave Egypt, and as a result I’m here today, preaching freedom once again, fighting not only for America’s freedom, but for my own from America’s influence in my own region.
Vote Ron Paul and let my people go once again! Stop meddling here and stop trying to buy influence by giving me money. Stop trying to be the all powerful Peace Maker and let us work out the problems here on our own! If we think Iran is a threat, we can handle it and we’ll take the consequences. It’s not America’s problem and you can’t afford another war.
Now I understand why people will give everything to this man. Whenever he’s asked the question, “Would you legalize heroin?” Ron Paul answers, “I want to legalize freedom!” Little do these people understand that freedom is a thousand times more addictive than heroin.
American Jews! Wake up! Set your brothers in Israel free! We were the first nation ever to be set free by God, and we brought the concept of liberty to the world when we left Egypt over 3000 years ago. It’s about time we set the example we were chosen to set.
WHAT I THINK.......JUSTIN RAIMONDO
“Between government in the republican meaning, that is, constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other, or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.”
Garet Garrett had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a financial writer for the New York Times, a renowned author and journalist of the “roaring Twenties,” an intransigent opponent of the New Deal, and sometime novelist: his career spanned the era of Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, and Truman. In those days his was the voice of mainstream conservatism, albeit of a sort alien to the Newt Gingriches and Charles Krauthammers of this world, and he wrote the above cited words just as the US was embarking on its postwar crusade to save the world from Communism.
He had lived through the previous holy war against the Axis powers, witnessed the demise of the Old America and the rise of the Welfare-Warfare State, and saw – even then – that the country would face ruination if the crusading spirit prevailed over the need for self-preservation. He saw what would happen if we acquired an empire and sought to remake the world in our image. He annoyed his fellow libertarian, the novelist and ideologue Rose Wilder Lane, with his “keening” note of pessimism, which mourned “a world forever lost.” Lane was sure the “world revolution” of freedom was coming, yet in those dark days when the spirit of freedom was seemingly forgotten it looked as if her friend Garrett was right.
Garrett died in 1954, a few years after the publication of his prescient essay: Rose followed him in 1968. Neither got to see the rise of a movement that would take the former’s insights and the latter’s optimism and forge a new path – and a new hope – for lovers of liberty. But I like to think they are still hovering over us, delighted at the success of their intellectual heirs, who today call themselves libertarians. No doubt they are buoyed by the success of presidential candidate Ron Paul, whose thrilling ascent in Iowa and beyond is redeeming Lane’s optimism – and Garrett’s hope – that the choice between empire and our old republic will – finally – be put to a vote of the people.
Paul’s success – he is currently the frontrunner in Iowa, although the “mainstream” media is doing its best to downplay the numbers – has provoked an outburst of hysteria and pure hate from the War Party. Iowa, they declare, will be rendered “irrelevant” if Paul wins: Joe McQuaid, the bombastic editor of the neocon Union-Leader, rants that “Ron Paul is a dangerous man.” How is that? Well, you see, Paul agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t think the Iraq war – which McQuaid and his tabloid supported – was worth the costs in lives and taxpayer dollars. Paul’s anti-interventionist foreign policy views, says the would-be New Hampshire kingmaker, “have been largely overlooked by a news media more interested in the presidential ‘horse race’ than in the candidates’ positions on issues.”
McQuaid is getting on in years, and so probably doesn’t get out much: while he is railing about the media’s inattention to what he considers to be Paul’s mortal sin, virtually every article assessing Paul’s chances since the beginning of the campaign season has harped on precisely this theme. Paul’s appeal is necessarily “limited” due to this: there is a “ceiling” on his support, they aver. As he began to climb in the polls, and this “ceiling” began to lift, the punditocracy declared that Iowa is passé, irrelevant, and an archaic tradition which ought to be ignored from now on by Those In The Know: Gail Collins gave voice to the New York-Washington axis when she sniffed that we ought to “feel free to ignore Iowa,” because “in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl.” That she wouldn’t dare say that if Earl lived in, say, the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – where plenty of Earls reside, to be sure – underscores the bigotries our elites allow themselves, these days. In the world of Ms. Collins, some Earls are more equal than others.
The alleged dissonance between Paul’s anti-interventionism and the frothy-mouthed militarism that has been Republican gospel ever since Robert Taft was cheated out of the GOP presidential nomination by the party’s Wall Street wing – (see Phyllis Schlafly’s classic A Choice, Not An Echo, p. 52, for a recap of the Eastern Establishment coup) – has been the constant theme of these pieces, written by youngsters with no understanding or knowledge of history. The one exception, oddly, was John Nichols in The Nation, a liberal-progressive periodical not known for its devotion to libertarianism, who recalled the history of the Old Right in his perceptive piece about the intellectual roots of the Paul campaign. McQuaid, for his part, neither knows nor cares about the history of the conservative movement he presumes to advise: he gets his “conservative” gospel from other sources. He cites Dorothy Rabinowitz’s darkly threatening characterization of Paul as “the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.”
He left out the part about Paul being a “propagandist for our enemies,” perhaps because it was too much even for him. To the Rabinowitzes of this world – and the Gingriches, the Santorums, the Bachmanns, and the rest of that crazed crew – falls the solemn responsibility of determining the Enemy of the moment. Debate is limited, on this subject, to the question of which Enemy ought to be targeted at this particular point in time. Paul has broken this rule, and allowed that the main enemy – for those who want to limit the power of government, cut $1 trillion dollars from the budget, and emerge out of our economic morass – is in Washington, D.C., not Tehran.
This is literally treason in Rabinowitz’s book, but then again that slim volume only contains several variations on a single theme: anyone who criticizes the regime of war and the constant erosion of our civil liberties is lacking in patriotism, and is quite possibly a “traitor,” a “fifth columnist,” a secret plotter against America and the supporter of its enemies – her enemies. In person – or, at least, on television – her bile is more acidic: here she compares Paul to Hitler and Mussolini while a panel of nattering neocons eggs her on.
One wonders what holds Rabinowitz back from calling for Paul’s arrest as an “enemy combatant” – such restraint goes against the grain of her personal style. It is a style that has long since gone out of style, an echo of the bad old days of the Bush era, when the smoke had hardly cleared from the skies over Manhattan, and the country trembled at the commanding tone of the neocons as they accused war critics – “the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts,” as neocon tool Andrew Sullivan put it – of wanting to “mount a fifth column.”
One of the most expected – and most welcome – developments of the primary campaign so far, from my perspective, has been Sullivan’s withdrawal of his endorsement of Rep. Paul, after pressure from his friends on the Washington-New York cocktail party circuit and outraged emails from his dwindling fan club of gay waiters and sad young women who love only their cats. It’s funny how everyone is howling that Paul must actively denounce and cast out any support from some white supremacist no one has ever heard of, but not a peep about the odiousness of an endorsement from someone who advocated, at the height of the post-9/11 hysteria, the launching of a nuclear attack on Iraq. Oh well, each to their own moral priorities.
Rabinowitz and McQuaid and the rest of the hate-mongers, who come up with a fresh Enemy every time we knock off the old one, or tire of the task, know who their real enemy is – and it isn’t the President of Iran, or the Communist Party of China. It’s those patriotic Americans who believe we ought to be putting the interests of Americans first – and that the empire is an albatross hung around our necks. It’s the one-third of veterans who, according to a recent poll, think the Iraq war wasn’t worth it: it’s the majority of the American people who think we ought to pursue a policy of “minding our own business” abroad – these are the enemies Rabinowitz rails against. Paul is just a stand-in for the great Outer Wilderness that exists – so some say – outside the Washington-New York axis of power. That the great unwashed masses beyond this perimeter don’t share the obsessions tormenting the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Georgetown cocktail party circuit has been of little concern to Dorothy and her friends, the Cowardly Lions of the chickenhawk brigade and the Tin Woodsman a.k.a. Mitt Romney. Along with the scarecrows of the Fox News commentariat, together they’ve been marching down the yellow-brick road to war with Iran with nary an opponent to vilify. Suddenly they find themselves confronted by one who combines all their fears in a single convenient package: anti-interventionism (which they call “isolationism”), anti-elitism, and a well-organized and ideologically coherent movement targeting not only “big government” but the big financial interests, centered in New York, who profit from a system based on government debt.
The American empire – indeed, the entire colossus that is our bloated federal government – could not exist a single day without enslaving the American people to the demon of debt. The obvious beneficiaries [.pdf] are those collecting the interest on that debt – the big financial institutions that buy and sell US government securities. They finance the wars, they profit from government spending, and this is the essence of the real issue of “crony capitalism” some of the lesser Republican presidential candidates babble about without understanding or acknowledging that it isn’t just Solyndra. That’s small change compared to the massive theft being pulled off by the Federal Reserve as it inflates away our savings and enriches the few.
How do we pay for our overseas empire? The same way we pay for our burgeoning welfare state: by monetizing the debt, i.e. degrading the currency by creating “money” out of thin air, and inflating the bubble until it bursts again. This has been Paul’s issue from the beginning, and it’s a powerful one: it has substantially shaped the political discourse, with the other candidates forced to jump on board the anti-Fed bandwagon.
This is the Ron Paul Effect, and it has Dorothy and the War Street Journal running scared. Here is a conservative populist who is challenging their power, and in the very redoubt of neoconservative orthodoxy, the GOP! They who have always lived in fear of the rest of the country – in fear of the day those peasants with pitchforks gather in the streets below and yank them out of their Manhattan towers – are seeing in Paul their worst nightmare come true. That accounts for the spittle on Rabinowitz’s cruel lips as she likens a gentle country doctor to the architect of the Holocaust.
It won’t be long now before we hear baseless charges of “racism” and “extremism” supplemented by an overarching explanation for the Paulian phenomenon that echoes the clichéd “sociological” analysis of the neocons Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, whose characterization of “pseudo-conservatism” as “status resentment” and “the paranoid style” given political form was an all-purpose smear, to be trotted out when liberal commentators were forced into discussions of conservatism. Conservatism, in this view, isn’t an ideology so much as a mental affliction: Hofstadter and Co. were merely popularizing the Marxist theories of Theodore Adorno and the “Frankfurt School,” who opined that opposition to FDR and the New Deal was evidence of a “father complex,” the touchstone of “the authoritarian personality.” Similar psycho-smears are deployed against Paul, who is said by his enemies to be a “crazy old uncle,” “a crazy old codger,” and a “crank,” with neocon professional prig and “movie critic” Michael Medved calling him “Dr. Demento.” This is the level of the “debate” the neocons want: prove you’re not a crazy old Nazi!
The New York Times has collected and codified the “paranoid style” campaign against Paul, essentially stealing (with only minimal attribution) the “analysis” of Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez, who inveighed against Paul’s “right-wing populism” in the pages of Reason magazine. In that essay, they charged that Paul has deliberately cultivated racists and other even less reputable elements while under the influence of his ideological Svengali, the libertarian theorist Murray N. Rothbard. The Times piece tries to link the good Doctor to one self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, who runs a racist web site – coincidentally the same person who was linked by the media to the Republicans in the infamous battle for Broward county, Florida, where disputes over ballot-counting escalated to the level of physical confrontations. Or not so coincidentally, as the case may be. In any case, the Times writer soon turns to the “right-wing populist” theory first floated by the anti-Paul tag team of Weigel and Sanchez, which is supposed to account for the racists and other troglodytes who are supposedly rallying to Paul’s banner. Weigel-Sanchez characterize this populist strategy as based on “racism,” and they present the following timeline:
“During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic.”
What was it about that period – roughly 1989 to 1994 – that stands out in one’s mind? If you’re a foreign policy analyst, or even if you’re just an ordinary educated person, what it recalls is the downing of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet empire. This, and not some mythical appeal to the followers of David Duke, was the impetus for the “right-wing populist” strategy. Weigel and Sanchez cite as their source Rothbard’s 1992 speech to the John Randolph Club, but fail to provide a link – leaving their readers to the interpretive mercies of these two mendacious authors. These two turncoats are liars plain and simple, for the speech, delivered before a group of writers and activists who represented both the libertarian and conservative strains of the emerging “paleo” coalition, was a passionate appeal for unity now that the greatest cause of their previous separation – the cold war – was over. It was a call for the conservative movement to return to its anti-imperialist Old Right roots:
“What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms old and new inevitably get confusing, with a new ‘new’ every few years, so let’s call it the ‘Original’ Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the Leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.
“… The most radical view of the New Deal was that of libertarian essayist and novelist Garet Garrett, an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. His brilliant little pamphlet The Revolution Was, published in 1938, began with these penetrating words – words that would never be fully absorbed by the right:
“’There are those who still think they are holding a pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the night of depression, singing songs to freedom.’
“The revolution was, said Garrett, and therefore nothing less than a counterrevolution is needed to take the country back. Behold, then, not a ‘conservative,’ but a radical right.
“In the late 1930s, there was added to this reaction against the domestic New Deal, a reaction against the foreign policy of the New Deal: the insistent drive toward war in Europe and Asia. Hence, the right wing added a reaction against big government abroad to the attack on big government at home. The one fed on the other. The right wing called for non-intervention in foreign as well as domestic affairs, and denounced FDR’s adoption of Woodrow Wilson’s Global Crusading which had proved so disastrous in World War I. To Wilson-Roosevelt globalism, the Old Right countered with a policy of America First. American foreign policy must neither be based on the interests of a foreign power – such as Great Britain – nor be in the service of such abstract ideals as ‘making the world safe for democracy,’ or waging a ‘war to end all wars,’ both of which would amount, in the prophetic words of Charles A. Beard, to waging ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’”
Racism? “Exploitation of class and race resentment”? There is none of that here: go and see for yourself. David Duke gets a mention in passing. Joe McCarthy is praised for his anti-elitism, populist appeal, and instinct that the main danger to liberty is right here at home, while Rothbard notes ruefully that the militant anti-Communism of the McCarthyites was soon transmuted into a militant foreign policy that nearly plunged us into a nuclear showdown with the Soviets.
With communism out of the way, however, conservatives could unite with libertarians to get rid the last vestiges of leftism: for while the Bolsheviks were defeated, to Rothbard’s great joy, their Menshevik cousins were in power in every Western country, including the United States. At the end, he conjures up a vision of a world eerily descriptive of the hysteria surrounding Paul’s rise in the polls:
“Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.”
This is precisely the task Paul has set for himself, and in the process he is creating – or, rather, recreating – a conservatism that is anti-war, anti-elitist, and anti-corporatist to the bone. This has the neocons fighting mad, but there is very little they can do about it except attach themselves to Romney, the Establishment candidate, and hope the peasants with pitchforks can be smeared out of existence.
We are, indeed, trapped inside a Menshevik nightmare world, in which peace is demonized as “appeasement” and the uniquely American antipathy to the exercise of arbitrary government power is deemed “unpatriotic.” Paul, it seems, has found the trap door out, however, and it looks like many of his fellow citizens are pouring through the breach. – much to the horror of our arrogant elites, who don’t recall authorizing any such movement.
Note the sheer breadth of the Anti-Paul Popular Front, extending all the way from the Beltway “libertarians” of the Weigel-Sanchez-“cosmotarian” school to the Union Leader, the War Street Journal, and the identity-politics lefties who think Rachel Maddow is a real “radical.” At the core of the smear campaign, you’ll note, are our old friends the neocons: the self-proclaimed “homosexual warrior” Jamie Kirchick, who effortlessly wafted from The New Republic to Radio Free Europe and thence to the extremist edges of the neocon movement inhabited by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The latest “rediscovery” of the infamous newsletters was prompted by a rehash published in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, who is still hoping that David Petraeus or some general on a white horse will come riding in to save the GOP from Paul.
This is a classic neocon smear operation, and it has only just begun. Before long, we’ll be treated to endless elaborations of the New York Times-Weigel-Sanchez “analysis,” which will no doubt bring in all the familiar demons that haunt the nightmares of our elites: no smear campaign involving the alleged “evils” of right-wing populism is complete without invoking the specters of Father Coughlin, the German-American Bund, and the allegedly pro-Nazi sympathies of the old American First Committee, the biggest antiwar movement in American history and one that was mercilessly smeared by the left and actively persecuted the US government. And, of course, as Ms. Rabinowitz proved, the inevitable comparison to Hitler – because in Bizarro World, don’t you know, the peacemakers are Hitlerites and the war-makers are the Good Guys.
This campaign will fail: indeed, it is already failing. Nobody is buying it. That’s because the people are tired of our arrogant, self-satisfied elites, who think they can determine the outcome of an election before a single ballot is counted. The more they say “but of course he can’t win,” the more the average person wonders: isn’t that our decision to make?
I can’t help feeling gleeful. The old paradigm that Republicans are invariably – genetically – warmongers is coming apart at the seams, and the War Party is livid. Well, that’s tough, but all good rackets must come to an end, especially when the sheep discover to what extent they’ve been fleeced.
It’s the thrill of a lifetime to see the neocons in such a frothy-mouthed lather: they are calling Paul a hater, but they are the ones exuding hate from every pore. And the people can smell it as it stinks up the political atmosphere, poisoning the election and obscuring the issues they care about. That’s why the haters can’t touch Paul, and won’t touch him with their vicious tactics – although I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if their accusations of “racism” and worse inspire violence against Paul’s followers and possibly even against the candidate himself. Which is why I hope and pray Paul has some good security in place, because he represents the last chance we have to change American foreign policy before we’re all dragged down by the impending collapse of the American empire.
Garet Garrett had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a financial writer for the New York Times, a renowned author and journalist of the “roaring Twenties,” an intransigent opponent of the New Deal, and sometime novelist: his career spanned the era of Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, and Truman. In those days his was the voice of mainstream conservatism, albeit of a sort alien to the Newt Gingriches and Charles Krauthammers of this world, and he wrote the above cited words just as the US was embarking on its postwar crusade to save the world from Communism.
He had lived through the previous holy war against the Axis powers, witnessed the demise of the Old America and the rise of the Welfare-Warfare State, and saw – even then – that the country would face ruination if the crusading spirit prevailed over the need for self-preservation. He saw what would happen if we acquired an empire and sought to remake the world in our image. He annoyed his fellow libertarian, the novelist and ideologue Rose Wilder Lane, with his “keening” note of pessimism, which mourned “a world forever lost.” Lane was sure the “world revolution” of freedom was coming, yet in those dark days when the spirit of freedom was seemingly forgotten it looked as if her friend Garrett was right.
Garrett died in 1954, a few years after the publication of his prescient essay: Rose followed him in 1968. Neither got to see the rise of a movement that would take the former’s insights and the latter’s optimism and forge a new path – and a new hope – for lovers of liberty. But I like to think they are still hovering over us, delighted at the success of their intellectual heirs, who today call themselves libertarians. No doubt they are buoyed by the success of presidential candidate Ron Paul, whose thrilling ascent in Iowa and beyond is redeeming Lane’s optimism – and Garrett’s hope – that the choice between empire and our old republic will – finally – be put to a vote of the people.
Paul’s success – he is currently the frontrunner in Iowa, although the “mainstream” media is doing its best to downplay the numbers – has provoked an outburst of hysteria and pure hate from the War Party. Iowa, they declare, will be rendered “irrelevant” if Paul wins: Joe McQuaid, the bombastic editor of the neocon Union-Leader, rants that “Ron Paul is a dangerous man.” How is that? Well, you see, Paul agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t think the Iraq war – which McQuaid and his tabloid supported – was worth the costs in lives and taxpayer dollars. Paul’s anti-interventionist foreign policy views, says the would-be New Hampshire kingmaker, “have been largely overlooked by a news media more interested in the presidential ‘horse race’ than in the candidates’ positions on issues.”
McQuaid is getting on in years, and so probably doesn’t get out much: while he is railing about the media’s inattention to what he considers to be Paul’s mortal sin, virtually every article assessing Paul’s chances since the beginning of the campaign season has harped on precisely this theme. Paul’s appeal is necessarily “limited” due to this: there is a “ceiling” on his support, they aver. As he began to climb in the polls, and this “ceiling” began to lift, the punditocracy declared that Iowa is passé, irrelevant, and an archaic tradition which ought to be ignored from now on by Those In The Know: Gail Collins gave voice to the New York-Washington axis when she sniffed that we ought to “feel free to ignore Iowa,” because “in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl.” That she wouldn’t dare say that if Earl lived in, say, the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – where plenty of Earls reside, to be sure – underscores the bigotries our elites allow themselves, these days. In the world of Ms. Collins, some Earls are more equal than others.
The alleged dissonance between Paul’s anti-interventionism and the frothy-mouthed militarism that has been Republican gospel ever since Robert Taft was cheated out of the GOP presidential nomination by the party’s Wall Street wing – (see Phyllis Schlafly’s classic A Choice, Not An Echo, p. 52, for a recap of the Eastern Establishment coup) – has been the constant theme of these pieces, written by youngsters with no understanding or knowledge of history. The one exception, oddly, was John Nichols in The Nation, a liberal-progressive periodical not known for its devotion to libertarianism, who recalled the history of the Old Right in his perceptive piece about the intellectual roots of the Paul campaign. McQuaid, for his part, neither knows nor cares about the history of the conservative movement he presumes to advise: he gets his “conservative” gospel from other sources. He cites Dorothy Rabinowitz’s darkly threatening characterization of Paul as “the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.”
He left out the part about Paul being a “propagandist for our enemies,” perhaps because it was too much even for him. To the Rabinowitzes of this world – and the Gingriches, the Santorums, the Bachmanns, and the rest of that crazed crew – falls the solemn responsibility of determining the Enemy of the moment. Debate is limited, on this subject, to the question of which Enemy ought to be targeted at this particular point in time. Paul has broken this rule, and allowed that the main enemy – for those who want to limit the power of government, cut $1 trillion dollars from the budget, and emerge out of our economic morass – is in Washington, D.C., not Tehran.
This is literally treason in Rabinowitz’s book, but then again that slim volume only contains several variations on a single theme: anyone who criticizes the regime of war and the constant erosion of our civil liberties is lacking in patriotism, and is quite possibly a “traitor,” a “fifth columnist,” a secret plotter against America and the supporter of its enemies – her enemies. In person – or, at least, on television – her bile is more acidic: here she compares Paul to Hitler and Mussolini while a panel of nattering neocons eggs her on.
One wonders what holds Rabinowitz back from calling for Paul’s arrest as an “enemy combatant” – such restraint goes against the grain of her personal style. It is a style that has long since gone out of style, an echo of the bad old days of the Bush era, when the smoke had hardly cleared from the skies over Manhattan, and the country trembled at the commanding tone of the neocons as they accused war critics – “the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts,” as neocon tool Andrew Sullivan put it – of wanting to “mount a fifth column.”
One of the most expected – and most welcome – developments of the primary campaign so far, from my perspective, has been Sullivan’s withdrawal of his endorsement of Rep. Paul, after pressure from his friends on the Washington-New York cocktail party circuit and outraged emails from his dwindling fan club of gay waiters and sad young women who love only their cats. It’s funny how everyone is howling that Paul must actively denounce and cast out any support from some white supremacist no one has ever heard of, but not a peep about the odiousness of an endorsement from someone who advocated, at the height of the post-9/11 hysteria, the launching of a nuclear attack on Iraq. Oh well, each to their own moral priorities.
Rabinowitz and McQuaid and the rest of the hate-mongers, who come up with a fresh Enemy every time we knock off the old one, or tire of the task, know who their real enemy is – and it isn’t the President of Iran, or the Communist Party of China. It’s those patriotic Americans who believe we ought to be putting the interests of Americans first – and that the empire is an albatross hung around our necks. It’s the one-third of veterans who, according to a recent poll, think the Iraq war wasn’t worth it: it’s the majority of the American people who think we ought to pursue a policy of “minding our own business” abroad – these are the enemies Rabinowitz rails against. Paul is just a stand-in for the great Outer Wilderness that exists – so some say – outside the Washington-New York axis of power. That the great unwashed masses beyond this perimeter don’t share the obsessions tormenting the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Georgetown cocktail party circuit has been of little concern to Dorothy and her friends, the Cowardly Lions of the chickenhawk brigade and the Tin Woodsman a.k.a. Mitt Romney. Along with the scarecrows of the Fox News commentariat, together they’ve been marching down the yellow-brick road to war with Iran with nary an opponent to vilify. Suddenly they find themselves confronted by one who combines all their fears in a single convenient package: anti-interventionism (which they call “isolationism”), anti-elitism, and a well-organized and ideologically coherent movement targeting not only “big government” but the big financial interests, centered in New York, who profit from a system based on government debt.
The American empire – indeed, the entire colossus that is our bloated federal government – could not exist a single day without enslaving the American people to the demon of debt. The obvious beneficiaries [.pdf] are those collecting the interest on that debt – the big financial institutions that buy and sell US government securities. They finance the wars, they profit from government spending, and this is the essence of the real issue of “crony capitalism” some of the lesser Republican presidential candidates babble about without understanding or acknowledging that it isn’t just Solyndra. That’s small change compared to the massive theft being pulled off by the Federal Reserve as it inflates away our savings and enriches the few.
How do we pay for our overseas empire? The same way we pay for our burgeoning welfare state: by monetizing the debt, i.e. degrading the currency by creating “money” out of thin air, and inflating the bubble until it bursts again. This has been Paul’s issue from the beginning, and it’s a powerful one: it has substantially shaped the political discourse, with the other candidates forced to jump on board the anti-Fed bandwagon.
This is the Ron Paul Effect, and it has Dorothy and the War Street Journal running scared. Here is a conservative populist who is challenging their power, and in the very redoubt of neoconservative orthodoxy, the GOP! They who have always lived in fear of the rest of the country – in fear of the day those peasants with pitchforks gather in the streets below and yank them out of their Manhattan towers – are seeing in Paul their worst nightmare come true. That accounts for the spittle on Rabinowitz’s cruel lips as she likens a gentle country doctor to the architect of the Holocaust.
It won’t be long now before we hear baseless charges of “racism” and “extremism” supplemented by an overarching explanation for the Paulian phenomenon that echoes the clichéd “sociological” analysis of the neocons Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, whose characterization of “pseudo-conservatism” as “status resentment” and “the paranoid style” given political form was an all-purpose smear, to be trotted out when liberal commentators were forced into discussions of conservatism. Conservatism, in this view, isn’t an ideology so much as a mental affliction: Hofstadter and Co. were merely popularizing the Marxist theories of Theodore Adorno and the “Frankfurt School,” who opined that opposition to FDR and the New Deal was evidence of a “father complex,” the touchstone of “the authoritarian personality.” Similar psycho-smears are deployed against Paul, who is said by his enemies to be a “crazy old uncle,” “a crazy old codger,” and a “crank,” with neocon professional prig and “movie critic” Michael Medved calling him “Dr. Demento.” This is the level of the “debate” the neocons want: prove you’re not a crazy old Nazi!
The New York Times has collected and codified the “paranoid style” campaign against Paul, essentially stealing (with only minimal attribution) the “analysis” of Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez, who inveighed against Paul’s “right-wing populism” in the pages of Reason magazine. In that essay, they charged that Paul has deliberately cultivated racists and other even less reputable elements while under the influence of his ideological Svengali, the libertarian theorist Murray N. Rothbard. The Times piece tries to link the good Doctor to one self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, who runs a racist web site – coincidentally the same person who was linked by the media to the Republicans in the infamous battle for Broward county, Florida, where disputes over ballot-counting escalated to the level of physical confrontations. Or not so coincidentally, as the case may be. In any case, the Times writer soon turns to the “right-wing populist” theory first floated by the anti-Paul tag team of Weigel and Sanchez, which is supposed to account for the racists and other troglodytes who are supposedly rallying to Paul’s banner. Weigel-Sanchez characterize this populist strategy as based on “racism,” and they present the following timeline:
“During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic.”
What was it about that period – roughly 1989 to 1994 – that stands out in one’s mind? If you’re a foreign policy analyst, or even if you’re just an ordinary educated person, what it recalls is the downing of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet empire. This, and not some mythical appeal to the followers of David Duke, was the impetus for the “right-wing populist” strategy. Weigel and Sanchez cite as their source Rothbard’s 1992 speech to the John Randolph Club, but fail to provide a link – leaving their readers to the interpretive mercies of these two mendacious authors. These two turncoats are liars plain and simple, for the speech, delivered before a group of writers and activists who represented both the libertarian and conservative strains of the emerging “paleo” coalition, was a passionate appeal for unity now that the greatest cause of their previous separation – the cold war – was over. It was a call for the conservative movement to return to its anti-imperialist Old Right roots:
“What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms old and new inevitably get confusing, with a new ‘new’ every few years, so let’s call it the ‘Original’ Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the Leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.
“… The most radical view of the New Deal was that of libertarian essayist and novelist Garet Garrett, an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. His brilliant little pamphlet The Revolution Was, published in 1938, began with these penetrating words – words that would never be fully absorbed by the right:
“’There are those who still think they are holding a pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the night of depression, singing songs to freedom.’
“The revolution was, said Garrett, and therefore nothing less than a counterrevolution is needed to take the country back. Behold, then, not a ‘conservative,’ but a radical right.
“In the late 1930s, there was added to this reaction against the domestic New Deal, a reaction against the foreign policy of the New Deal: the insistent drive toward war in Europe and Asia. Hence, the right wing added a reaction against big government abroad to the attack on big government at home. The one fed on the other. The right wing called for non-intervention in foreign as well as domestic affairs, and denounced FDR’s adoption of Woodrow Wilson’s Global Crusading which had proved so disastrous in World War I. To Wilson-Roosevelt globalism, the Old Right countered with a policy of America First. American foreign policy must neither be based on the interests of a foreign power – such as Great Britain – nor be in the service of such abstract ideals as ‘making the world safe for democracy,’ or waging a ‘war to end all wars,’ both of which would amount, in the prophetic words of Charles A. Beard, to waging ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’”
Racism? “Exploitation of class and race resentment”? There is none of that here: go and see for yourself. David Duke gets a mention in passing. Joe McCarthy is praised for his anti-elitism, populist appeal, and instinct that the main danger to liberty is right here at home, while Rothbard notes ruefully that the militant anti-Communism of the McCarthyites was soon transmuted into a militant foreign policy that nearly plunged us into a nuclear showdown with the Soviets.
With communism out of the way, however, conservatives could unite with libertarians to get rid the last vestiges of leftism: for while the Bolsheviks were defeated, to Rothbard’s great joy, their Menshevik cousins were in power in every Western country, including the United States. At the end, he conjures up a vision of a world eerily descriptive of the hysteria surrounding Paul’s rise in the polls:
“Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.”
This is precisely the task Paul has set for himself, and in the process he is creating – or, rather, recreating – a conservatism that is anti-war, anti-elitist, and anti-corporatist to the bone. This has the neocons fighting mad, but there is very little they can do about it except attach themselves to Romney, the Establishment candidate, and hope the peasants with pitchforks can be smeared out of existence.
We are, indeed, trapped inside a Menshevik nightmare world, in which peace is demonized as “appeasement” and the uniquely American antipathy to the exercise of arbitrary government power is deemed “unpatriotic.” Paul, it seems, has found the trap door out, however, and it looks like many of his fellow citizens are pouring through the breach. – much to the horror of our arrogant elites, who don’t recall authorizing any such movement.
Note the sheer breadth of the Anti-Paul Popular Front, extending all the way from the Beltway “libertarians” of the Weigel-Sanchez-“cosmotarian” school to the Union Leader, the War Street Journal, and the identity-politics lefties who think Rachel Maddow is a real “radical.” At the core of the smear campaign, you’ll note, are our old friends the neocons: the self-proclaimed “homosexual warrior” Jamie Kirchick, who effortlessly wafted from The New Republic to Radio Free Europe and thence to the extremist edges of the neocon movement inhabited by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The latest “rediscovery” of the infamous newsletters was prompted by a rehash published in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, who is still hoping that David Petraeus or some general on a white horse will come riding in to save the GOP from Paul.
This is a classic neocon smear operation, and it has only just begun. Before long, we’ll be treated to endless elaborations of the New York Times-Weigel-Sanchez “analysis,” which will no doubt bring in all the familiar demons that haunt the nightmares of our elites: no smear campaign involving the alleged “evils” of right-wing populism is complete without invoking the specters of Father Coughlin, the German-American Bund, and the allegedly pro-Nazi sympathies of the old American First Committee, the biggest antiwar movement in American history and one that was mercilessly smeared by the left and actively persecuted the US government. And, of course, as Ms. Rabinowitz proved, the inevitable comparison to Hitler – because in Bizarro World, don’t you know, the peacemakers are Hitlerites and the war-makers are the Good Guys.
This campaign will fail: indeed, it is already failing. Nobody is buying it. That’s because the people are tired of our arrogant, self-satisfied elites, who think they can determine the outcome of an election before a single ballot is counted. The more they say “but of course he can’t win,” the more the average person wonders: isn’t that our decision to make?
I can’t help feeling gleeful. The old paradigm that Republicans are invariably – genetically – warmongers is coming apart at the seams, and the War Party is livid. Well, that’s tough, but all good rackets must come to an end, especially when the sheep discover to what extent they’ve been fleeced.
It’s the thrill of a lifetime to see the neocons in such a frothy-mouthed lather: they are calling Paul a hater, but they are the ones exuding hate from every pore. And the people can smell it as it stinks up the political atmosphere, poisoning the election and obscuring the issues they care about. That’s why the haters can’t touch Paul, and won’t touch him with their vicious tactics – although I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if their accusations of “racism” and worse inspire violence against Paul’s followers and possibly even against the candidate himself. Which is why I hope and pray Paul has some good security in place, because he represents the last chance we have to change American foreign policy before we’re all dragged down by the impending collapse of the American empire.
WHAT I THINK......KURT NIMMO
Appearing on Alex Jones’ nationally syndicated radio show today, the former governor of Minnesota and best selling author, Jesse Ventura, emphatically declared his support for Ron Paul’s presidential run.
“Ron Paul has Governor Jesse Ventura’s endorsement without a doubt,” he said. “It’s not even close. Because I want a new president that is going to change the direction of this country. I want a new president that is going to follow the Constitution. I want a new president that is going to believe in states’ rights. I want somebody that will shock the status quo.”
Jesse said Ron Paul is the only candidate that will put an end to the establishment’s wars and foreign adventures.
“It’s a simple as this,” he said. “If people truly are looking for an attempt at change in this country – changing who are and what we will be in the future – then there is only one candidate, and that is congressman Ron Paul. He’s the only candidate that wants to audit the Federal Reserve… he is the only candidate that wants to talk rather than wage war, so I think this will truly be an agenda for the United States of America, an agenda to determine what we stand for. Do we stand for being the most aggressive, war-mongering country in the world who is all set to go to war with Iran, too, or are we going to be a country that stands for peace?”
Jesse said that there has not been a president since John F. Kennedy who worked for peace and opposed the endless war policies of the ruling elite. Ron Paul is the first candidate since Kennedy to oppose the perpetual war agenda, he explained.
He criticized the corporate media for its effort to portray Paul’s foreign policy philosophy as “scary” and said the exact opposite it true – the foreign policy of the establishment and its handpicked candidates is scary. “All we do is go to war – one after another after another – and I’m one of the people being a veteran who says stop it, that’s enough of this,” Ventura said.
If America wants a change in direction, Jesse said, the only choice for president in 2012 is Ron Paul. “He is then only one who says we ought to talk before we shoot.”
Ventura cited as an example the response of the United States to Iran’s announcement that if may block the Strait of Hormuz if the United States and the EU impose a crippling embargo – essentially an act of war – on the country. The U.S. has vowed to respond if Iran blocks the strategic waterway.
He compared the latest actions of the U.S. to an earlier embargo – the oil embargo imposed on Japan by the United States that ultimately resulted in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of the Second World War.
“Ron Paul has Governor Jesse Ventura’s endorsement without a doubt,” he said. “It’s not even close. Because I want a new president that is going to change the direction of this country. I want a new president that is going to follow the Constitution. I want a new president that is going to believe in states’ rights. I want somebody that will shock the status quo.”
Jesse said Ron Paul is the only candidate that will put an end to the establishment’s wars and foreign adventures.
“It’s a simple as this,” he said. “If people truly are looking for an attempt at change in this country – changing who are and what we will be in the future – then there is only one candidate, and that is congressman Ron Paul. He’s the only candidate that wants to audit the Federal Reserve… he is the only candidate that wants to talk rather than wage war, so I think this will truly be an agenda for the United States of America, an agenda to determine what we stand for. Do we stand for being the most aggressive, war-mongering country in the world who is all set to go to war with Iran, too, or are we going to be a country that stands for peace?”
Jesse said that there has not been a president since John F. Kennedy who worked for peace and opposed the endless war policies of the ruling elite. Ron Paul is the first candidate since Kennedy to oppose the perpetual war agenda, he explained.
He criticized the corporate media for its effort to portray Paul’s foreign policy philosophy as “scary” and said the exact opposite it true – the foreign policy of the establishment and its handpicked candidates is scary. “All we do is go to war – one after another after another – and I’m one of the people being a veteran who says stop it, that’s enough of this,” Ventura said.
If America wants a change in direction, Jesse said, the only choice for president in 2012 is Ron Paul. “He is then only one who says we ought to talk before we shoot.”
Ventura cited as an example the response of the United States to Iran’s announcement that if may block the Strait of Hormuz if the United States and the EU impose a crippling embargo – essentially an act of war – on the country. The U.S. has vowed to respond if Iran blocks the strategic waterway.
He compared the latest actions of the U.S. to an earlier embargo – the oil embargo imposed on Japan by the United States that ultimately resulted in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of the Second World War.
WHAT I THINK.......MICHAEL SCHEUER
Two recent experiences underlined for me what Iowans will vote for next week in the field of foreign policy if they do not vote for Dr. Ron Paul. On Christmas day, I heard Chris Wallace’s program on FOX. He had a guest – Mr. Charles Lane – who made the false and scurrilous claim that Dr. Paul’s foreign policy was the same as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s America-hating policy, a doctrine that appealed to Barack Obama for more than twenty years and which the president and his party are now implementing. Following this imbecilic assertion of Mr. Lane to its logical conclusion, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines also must be ardent devotees of Rev Wright’s anti-Americanism as they donate many times more money to Dr. Paul than to all the other Republican candidates combined.
Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon’s new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington’s Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington’s clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain’s interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues’ ignorance of Washington’s ideas and U.S. history generally.
Based on these two experiences, let us look at what Iowans not voting for Ron Paul will help to inflict on an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.
1.) A foreign policy that will complete U.S. bankruptcy. While there is a lot of talk about cutting domestic spending to bring the federal debt under control, it is obvious that neither party is willing to make substantial cuts in that area. Indeed, both are counting on drastic cuts in defense spending to help reduce the federal debt. While they may agree on and even make defense-spending cuts, any such reductions will be short-lived and then restored to much more than current levels. Obama and any Republican save Dr. Paul will continue to intervene in the Muslim world and so will motivate more Muslims to fight us. A third-grader could tell you that you cannot cut defense spending when Washington’s unrelenting interventionism is cultivating new enemies who are intent on attacking U.S. citizens and interests. If you are being attacked, our third grader would patiently explain, you have to spend whatever it takes to defend yourself. And there is no doubt that we and our vital interests are going to keep being attacked by Islamists as long as we continue to intervene in their world.
2.) Obama’s return or the election of any Republican but Dr. Paul means the continuation of the State Department’s not-so-secret computer/Facebook/Twitter proselytizing campaign to incite people to overthrow their governments in places like Iran, Russia, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. [NB: Three offices of Mrs. Clinton’s elitist democracy/feminism crusade in Cairo were raided and shut by Egyptian authorities on 28 December 2011 for intervening in Egypt’s domestic affairs.] This mindless promotion of anarchy alienates the governments targeted and will motivate them to harm the United States in some manner. Of no concern to Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators McCain and Graham, of course, are the thousands of young and naive people who will die at the hands of the regimes they are instigated to overthrow by the democracy-pushing federal bureaucrats and their elitist political masters, all of whom are safe and secure here in North America. Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist policy will allow foreigners to work out their political destiny in their own way and at their own pace; prevent unnecessary additions to America’s growing list of enemies; and save countless young lives.
3.) All the Republican contenders and the Obama administration are whole-hearted believers that the Arab Spring will bring the installation of secular democracy across that region. This has been and still is a nonsense that only adolescent idealists – or deliberate liars – could believe, and one that has been proven fatuous by the fact that Islamists have won every election held since the start of the Arab Spring. Neither the Obamaites nor the Republicans will admit they are wrong on this issue and they will pump billions of dollars in foreign aid into the Arab-Spring countries in a feckless, Muslim-alienating effort to build secular democracies and install the crazed feminism of Mrs. Clinton. Such aid not only will be wasted, but it surely will cause more Muslims take up arms against America. Indeed, the continuation of this bipartisan cultural/feminist war on Islam is likely to start the clash of civilizations Professor Huntington predicted.
4.) Electing anyone but Ron Paul will further increase the already strong chances of widespread Islamist-conducted violence inside the United States. Any other Republican candidate or a reelected Obama will keep lying to Americans by claiming that we are being attacked because of our liberties, gender-equality laws, and elections rather than because of Washington’s constant intervention in the Islamic world. This now two-decade-old lie – which is abetted by most of the media – has hidden from Americans the fact that all of the would-be Islamist attackers who have been captured in this country were motivated by the invasion of Iraq, U.S. support for Israel, or some other U.S. government action in the Muslim world. As Dr. Paul has explained, our Islamist enemies are motivated by Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy, and as long as that foreign policy does not change the number of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males willing to attack their fellow citizens will keep increasing. For those who doubt this reality, a quick look at the recently adopted Defense Appropriations Act will clear their eyes. That Act’s authorization for the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens in the United States is clear evidence that the leaders of both parties know that their foreign policy is going to bring war to America’s streets and towns and that the U.S. military will be called on to fight Islamists militants here at home.
5.) Obama and any Republican candidate, except for Dr. Paul, will slavishly obey the U.S.-citizen-dominated, pro-Israel lobby that bribes and suborns them by getting into a war with Iran. Indeed, Washington, Tel Aviv, and London are already conducting a lethal, covert-action war inside Iran which is killing Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying nuclear-related facilities, as well as trying to goad Tehran into reacting with violence and thereby give the West a casus belli. Such a war would be a financial and military disaster for the United States, and would be watched with glee by Russian and Chinese leaders who – while their countries would lose some trade with Iran during a war – would applaud another U.S. self-inflicted would that further erodes the already failing economy that is the base of American power. Moreover, if U.S. political leaders would not permit the U.S. military to defeat Afghan and Iraqi mujahedin armed with Korean War-vintage weapons, they surely will not allow the military to defeat a much better armed nation-state like Iran. Thus we would have yet another politically imposed defeat for the U.S. military. More painful for Americans will be the Iran-sponsored attacks that will occur in the United States if Washington and/or Israel launch a first strike on Iran. The only serious threat Iran poses to the United States is the result of more than 35 years of near-criminal bipartisan negligence by the U.S. executive and legislative branches in the fields of border control and domestic security. Both Iran’s military and intelligence services and their Lebanese Hizballah surrogate have created clandestine entry points along our southern border, as well as a large clandestine infrastructure in the continental United States, one which works with similar networks in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Iran is too smart and fearful of U.S. military power to use this apparatus to strike first in North America, but the network clearly is meant to allow Tehran to respond violently here if Iran is attacked by America and/or Israel.
6.) While all of the Republican candidates and Obama talk about their plans to make America energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible, there is no reason to believe any of them. In the past 40 years, the two parties have made virtually no progress toward this goal, unless you count moving up Daylight Savings Time by three weeks as a major gain. Both parties have taken the easy and profitable route: dependence on oil-rich Arab tyrants, a policy that mandates that the U.S. military spends billions each year to defend the Arab Peninsula’s fundamentally anti-U.S. police states. Only Dr. Paul could be counted on to allow the unfettered development of all domestic energy resources to promote energy self-sufficiency and allow the gradual abandonment of our mujahedin- motivating exploitation of Muslim oil. But even Dr. Paul cannot prevent the United States from fighting an oil war that the Republicans and Democrats have fixed on the national agenda, one that America will wage in the Niger Delta region – from which we will soon get 20-25 percent of our crude – because of the Islamist insurgency that is gathering steam in Nigeria and threatening the oil-rich Delta region’s stability.
Notwithstanding the damnable lies about Dr. Paul’s foreign policy constantly proclaimed by his fellow Republican candidates, leading pro-Israel/pro-intervention U.S.-citizens and their journalist friends, and most of the media, only the gentleman from Texas speaks for the Founder’s non-interventionist vision of America’s role in world affairs and for plain common sense. In the Founders’ non-interventionist design for U.S. foreign policy that is championed by Dr. Paul, Iowans will find a proven road to the maintenance of America’s sovereignty, independence, peace, and prosperity. In the realm of common sense, Dr. Paul beats his fellow candidates, the Obamaites, and the media hands down. Dr. Paul challenges the interventionists in both parties on their plans for spreading secular democracy – and causing wars thereby – on historical grounds that are irrefutable because they are just good commonsense. We, the British, the Australians, and the Canadians have been building our republics/democracies since Magna Charta in 1215 – that is for nearly 800 years – and we are not yet quite perfect. If Iowans and all Americans truly think about what Dr. Paul is saying – and not what the interventionists say he is saying – they would respond favorably to the Texan’s logical conclusion that what we have not fully accomplished in eight centuries cannot possibly be attained in Egypt, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Muslim world in 6 weeks, 6 months, or six years, not least because none of those places separate church from state. Dr. Paul’s precise use of history and commonsense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause that is impossibly lost from the start and one that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.
In the words of Dr. Paul’s Republican opponents, the Obamaites, and most of the media, on the other hand, Iowans ought to easily be able to hear the elitist, racist, and war-causing Wilsonian doctrine of intervening abroad to impose democracy and secular social beliefs on foreigners at the point of bayonets. Indeed, the national-security policy advocated by Dr. Paul’s opponents and critics boils down to the clear and absurd argument that: America needs more and more wars – and the dead/maimed military personnel attendant thereto – that are motivated by Washington’s intervention abroad if Americans are to be safe and secure at home.
For Iowans and Americans as a whole, then, the best choice for their children, grandchildren, and country clearly lies in the Founder’s foreign-policy wisdom and Dr. Paul’s sturdy advocacy and promised application thereof.
Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon’s new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington’s Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington’s clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain’s interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues’ ignorance of Washington’s ideas and U.S. history generally.
Based on these two experiences, let us look at what Iowans not voting for Ron Paul will help to inflict on an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.
1.) A foreign policy that will complete U.S. bankruptcy. While there is a lot of talk about cutting domestic spending to bring the federal debt under control, it is obvious that neither party is willing to make substantial cuts in that area. Indeed, both are counting on drastic cuts in defense spending to help reduce the federal debt. While they may agree on and even make defense-spending cuts, any such reductions will be short-lived and then restored to much more than current levels. Obama and any Republican save Dr. Paul will continue to intervene in the Muslim world and so will motivate more Muslims to fight us. A third-grader could tell you that you cannot cut defense spending when Washington’s unrelenting interventionism is cultivating new enemies who are intent on attacking U.S. citizens and interests. If you are being attacked, our third grader would patiently explain, you have to spend whatever it takes to defend yourself. And there is no doubt that we and our vital interests are going to keep being attacked by Islamists as long as we continue to intervene in their world.
2.) Obama’s return or the election of any Republican but Dr. Paul means the continuation of the State Department’s not-so-secret computer/Facebook/Twitter proselytizing campaign to incite people to overthrow their governments in places like Iran, Russia, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. [NB: Three offices of Mrs. Clinton’s elitist democracy/feminism crusade in Cairo were raided and shut by Egyptian authorities on 28 December 2011 for intervening in Egypt’s domestic affairs.] This mindless promotion of anarchy alienates the governments targeted and will motivate them to harm the United States in some manner. Of no concern to Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators McCain and Graham, of course, are the thousands of young and naive people who will die at the hands of the regimes they are instigated to overthrow by the democracy-pushing federal bureaucrats and their elitist political masters, all of whom are safe and secure here in North America. Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist policy will allow foreigners to work out their political destiny in their own way and at their own pace; prevent unnecessary additions to America’s growing list of enemies; and save countless young lives.
3.) All the Republican contenders and the Obama administration are whole-hearted believers that the Arab Spring will bring the installation of secular democracy across that region. This has been and still is a nonsense that only adolescent idealists – or deliberate liars – could believe, and one that has been proven fatuous by the fact that Islamists have won every election held since the start of the Arab Spring. Neither the Obamaites nor the Republicans will admit they are wrong on this issue and they will pump billions of dollars in foreign aid into the Arab-Spring countries in a feckless, Muslim-alienating effort to build secular democracies and install the crazed feminism of Mrs. Clinton. Such aid not only will be wasted, but it surely will cause more Muslims take up arms against America. Indeed, the continuation of this bipartisan cultural/feminist war on Islam is likely to start the clash of civilizations Professor Huntington predicted.
4.) Electing anyone but Ron Paul will further increase the already strong chances of widespread Islamist-conducted violence inside the United States. Any other Republican candidate or a reelected Obama will keep lying to Americans by claiming that we are being attacked because of our liberties, gender-equality laws, and elections rather than because of Washington’s constant intervention in the Islamic world. This now two-decade-old lie – which is abetted by most of the media – has hidden from Americans the fact that all of the would-be Islamist attackers who have been captured in this country were motivated by the invasion of Iraq, U.S. support for Israel, or some other U.S. government action in the Muslim world. As Dr. Paul has explained, our Islamist enemies are motivated by Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy, and as long as that foreign policy does not change the number of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males willing to attack their fellow citizens will keep increasing. For those who doubt this reality, a quick look at the recently adopted Defense Appropriations Act will clear their eyes. That Act’s authorization for the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens in the United States is clear evidence that the leaders of both parties know that their foreign policy is going to bring war to America’s streets and towns and that the U.S. military will be called on to fight Islamists militants here at home.
5.) Obama and any Republican candidate, except for Dr. Paul, will slavishly obey the U.S.-citizen-dominated, pro-Israel lobby that bribes and suborns them by getting into a war with Iran. Indeed, Washington, Tel Aviv, and London are already conducting a lethal, covert-action war inside Iran which is killing Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying nuclear-related facilities, as well as trying to goad Tehran into reacting with violence and thereby give the West a casus belli. Such a war would be a financial and military disaster for the United States, and would be watched with glee by Russian and Chinese leaders who – while their countries would lose some trade with Iran during a war – would applaud another U.S. self-inflicted would that further erodes the already failing economy that is the base of American power. Moreover, if U.S. political leaders would not permit the U.S. military to defeat Afghan and Iraqi mujahedin armed with Korean War-vintage weapons, they surely will not allow the military to defeat a much better armed nation-state like Iran. Thus we would have yet another politically imposed defeat for the U.S. military. More painful for Americans will be the Iran-sponsored attacks that will occur in the United States if Washington and/or Israel launch a first strike on Iran. The only serious threat Iran poses to the United States is the result of more than 35 years of near-criminal bipartisan negligence by the U.S. executive and legislative branches in the fields of border control and domestic security. Both Iran’s military and intelligence services and their Lebanese Hizballah surrogate have created clandestine entry points along our southern border, as well as a large clandestine infrastructure in the continental United States, one which works with similar networks in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Iran is too smart and fearful of U.S. military power to use this apparatus to strike first in North America, but the network clearly is meant to allow Tehran to respond violently here if Iran is attacked by America and/or Israel.
6.) While all of the Republican candidates and Obama talk about their plans to make America energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible, there is no reason to believe any of them. In the past 40 years, the two parties have made virtually no progress toward this goal, unless you count moving up Daylight Savings Time by three weeks as a major gain. Both parties have taken the easy and profitable route: dependence on oil-rich Arab tyrants, a policy that mandates that the U.S. military spends billions each year to defend the Arab Peninsula’s fundamentally anti-U.S. police states. Only Dr. Paul could be counted on to allow the unfettered development of all domestic energy resources to promote energy self-sufficiency and allow the gradual abandonment of our mujahedin- motivating exploitation of Muslim oil. But even Dr. Paul cannot prevent the United States from fighting an oil war that the Republicans and Democrats have fixed on the national agenda, one that America will wage in the Niger Delta region – from which we will soon get 20-25 percent of our crude – because of the Islamist insurgency that is gathering steam in Nigeria and threatening the oil-rich Delta region’s stability.
Notwithstanding the damnable lies about Dr. Paul’s foreign policy constantly proclaimed by his fellow Republican candidates, leading pro-Israel/pro-intervention U.S.-citizens and their journalist friends, and most of the media, only the gentleman from Texas speaks for the Founder’s non-interventionist vision of America’s role in world affairs and for plain common sense. In the Founders’ non-interventionist design for U.S. foreign policy that is championed by Dr. Paul, Iowans will find a proven road to the maintenance of America’s sovereignty, independence, peace, and prosperity. In the realm of common sense, Dr. Paul beats his fellow candidates, the Obamaites, and the media hands down. Dr. Paul challenges the interventionists in both parties on their plans for spreading secular democracy – and causing wars thereby – on historical grounds that are irrefutable because they are just good commonsense. We, the British, the Australians, and the Canadians have been building our republics/democracies since Magna Charta in 1215 – that is for nearly 800 years – and we are not yet quite perfect. If Iowans and all Americans truly think about what Dr. Paul is saying – and not what the interventionists say he is saying – they would respond favorably to the Texan’s logical conclusion that what we have not fully accomplished in eight centuries cannot possibly be attained in Egypt, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Muslim world in 6 weeks, 6 months, or six years, not least because none of those places separate church from state. Dr. Paul’s precise use of history and commonsense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause that is impossibly lost from the start and one that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.
In the words of Dr. Paul’s Republican opponents, the Obamaites, and most of the media, on the other hand, Iowans ought to easily be able to hear the elitist, racist, and war-causing Wilsonian doctrine of intervening abroad to impose democracy and secular social beliefs on foreigners at the point of bayonets. Indeed, the national-security policy advocated by Dr. Paul’s opponents and critics boils down to the clear and absurd argument that: America needs more and more wars – and the dead/maimed military personnel attendant thereto – that are motivated by Washington’s intervention abroad if Americans are to be safe and secure at home.
For Iowans and Americans as a whole, then, the best choice for their children, grandchildren, and country clearly lies in the Founder’s foreign-policy wisdom and Dr. Paul’s sturdy advocacy and promised application thereof.
WHAT I THINK.......GEORGE SMITH
Ron Paul published Gold, Peace, and Prosperity in 1981. What makes his pamphlet especially attractive today is the speed with which it can be consumed. A reader could get through his robust prose during an hour lunch break.
But why would a reader want to do that? Why not read one of Paul’s more recent books instead, even if it couldn’t be read in one sitting?
The answer is, the earlier work provides an excellent foundation for his later writings. It offers a clear, non-technical summary of his views on money and the economy.
Ron Paul has made his mark as an advocate of sound money. As such, he is totally opposed to fiat money and its imposition through the government-supported cartel, the Federal Reserve. It is largely through a hijacked monetary system that government has become a threat to civilization. In this pamphlet, Paul puts it all in perspective with everyday language, as if he’s talking to you – over lunch.
Sound money, he says, is money that is “fully redeemable.” The paper currency people use in transactions is only a substitute for money proper, which traditionally has been gold and silver coin. The adverb “fully” means that every note issued is a claim ticket to a specified weight of gold stored in a bank warehouse.
Why is this arrangement sound? Because it makes the value of money depend on the profitability of mining gold, rather than the “politics of the hour,” as Mises put it. A money that’s sound means the money supply remains relatively stable.
Unsound money is money that bankers and government can inflate virtually without limit. Unsound money equates “monetary policy” with varying degrees of inflation, as determined by a panel of politically-influenced bureaucrats.
Since inflation is indistinguishable in its effects from counterfeiting, the bureaucrats are simply counterfeiters with grandiose titles; their sacred monetary policy is nothing more than “legalized counterfeiting.” Inflation, Paul explains, citing Murray Rothbard, is “new money issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government.”
Blaming Arabs, businessmen, labor unions, or consumers for rising prices doesn't drown out the steady hum of printing presses running 24-hours-a-day, ballooning the money supply, and thereby debasing every dollar previously printed.
Referencing Hans Sennholz, he says:
An increase in the money supply confers no social benefits whatsoever. It merely redistributes income and wealth, disrupts and misguides economic production, and as such constitutes a powerful weapon in a conflict society.
If inflation is so bad, why does it exist? Because it benefits “whoever gets the new money first” – government, bankers, and favored businesses.
A good example is the credit the government created to bail-out the Chrysler Corporation, largely to finance a labor contract that pays the employees twice the average industrial wage. But unions, like businesses, can only persuade government to inflate if the inflation mechanism is in place. A redeemable currency would make this impossible.
Who pays for inflation? The poor and middle classes, and those on fixed incomes. By the time they get the new money – if they get it at all – prices have gone up (or they’ve failed to drop, as they would have without inflation). These groups are cheated by inflation, and eventually are either wiped out through currency depreciation or made dependent on government favors. This pattern has been known for ages, as Paul shows with numerous historical references.
Expansion of the money supply through "spurious paper currency," noted [Andrew] Jackson, "is always attended by a loss to the laboring classes."
"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind," added Daniel Webster, "none has been found more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money."
But if prices rise from an increase in the money supply, wouldn’t the price of labor go up, too? Quoting William Gouge, President Jackson’s Treasury advisor in 1833, Paul writes:
Wages appear to be among the last things that are raised. . . . The working man finds all the articles he uses in his family rising in price, while the money rate of his own wages remains the same.
When Lincoln issued greenbacks to pay for the Civil War, Paul notes, “prices rose 183%, while wages went up only 54%. During the World War I inflation, prices rose 135%, and wages increased only 88%. The same is true today.”
In answer to the claim that the Fed was created to prevent inflation and the periodic panics that erupted in the 19th century, Paul points out that inflation was written into the central bank’s founding charter, in the requirement to provide a more “elastic” currency. With the Federal Reserve Act of 1913,
a 40% gold cover for Federal Reserve notes and 35% for Federal Reserve deposits were required. The fact that it was not 100% showed that the central bankers planned more inflation. . . .
The central bank never set out to protect the integrity of our money. In fact, the Fed set out to destroy it by institutionalizing inflation. The gold coin standard was doomed and today's inflation made inevitable the day the Federal Reserve was created.
A gold coin standard, regulated by the market, acts as a restraint on inflation because it is the money, not the paper issued as a substitute. This is why governments hate gold – they can’t produce it in unlimited quantities. Using a non-redeemable paper currency avoids the risks of raising taxes while allowing politicians to pay for their wars and bureaucracies by running the printing press behind the curtain.
Since a gold standard enables the average person to restrain the government's attempts to inflate, control the economy, run up deficits, and fight senseless wars, the central planners had to eliminate this fundamental American freedom to own gold. This was accomplished with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which outlawed private ownership of gold, prohibited the use of "gold clause" contracts, and abolished the gold coin standard.
Thanks to Paul and others who support sound money, the government in 1974
reversed the unconstitutional 1934 law that barred private ownership of gold. In 1977, gold clause contracts were legalized.
One of my favorite passages in the book is Paul’s succinct comment on the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke wrote a collection of technical essays on the subject and has earned the reputation among his Keynesian colleagues as an expert on the Depression, never mind that he got it wrong. In 2002 he famously apologized to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz for the Fed’s mismanagement of the money supply after the Crash, which he concluded could have been avoided if central bankers had provided “low and stable inflation” as a monetary background. (For an in-depth discussion of this episode, see Joseph Salerno’s Money, Sound and Unsound, Chapter 16, “Money and Gold in the 1920s and 1930s: An Austrian View”.) Applying the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, Ron Paul summarizes the Depression in 25 words:
Federal Reserve inflation during the 1920s, combined with economic interventionism by both Republican and Democratic administrations, caused and perpetuated the Great Depression of the 1930s.
One could hardly state the truth more concisely.
Many commentators are pointing out that the U.S. is declining into a police state, if it isn’t there already, but what some – especially the monetarists – overlook is the connection between honest money and freedom. For Ron Paul, freedom is “the ultimate justification for honest money.” And here he presents one of the most familiar quotes in libertarian literature, a non-Keynesian comment written by Keynes himself:
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Ron Paul was one of those one-in-a-million many years ago. Sit down with him some lunch hour and see why.
But why would a reader want to do that? Why not read one of Paul’s more recent books instead, even if it couldn’t be read in one sitting?
The answer is, the earlier work provides an excellent foundation for his later writings. It offers a clear, non-technical summary of his views on money and the economy.
Ron Paul has made his mark as an advocate of sound money. As such, he is totally opposed to fiat money and its imposition through the government-supported cartel, the Federal Reserve. It is largely through a hijacked monetary system that government has become a threat to civilization. In this pamphlet, Paul puts it all in perspective with everyday language, as if he’s talking to you – over lunch.
Sound money, he says, is money that is “fully redeemable.” The paper currency people use in transactions is only a substitute for money proper, which traditionally has been gold and silver coin. The adverb “fully” means that every note issued is a claim ticket to a specified weight of gold stored in a bank warehouse.
Why is this arrangement sound? Because it makes the value of money depend on the profitability of mining gold, rather than the “politics of the hour,” as Mises put it. A money that’s sound means the money supply remains relatively stable.
Unsound money is money that bankers and government can inflate virtually without limit. Unsound money equates “monetary policy” with varying degrees of inflation, as determined by a panel of politically-influenced bureaucrats.
Since inflation is indistinguishable in its effects from counterfeiting, the bureaucrats are simply counterfeiters with grandiose titles; their sacred monetary policy is nothing more than “legalized counterfeiting.” Inflation, Paul explains, citing Murray Rothbard, is “new money issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government.”
Blaming Arabs, businessmen, labor unions, or consumers for rising prices doesn't drown out the steady hum of printing presses running 24-hours-a-day, ballooning the money supply, and thereby debasing every dollar previously printed.
Referencing Hans Sennholz, he says:
An increase in the money supply confers no social benefits whatsoever. It merely redistributes income and wealth, disrupts and misguides economic production, and as such constitutes a powerful weapon in a conflict society.
If inflation is so bad, why does it exist? Because it benefits “whoever gets the new money first” – government, bankers, and favored businesses.
A good example is the credit the government created to bail-out the Chrysler Corporation, largely to finance a labor contract that pays the employees twice the average industrial wage. But unions, like businesses, can only persuade government to inflate if the inflation mechanism is in place. A redeemable currency would make this impossible.
Who pays for inflation? The poor and middle classes, and those on fixed incomes. By the time they get the new money – if they get it at all – prices have gone up (or they’ve failed to drop, as they would have without inflation). These groups are cheated by inflation, and eventually are either wiped out through currency depreciation or made dependent on government favors. This pattern has been known for ages, as Paul shows with numerous historical references.
Expansion of the money supply through "spurious paper currency," noted [Andrew] Jackson, "is always attended by a loss to the laboring classes."
"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind," added Daniel Webster, "none has been found more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money."
But if prices rise from an increase in the money supply, wouldn’t the price of labor go up, too? Quoting William Gouge, President Jackson’s Treasury advisor in 1833, Paul writes:
Wages appear to be among the last things that are raised. . . . The working man finds all the articles he uses in his family rising in price, while the money rate of his own wages remains the same.
When Lincoln issued greenbacks to pay for the Civil War, Paul notes, “prices rose 183%, while wages went up only 54%. During the World War I inflation, prices rose 135%, and wages increased only 88%. The same is true today.”
In answer to the claim that the Fed was created to prevent inflation and the periodic panics that erupted in the 19th century, Paul points out that inflation was written into the central bank’s founding charter, in the requirement to provide a more “elastic” currency. With the Federal Reserve Act of 1913,
a 40% gold cover for Federal Reserve notes and 35% for Federal Reserve deposits were required. The fact that it was not 100% showed that the central bankers planned more inflation. . . .
The central bank never set out to protect the integrity of our money. In fact, the Fed set out to destroy it by institutionalizing inflation. The gold coin standard was doomed and today's inflation made inevitable the day the Federal Reserve was created.
A gold coin standard, regulated by the market, acts as a restraint on inflation because it is the money, not the paper issued as a substitute. This is why governments hate gold – they can’t produce it in unlimited quantities. Using a non-redeemable paper currency avoids the risks of raising taxes while allowing politicians to pay for their wars and bureaucracies by running the printing press behind the curtain.
Since a gold standard enables the average person to restrain the government's attempts to inflate, control the economy, run up deficits, and fight senseless wars, the central planners had to eliminate this fundamental American freedom to own gold. This was accomplished with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which outlawed private ownership of gold, prohibited the use of "gold clause" contracts, and abolished the gold coin standard.
Thanks to Paul and others who support sound money, the government in 1974
reversed the unconstitutional 1934 law that barred private ownership of gold. In 1977, gold clause contracts were legalized.
One of my favorite passages in the book is Paul’s succinct comment on the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke wrote a collection of technical essays on the subject and has earned the reputation among his Keynesian colleagues as an expert on the Depression, never mind that he got it wrong. In 2002 he famously apologized to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz for the Fed’s mismanagement of the money supply after the Crash, which he concluded could have been avoided if central bankers had provided “low and stable inflation” as a monetary background. (For an in-depth discussion of this episode, see Joseph Salerno’s Money, Sound and Unsound, Chapter 16, “Money and Gold in the 1920s and 1930s: An Austrian View”.) Applying the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, Ron Paul summarizes the Depression in 25 words:
Federal Reserve inflation during the 1920s, combined with economic interventionism by both Republican and Democratic administrations, caused and perpetuated the Great Depression of the 1930s.
One could hardly state the truth more concisely.
Many commentators are pointing out that the U.S. is declining into a police state, if it isn’t there already, but what some – especially the monetarists – overlook is the connection between honest money and freedom. For Ron Paul, freedom is “the ultimate justification for honest money.” And here he presents one of the most familiar quotes in libertarian literature, a non-Keynesian comment written by Keynes himself:
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Ron Paul was one of those one-in-a-million many years ago. Sit down with him some lunch hour and see why.
Thursday
WHAT I THINK.........JOHN KELLER
The establishment media and republicans are in a panic that Ron Paul is in a position to win the Iowa caucus, and is gaining momentum in New Hampshire. One of the main strawmen put forth is that Ron Paul has a small but fervent set of supporters, perhaps 1 Million, who take over online polls, and have now realized how to organize on the ground. In other words, the establishment argues that Ron Paul’s apparent popularity is really driven by a small group of Ron Paul fans, rather than being reflective of the majority of voters, and in a real election Ron Paul will be unable to win. Let’s use widely available Internet tools to examine this argument and draw our own conclusions.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and here’s my favorite. It was created using Google Trends, and I invite you to use the tool to replicate what I’ve done here: http://www.google.com/trends (Enter Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney). I changed the default time range to 30 days.
This set of graphs shows 3 major things – I’ve added a big #1, #2, and #3 by each point. First, unless Ron Paul supporters are getting up and using Google every morning, search volume shows that Ron Paul is overwhelmingly the most searched about candidate. The top line references Ron Paul to 1, and compares the search volume for Newt and Mitt to Ron (see the big #1) – He has 2x times the search volume of Newt Gingrich, and 4 times the search volume of Mitt Romney. He has more Google searches than Mitt and Newt, combined. Bottom line: the general public has interest in Ron Paul – note that this does not tell us if the interest is positive or negative, but it is sustained and growing.
Second, the bottom graph is Google’s index of news story mentions. See the big #2, and note that the Mainstream Media really is ignoring Ron Paul. See how it is only now, when Ron Paul has been polling #1 in Iowa and gaining momentum in New Hampshire that the news media are starting to run stories on him. No wonder they call them dead tree dailies. They are not serving the public the information they want to know about, they are serving up the establishment line. Note to entrepreneurs: the gap between search volume above and news story volume below has a name – "opportunity".
Third, the city by city breakout of interest is very telling – see the big #3. The beltway insiders in Washington DC are breathing their own exhaust. They are the only area where searches for Newt Gingrich approach those of Ron Paul. When I first pulled this graph a few days ago, Newt was actually ahead. The level of groupthink is truly amazing, and helps explain the utter befuddlement as the Washington desk chiefs, K street gang, assorted lobbyists, and political hacks try to understand how and why Ron Paul can actually win in Iowa and New Hampshire.
There are many other sources of information to confirm that Ron Paul is really the people’s choice, and the most interesting candidate in the field. Note that I haven’t cherry-picked these, as Mitt is clearly winning in some areas. I will point out that Gross Google Results includes news stories and cross postings of news, which is why I prefer actual search volume to represent interest. Similarly, Mitt is ahead on Facebook "likes", however, Ron is gaining ground after his fine debate performances and Tonight Show Appearance . The Youtube videos are especially telling. Ron Paul’s results page has multiple videos with hundreds and thousands of views each, and no video on the first page with less than 25,000 views. Mitt Romney’s results page has a clip with 42 views in the number 6 position.
In summary, the mainstream media attempts to show Ron Paul as a fringe candidate to discourage undecided voters from aligning themselves with him. Don’t be fooled, and don’t be fooled by the "Ron Paul can’t win" canard. The real world statistics and indicators show that the mainstream media has and is consistently underestimating the strength, depth, and breadth of Ron Paul’s support.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and here’s my favorite. It was created using Google Trends, and I invite you to use the tool to replicate what I’ve done here: http://www.google.com/trends (Enter Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney). I changed the default time range to 30 days.
This set of graphs shows 3 major things – I’ve added a big #1, #2, and #3 by each point. First, unless Ron Paul supporters are getting up and using Google every morning, search volume shows that Ron Paul is overwhelmingly the most searched about candidate. The top line references Ron Paul to 1, and compares the search volume for Newt and Mitt to Ron (see the big #1) – He has 2x times the search volume of Newt Gingrich, and 4 times the search volume of Mitt Romney. He has more Google searches than Mitt and Newt, combined. Bottom line: the general public has interest in Ron Paul – note that this does not tell us if the interest is positive or negative, but it is sustained and growing.
Second, the bottom graph is Google’s index of news story mentions. See the big #2, and note that the Mainstream Media really is ignoring Ron Paul. See how it is only now, when Ron Paul has been polling #1 in Iowa and gaining momentum in New Hampshire that the news media are starting to run stories on him. No wonder they call them dead tree dailies. They are not serving the public the information they want to know about, they are serving up the establishment line. Note to entrepreneurs: the gap between search volume above and news story volume below has a name – "opportunity".
Third, the city by city breakout of interest is very telling – see the big #3. The beltway insiders in Washington DC are breathing their own exhaust. They are the only area where searches for Newt Gingrich approach those of Ron Paul. When I first pulled this graph a few days ago, Newt was actually ahead. The level of groupthink is truly amazing, and helps explain the utter befuddlement as the Washington desk chiefs, K street gang, assorted lobbyists, and political hacks try to understand how and why Ron Paul can actually win in Iowa and New Hampshire.
There are many other sources of information to confirm that Ron Paul is really the people’s choice, and the most interesting candidate in the field. Note that I haven’t cherry-picked these, as Mitt is clearly winning in some areas. I will point out that Gross Google Results includes news stories and cross postings of news, which is why I prefer actual search volume to represent interest. Similarly, Mitt is ahead on Facebook "likes", however, Ron is gaining ground after his fine debate performances and Tonight Show Appearance . The Youtube videos are especially telling. Ron Paul’s results page has multiple videos with hundreds and thousands of views each, and no video on the first page with less than 25,000 views. Mitt Romney’s results page has a clip with 42 views in the number 6 position.
In summary, the mainstream media attempts to show Ron Paul as a fringe candidate to discourage undecided voters from aligning themselves with him. Don’t be fooled, and don’t be fooled by the "Ron Paul can’t win" canard. The real world statistics and indicators show that the mainstream media has and is consistently underestimating the strength, depth, and breadth of Ron Paul’s support.
Wednesday
WHAT I THINK........WALTER BLOCK
There is a segment of the electorate that greets Congressman Paul’s continual harking back to the Constitution, and to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, as follows: Sure, those were good ideas, then; but nowadays, things are far more complicated. We lived a relatively simple bucolic life as a nation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We travelled by horse and buggy, at best. There was no television, no computers, no Al Qaeda, no cars, no weapons of mass destruction; there was far less poverty, crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, etc. Dr. Paul’s ideas are two centuries out of date. Nowadays, due to the complexity of modern society, his type of limited government free enterprise system simply cannot suffice. Congressman Paul should wake up to the fact that we are now in living the 21st century. An old fuddy-duddy who is continually looking back to the past cannot possibly be a good presidential candidate in 2012.
There is much wrong with this negative assessment of Ron Paul’s limited government philosophy. I shall address these "he is out of date" criticisms under three headings: foreign policy, civil liberties and economics.
1. Foreign policy
In the early days of our nation, we were protected by not one, not two, not three but four oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Even if we made mistakes, and engaged in "entangling alliances," and searched for "monsters to destroy" abroad, these bodies of water served as a buffer. Yes, the sailing ships could come get us, but that would take a long time; we could see them coming long before they got here.
Nowadays, modern technology has rendered the preventative function of these bodies of water pretty much inoperable. So, any mistakes we make are likely to be met with faster and more effective blowback, e.g., 9/11. If George Washington’s advice to be non interventionists was right during his day, it is even more correct at present.
Similarly, if there were a "terra-ist" in, say, the year 1799 who had it in for us, whether for just or unjust reasons, he would come to our shores armed, only, with a sword, or a musket, or some such weapon. At worst, he could murder but a very few innocent Americans. Nowadays, this is simply not the case. It thus behooves us to be more cautious with our foreign policy in the modern era than ever we needed to be in the earlier epoch.
Terrorists do not put us in the cross hairs because we have rock music, mini-skirts and freedom. Many other countries that have not been attacked exhibit the first two; as for the third, the U.S. is no longer among the freest of nations. According to one source, we are only tenth, after these others: Hong Kong, in first, Singapore in second, New Zealand in third, Switzerland in fourth, Australia in fifth, Canada in sixth, Chile in seventh, the UK in eighth, and Mauritius in ninth. Rather, we have been recently targeted by murderous killers because of what we have done: we have been poking sticks in hornet’s nests in every corner of the globe. Then, our mainstream media have registered shock and horror when some of these insects come back here and bite us. In contrast, in the early days of our republic we pretty much minded our own business, and did not have these horrid events befall us.
According to Dorothy Rabinowitz, Dr. Paul is "the best-known American propagandist for our enemies." Not at all. Dr. Paul, as a physician knows full well that he cannot cure any medical problem until he is clear as to its underlying cause. As a presidential candidate he is fully cognizant of the fact that he cannot stop an outbreak of attacks on our country and our people unless he fully understands their genesis. And, how can this be accomplished? For Ron Paul as doctor, this involves the stethoscope, the x-ray machine, the thermometer, blood pressure measurement devices, the cat-scan and the MRI. For Mr. President Paul, it requires, at least, listening to what they have to say when they explain why they have attacked us. It necessitates reading what the intelligence community of our country has to say about blowback. (See here for the reading list on these matters that Ron Paul utilized to instruct former New York City mayor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani.)
2. Civil liberties
We did not have a drug war until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Before that time, these drugs were a medical crisis, only. Afterwards, the medical challenges became exacerbated, and an entire new whole host of problems ensued. Black people are about 14% of our population, but account for some 63% of the prisoners in jail for drug crimes. Numerous deaths have been attributed to these vicious laws as well. Before and after alcohol prohibition this substance, too, was only a medical problem, best dealt with by doctors and groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. But during Prohibition, this drug, also, created havoc in our society, needless deaths due to fighting over territory, and poisonings due to "bathtub gin."
Yes, Ron Paul "wishes to turn back the clock" to a previous era here too. But earlier does not necessarily mean worse. Would anyone seriously like to turn the clock forward and reinstitute alcohol prohibition? Of course not. And, yet, anything that can be said in criticism of alcohol can probably be said, or worse, of narcotics. Both are dangerous substances; but more people die of the former than the latter. The prohibition of each of them leads to deaths. Libertarians oppose allowing children to have access to either of them, but if we cannot trust adults to make decisions about them, how can we justify giving them the right to vote?
In like manner, Congressman Paul opposes the Patriot Act and NDAA and SOPA because they trash the Constitution and violate our basic civil rights. Here, too, he prefers an earlier epoch to a later one, because he is not at all concerned with dates, but rather with rights.
3. Economics
Yes, our present day economy comprised of one third of a billion Americans, and billions of other people across the globe, is far more complicated than the one over which the founding fathers presided. But this is not an argument in favor of more regulations, it is an argument against them. For, the more complex is an economy, the more it needs to rely on the "magic of the market," not on central direction. If there is any case for a centrally planned economy, it applies not at present, but 300 years ago, when matters were far simpler, and thus socialistic planning could not, paradoxically, be quite as deleterious.
At the beginning of our Republic, some 98% of the people were farmers. They didn’t need price signals as much as modern entrepreneurs do. They could pretty much judge the best way of engaging in human action based on tradition. Grandpa planted such and such, and so did dad, so the way was clear ahead for the present farmer. But in an epoch where automobiles supplant horses and buggies, computers take the place of typewriters and telephones, etc., when there are millions, maybe billions of prices, not merely a few tens of thousands, it is imperative that economic freedom and private property rights coordinate economic activity. Yes, the Jamestown colony almost died out due to socialism. I am not advocating any such system, for any time. But I do insist that the simpler an economy, paradoxically, the less harm that price controls and socialism can do.
In like manner, it is also paradoxical that if you must have governmental interferences with the economy, it will hurt fewer people, and less seriously, if this is confined to luxury goods. If price controls and central planning are imposed on diamonds, jewelry and Rolls Royces, users of these goods will be disaccommodated. But they will not perish. However, if these dirigisme initiatives apply to milk, bread, meat, apples, etc., many people will die, particularly the poor. Yet, it is the rare socialist-fascist who advocates a government take-over of luxury goods. Rather, these economic illiterates target things like housing (rent control) and food. They make a mistake akin to the one made by those who think that since our economy is now more complicated than ages ago, it needs more tender loving care by government, inc.
Let us conclude.
It is not at all the case that newer is necessarily better than older. Murray N. Rothbard has characterized this as the Whig fallacy. Yes, certainly, in some arenas, many of them, we have made great progress. Transportation, communication, medical practice, all readily come to mind in this regard. But it cannot be denied that in other areas, we have retrogressed. We no longer have the technology or the skills to manufacture Stradivarius quality violins. Although this is of course subjective, I and many others would argue that modern music is vastly inferior to that of Bach, Mozart and Handel. And so it is with our Founding Fathers (apart from slavery, of course). Their foreign policy was arguably better than that of Bush and Obama. Just because it is historical, does not render it fallacious, as critics of Ron Paul all too often "argue." Similarly, Congressman Ron Paul sees our drug policies pre-1914 as far more humane and beneficial than our present drug war. It will not suffice to prove him wrong to note that he is living in the past. No, these things have to be argued out on their merits. It is simply fallacious to maintain that since this policy was once tried and then rejected (with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914), it is inferior to present day practices. As far as economics is concerned, the move from Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard to the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Ben Bernanke was one of retrogression, not progress. By going "forward," we have lost, not gained.
There is much wrong with this negative assessment of Ron Paul’s limited government philosophy. I shall address these "he is out of date" criticisms under three headings: foreign policy, civil liberties and economics.
1. Foreign policy
In the early days of our nation, we were protected by not one, not two, not three but four oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Even if we made mistakes, and engaged in "entangling alliances," and searched for "monsters to destroy" abroad, these bodies of water served as a buffer. Yes, the sailing ships could come get us, but that would take a long time; we could see them coming long before they got here.
Nowadays, modern technology has rendered the preventative function of these bodies of water pretty much inoperable. So, any mistakes we make are likely to be met with faster and more effective blowback, e.g., 9/11. If George Washington’s advice to be non interventionists was right during his day, it is even more correct at present.
Similarly, if there were a "terra-ist" in, say, the year 1799 who had it in for us, whether for just or unjust reasons, he would come to our shores armed, only, with a sword, or a musket, or some such weapon. At worst, he could murder but a very few innocent Americans. Nowadays, this is simply not the case. It thus behooves us to be more cautious with our foreign policy in the modern era than ever we needed to be in the earlier epoch.
Terrorists do not put us in the cross hairs because we have rock music, mini-skirts and freedom. Many other countries that have not been attacked exhibit the first two; as for the third, the U.S. is no longer among the freest of nations. According to one source, we are only tenth, after these others: Hong Kong, in first, Singapore in second, New Zealand in third, Switzerland in fourth, Australia in fifth, Canada in sixth, Chile in seventh, the UK in eighth, and Mauritius in ninth. Rather, we have been recently targeted by murderous killers because of what we have done: we have been poking sticks in hornet’s nests in every corner of the globe. Then, our mainstream media have registered shock and horror when some of these insects come back here and bite us. In contrast, in the early days of our republic we pretty much minded our own business, and did not have these horrid events befall us.
According to Dorothy Rabinowitz, Dr. Paul is "the best-known American propagandist for our enemies." Not at all. Dr. Paul, as a physician knows full well that he cannot cure any medical problem until he is clear as to its underlying cause. As a presidential candidate he is fully cognizant of the fact that he cannot stop an outbreak of attacks on our country and our people unless he fully understands their genesis. And, how can this be accomplished? For Ron Paul as doctor, this involves the stethoscope, the x-ray machine, the thermometer, blood pressure measurement devices, the cat-scan and the MRI. For Mr. President Paul, it requires, at least, listening to what they have to say when they explain why they have attacked us. It necessitates reading what the intelligence community of our country has to say about blowback. (See here for the reading list on these matters that Ron Paul utilized to instruct former New York City mayor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani.)
2. Civil liberties
We did not have a drug war until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Before that time, these drugs were a medical crisis, only. Afterwards, the medical challenges became exacerbated, and an entire new whole host of problems ensued. Black people are about 14% of our population, but account for some 63% of the prisoners in jail for drug crimes. Numerous deaths have been attributed to these vicious laws as well. Before and after alcohol prohibition this substance, too, was only a medical problem, best dealt with by doctors and groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. But during Prohibition, this drug, also, created havoc in our society, needless deaths due to fighting over territory, and poisonings due to "bathtub gin."
Yes, Ron Paul "wishes to turn back the clock" to a previous era here too. But earlier does not necessarily mean worse. Would anyone seriously like to turn the clock forward and reinstitute alcohol prohibition? Of course not. And, yet, anything that can be said in criticism of alcohol can probably be said, or worse, of narcotics. Both are dangerous substances; but more people die of the former than the latter. The prohibition of each of them leads to deaths. Libertarians oppose allowing children to have access to either of them, but if we cannot trust adults to make decisions about them, how can we justify giving them the right to vote?
In like manner, Congressman Paul opposes the Patriot Act and NDAA and SOPA because they trash the Constitution and violate our basic civil rights. Here, too, he prefers an earlier epoch to a later one, because he is not at all concerned with dates, but rather with rights.
3. Economics
Yes, our present day economy comprised of one third of a billion Americans, and billions of other people across the globe, is far more complicated than the one over which the founding fathers presided. But this is not an argument in favor of more regulations, it is an argument against them. For, the more complex is an economy, the more it needs to rely on the "magic of the market," not on central direction. If there is any case for a centrally planned economy, it applies not at present, but 300 years ago, when matters were far simpler, and thus socialistic planning could not, paradoxically, be quite as deleterious.
At the beginning of our Republic, some 98% of the people were farmers. They didn’t need price signals as much as modern entrepreneurs do. They could pretty much judge the best way of engaging in human action based on tradition. Grandpa planted such and such, and so did dad, so the way was clear ahead for the present farmer. But in an epoch where automobiles supplant horses and buggies, computers take the place of typewriters and telephones, etc., when there are millions, maybe billions of prices, not merely a few tens of thousands, it is imperative that economic freedom and private property rights coordinate economic activity. Yes, the Jamestown colony almost died out due to socialism. I am not advocating any such system, for any time. But I do insist that the simpler an economy, paradoxically, the less harm that price controls and socialism can do.
In like manner, it is also paradoxical that if you must have governmental interferences with the economy, it will hurt fewer people, and less seriously, if this is confined to luxury goods. If price controls and central planning are imposed on diamonds, jewelry and Rolls Royces, users of these goods will be disaccommodated. But they will not perish. However, if these dirigisme initiatives apply to milk, bread, meat, apples, etc., many people will die, particularly the poor. Yet, it is the rare socialist-fascist who advocates a government take-over of luxury goods. Rather, these economic illiterates target things like housing (rent control) and food. They make a mistake akin to the one made by those who think that since our economy is now more complicated than ages ago, it needs more tender loving care by government, inc.
Let us conclude.
It is not at all the case that newer is necessarily better than older. Murray N. Rothbard has characterized this as the Whig fallacy. Yes, certainly, in some arenas, many of them, we have made great progress. Transportation, communication, medical practice, all readily come to mind in this regard. But it cannot be denied that in other areas, we have retrogressed. We no longer have the technology or the skills to manufacture Stradivarius quality violins. Although this is of course subjective, I and many others would argue that modern music is vastly inferior to that of Bach, Mozart and Handel. And so it is with our Founding Fathers (apart from slavery, of course). Their foreign policy was arguably better than that of Bush and Obama. Just because it is historical, does not render it fallacious, as critics of Ron Paul all too often "argue." Similarly, Congressman Ron Paul sees our drug policies pre-1914 as far more humane and beneficial than our present drug war. It will not suffice to prove him wrong to note that he is living in the past. No, these things have to be argued out on their merits. It is simply fallacious to maintain that since this policy was once tried and then rejected (with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914), it is inferior to present day practices. As far as economics is concerned, the move from Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard to the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Ben Bernanke was one of retrogression, not progress. By going "forward," we have lost, not gained.
THE NDAA REPEALS MORE RIGHTS
Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed. The 4th amendment has been rendered toothless by the PATRIOT Act. No more can we truly feel secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects when now there is an exception that fits nearly any excuse for our government to search and seize our property. Of course, the vast majority of Americans may say “I’m not a terrorist, so I have no reason to worry.” However, innocent people are wrongly accused all the time. The Bill of Rights is there precisely because the founders wanted to set a very high bar for the government to overcome in order to deprive an individual of life or liberty. To lower that bar is to endanger everyone. When the bar is low enough to include political enemies, our descent into totalitarianism is virtually assured.
The PATRIOT Act, as bad is its violation of the 4th Amendment, was just one step down the slippery slope. The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) continues that slip toward tyranny and in fact accelerates it significantly. The main section of concern, Section 1021 of the NDAA Conference Report, does to the 5th Amendment what the PATRIOT Act does to the 4th. The 5th Amendment is about much more than the right to remain silent in the face of government questioning. It contains very basic and very critical stipulations about due process of law. The government cannot imprison a person for no reason and with no evidence presented or access to legal counsel.
The dangers in the NDAA are its alarmingly vague, undefined criteria for who can be indefinitely detained by the US government without trial. It is now no longer limited to members of al Qaeda or the Taliban, but anyone accused of “substantially supporting” such groups or “associated forces.” How closely associated? And what constitutes "substantial" support? What if it was discovered that someone who committed a terrorist act was once involved with a charity? Or supported a political candidate? Are all donors of that charity or supporters of that candidate now suspect, and subject to indefinite detainment? Is that charity now an associated force?
Additionally, this legislation codifies in law for the first time authority to detain Americans that has to this point only been claimed by President Obama. According to subsection (e) of section 1021, “[n]othing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” This means the president’s widely expanded view of his own authority to detain Americans indefinitely even on American soil is for the first time in this legislation codified in law. That should chill all of us to our cores.
The Bill of Rights has no exemptions for "really bad people" or terrorists or even non-citizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. That is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system. The NDAA attempts to justify abridging the bill of rights on the theory that rights are suspended in a time of war, and the entire Unites States is a battlefield in the War on Terror. This is a very dangerous development indeed. Beware.
The PATRIOT Act, as bad is its violation of the 4th Amendment, was just one step down the slippery slope. The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) continues that slip toward tyranny and in fact accelerates it significantly. The main section of concern, Section 1021 of the NDAA Conference Report, does to the 5th Amendment what the PATRIOT Act does to the 4th. The 5th Amendment is about much more than the right to remain silent in the face of government questioning. It contains very basic and very critical stipulations about due process of law. The government cannot imprison a person for no reason and with no evidence presented or access to legal counsel.
The dangers in the NDAA are its alarmingly vague, undefined criteria for who can be indefinitely detained by the US government without trial. It is now no longer limited to members of al Qaeda or the Taliban, but anyone accused of “substantially supporting” such groups or “associated forces.” How closely associated? And what constitutes "substantial" support? What if it was discovered that someone who committed a terrorist act was once involved with a charity? Or supported a political candidate? Are all donors of that charity or supporters of that candidate now suspect, and subject to indefinite detainment? Is that charity now an associated force?
Additionally, this legislation codifies in law for the first time authority to detain Americans that has to this point only been claimed by President Obama. According to subsection (e) of section 1021, “[n]othing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” This means the president’s widely expanded view of his own authority to detain Americans indefinitely even on American soil is for the first time in this legislation codified in law. That should chill all of us to our cores.
The Bill of Rights has no exemptions for "really bad people" or terrorists or even non-citizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. That is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system. The NDAA attempts to justify abridging the bill of rights on the theory that rights are suspended in a time of war, and the entire Unites States is a battlefield in the War on Terror. This is a very dangerous development indeed. Beware.
Friday
WHAT I THINK.......JAMES JAEGER
If you have been watching the news, you know that Ron Paul is now beating both Gingrich and Romney in the polls and could walk away with a win in Iowa.
Some say he could also walk away with a win in New Hampshire, and possibly even win the Republican (GOP) nomination.
For the Republican National Committee (RNC), this must be uncomfortable – the idea that they would be forced to nominate a principled, Constitutionalist just because WE THE PEOPLE demanded it.
But here's what really terrifies them: Ron Paul is in a position to hand the election of 2012 over to Barack Obama and the Democrats because he would be a "spoiler." But even more terrifying is the fact that Dr. Paul is in a position to be much more than a "spoiler" – he's in a position to be a "winner."
Etymology of the term SPOILER:
The term "spoiler" is a derogatory term that was dreamt up by statists in the Democratic and Republican parties in order to sucker the public into continuously voting for no one outside the Establishment. In other words, if you vote your conscience, YOU are a "spoiler." If you run on principles of your conscience and take votes away from an Establishment candidate, YOU are also a "spoiler."
Thus, since Ron Paul votes his conscience, since he rejects certain aspects of the Establishment – such as the Federal Reserve's abuse of the monetary system and its financing of the welfare-warfare empire we have now become – there is no way apparatchiks in the GOP will nominate Dr. Paul no matter what WE THE PEOPLE want.
And to this end, lackey pundits in the CFR-dominated, mainstream media continuously chant that Ron Paul has "no chance to get the Republican nomination." They spew this so often, it's obvious they don't believe their own lies.
But here's the joker: Ron Paul does not even need the GOP to win the general election. If he were to walk away for a third party, he would take at least 12% of the Republican vote with him. He would also take another 15% from the Independents and at least 11% from the Democrats. This would give him 38% – enough of the vote to win the Presidency in a three-man race.
GOP strategists know all this and this is why you will never hear them utter these statistics in the mainstream media. If the public were to become too "hopeful" – if they were to understand the mathematics of the situation – even more people would vote for Ron Paul if for no other reason than to be on the winner's bandwagon.
So, the GOP has some serious choices to make.
Either they morph into a small-government party and support the Ron Paul Revolution of "getting back to the Constitution," or they risk losing their power to a new political party. And a new political party would not only mean the demise of the Republican party, but the Democratic party as well.
Since the Democratic Party AND the Republican Party are BOTH the parties of BIG government, a new political party of SMALL government would reveal to the public – more than ever – what the two mainstream parties have become.
The two mainstream parties – the Democrats and Republicans – have become, in essence, two departments of the same police state. They are the same political party, in effect: growing the government ever larger and ever more militaristic, both domestically and internationally. The PATRIOT Act expands the police state domestically, and the UN, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, GATT and NATO -which they BOTH continuously and blindly support – expand the police state internationally.
Due to serious abridgments of the US Constitution and principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, the United States are now run by a dictating oligarchy known as the UNITED STATES. And this dictating oligarchy is dominated by cultural Marxists and corporate fascists who have hijacked the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively.
The "DemoPublicans" have established the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of administering their police state and the PATRIOT Act has become their new Constitution.
If you accept the idea that the Democrats and Republicans (again the "DemoPublicans") have become two departments of the same police state – two wings of the same ugly bird – you will have to accept that ultimately it does not matter whether a Democrat or Republican is elected to the presidency. It does not matter if Obama or Romney is elected president. Establishment politicians in either of these "two" parties will continue to use the Federal Reserve System to monetize debt (print money out of thin air) and use this fraudulent "fiat" currency to build their welfare-warfare state.
It could be said that Republicans specialize in printing money to build weapons and wage wars – Democrats specialize in printing money to address the sick and the poor. The Republicans thus CREATE the sick and the poor with their WAR-fare policies and the Democrats HEAL the sick and the poor with their WELL-fare policies.
Thus when an entity controls the HEALING and HURTING of Humankind, doesn't that entity, in essence, CONTROL Humankind? Well, welcome to the DemoPublican control mechanism – something you might think about the next time you vote or mindlessly scream out for your Clinton-, Bush-, Obama-, Gingrich- or Romney-candidate.
Taken as a whole, the Demopublican machine – now assembled more by supra-national, international banking families than American citizens – has destroyed US politics that used to center on constitutional principles. Controllers in this CFR-led embryonic world government have created a well-oiled machine to maximize the plunder of millions, if not billions of people, through the mechanism of central banking, debt and the hurting-healing cycle. Would it not be reasonable to posit that the Democratic and Republican Parties are thus primary tools in what seems to be a master plan of globalization?
Ron Paul – a strict limited-government Constitutionalist with an appreciation for ethnonationalism – does not fit in with the New World Order's management plans. Therefore, if he wins the popular vote not only in Iowa and New Hampshire but across the nation, the DemoPublican controllers have a serious problem.
They can either rig the elections so it looks like Dr. Paul did "not" win, or they can blackmail him by threatening his family, like they did when Ross Perot was getting too popular.
If Dr. Paul walks away from the GOP to go Indy, in reality he will "spoil" nothing, for as discussed above, the Democrats and Republicans are the same political party in effect, so there is nothing that CAN be "spoiled".
Also, since the DemoPublicans must continue the cockfight between them – so the illusion that they are "different" parties can be maintained – this fighting has been, of necessity, escalating into a GRIDLOCK. Note the endless fighting about extending payroll tax cuts, Obamacare and illegal immigration. Thus, even if Ron Paul is labeled a "spoiler" – for thwarting the Establishment Controller's plan to get one of their puppets nominated or elected – he will spoil nothing.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR RON PAUL TO BE A SPOILER, BECAUSE:
A) THE DEMS AND GOP ARE THE SAME PARTY IN EFFECT, AND;
B) EVEN IF OBAMA GETS REELECTED, THE DEMS AND GOP WILL BE GRIDLOCKED AND THUS NOTHING WILL GET DONE.
Summary:
The term "spoiler" is used by two groups of people:
1) the ignorant or IQ-challenged person who knows little or nothing about politics or the art of war, and
2) the statist propaganda-merchant who is trying to give the public the illusion that there is a "difference" between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
The reason the statist propaganda-merchant is trying to perpetuate the meme that there is a difference between the two major parties is so the general public will not look elsewhere for the solution to their problems. If one can get the Democrats and Republicans fighting with each other, it gives the illusion that they are "different" to the degree they "fight." Indeed they DO have "differences"; however, the differences are over trivial issues. On all the major issues the Democrats and Republicans are identical, overtly and covertly, thus they are the same political party in effect. You saw how many of Bush's policies Obama kept in place when he came into office ostensibly to "change" things. The same thing will happen if the Republicans take back the White House, ad infinitum.
So this is why Ron Paul is such a threat to the Establishment. He's running on the GOP ticket basically so he can get mainstream media exposure. The mainstream tried to ignore him in the last election. Remember how Hannity practically spat on Dr. Paul in the 2008 election? Remember how all the other pundits treated him? Then, when he suddenly raised millions of dollars with his "money bombs" and millions of voters started joining the grassroots Ron Paul Revolution – which kicked off the Tea Party Revolution – it wasn't "politically correct" to spit on him any longer. Worse, they couldn't ignore him into oblivion like they ignored all other dissenting candidates. Third-party candidate Ross Perot was only able to get mainstream media exposure because he purchased it with his personal wealth. Neither Ralph Nader nor Harry Brown, on the other hand, have been able to purchase such exposure; thus they have never been able to get an alternative vision into the public domain.
Thus, if Ron Paul continues to get support from the rest of the nation he's currently getting in Iowa, the GOP should technically nominate him, but it's a long-shot they will.
After all, for Ron Paul to win and use the vote to destroy the cultural Marxist-infested, totalitarian fiat empire, being built by controllers of the "liberal world order" is incomprehensible to them even though Pat Buchanan details in his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, the reasons why the moment of globalism and "free" trade has passed.
But such is the power of the zeitgeist for the world is in revolt, from the Middle East to Wall Street. The 99-percent don't know exactly HOW they have been screwed, but they do know that they HAVE been screwed – at least for the past 100 years. From the Tea Partiers to the Wall Street Occupiers in America, WE THE PEOPLE are fed up with:
1) a Congress that has been bought and sold by corporate fascists,
2) Presidents that start wars and act like Marxist dictators,
3) an activist Supreme Court that legislates from the bench making one-size-fits-all laws that ignore the original intent of the Founders.
WE THE PEOPLE are fed up with many other things, but both the "Right" and the "Left" can agree with much of what Ron Paul offers, because his principles are American principles, and American principles are Constitutional Principles which accommodate both liberals and conservatives, Left or Right.
So don't let CFR-infested, Establishment propaganda spewed through the mainstream media or the DemoPublican police state dissuade you from voting for Ron Paul, whether he stays on the GOP ticket, goes Independent or starts a new party.
It is vital that all Americans stay true to their conscience, NOT their political parties. Remember, the US Constitution does not even mention political parties. In fact, many of the Founders warned us against them; they called them "factions" and said that membership in them is dangerous to a democratic form of government. They warned us to stay away from entrenched political parties – such as the Democrats and Republicans – because entrenched political parties are only one step away from dictatorships.
It is not too late to act. Vote out the incumbent congressmen and vote in Ron Paul no matter what scare tactics the pundits on CNN, FOX News or MSNBC attempt to use on you. Ron Paul CAN get 38% of the vote and win the presidency. This is not an opinion; it's mathematical fact.
Some say he could also walk away with a win in New Hampshire, and possibly even win the Republican (GOP) nomination.
For the Republican National Committee (RNC), this must be uncomfortable – the idea that they would be forced to nominate a principled, Constitutionalist just because WE THE PEOPLE demanded it.
But here's what really terrifies them: Ron Paul is in a position to hand the election of 2012 over to Barack Obama and the Democrats because he would be a "spoiler." But even more terrifying is the fact that Dr. Paul is in a position to be much more than a "spoiler" – he's in a position to be a "winner."
Etymology of the term SPOILER:
The term "spoiler" is a derogatory term that was dreamt up by statists in the Democratic and Republican parties in order to sucker the public into continuously voting for no one outside the Establishment. In other words, if you vote your conscience, YOU are a "spoiler." If you run on principles of your conscience and take votes away from an Establishment candidate, YOU are also a "spoiler."
Thus, since Ron Paul votes his conscience, since he rejects certain aspects of the Establishment – such as the Federal Reserve's abuse of the monetary system and its financing of the welfare-warfare empire we have now become – there is no way apparatchiks in the GOP will nominate Dr. Paul no matter what WE THE PEOPLE want.
And to this end, lackey pundits in the CFR-dominated, mainstream media continuously chant that Ron Paul has "no chance to get the Republican nomination." They spew this so often, it's obvious they don't believe their own lies.
But here's the joker: Ron Paul does not even need the GOP to win the general election. If he were to walk away for a third party, he would take at least 12% of the Republican vote with him. He would also take another 15% from the Independents and at least 11% from the Democrats. This would give him 38% – enough of the vote to win the Presidency in a three-man race.
GOP strategists know all this and this is why you will never hear them utter these statistics in the mainstream media. If the public were to become too "hopeful" – if they were to understand the mathematics of the situation – even more people would vote for Ron Paul if for no other reason than to be on the winner's bandwagon.
So, the GOP has some serious choices to make.
Either they morph into a small-government party and support the Ron Paul Revolution of "getting back to the Constitution," or they risk losing their power to a new political party. And a new political party would not only mean the demise of the Republican party, but the Democratic party as well.
Since the Democratic Party AND the Republican Party are BOTH the parties of BIG government, a new political party of SMALL government would reveal to the public – more than ever – what the two mainstream parties have become.
The two mainstream parties – the Democrats and Republicans – have become, in essence, two departments of the same police state. They are the same political party, in effect: growing the government ever larger and ever more militaristic, both domestically and internationally. The PATRIOT Act expands the police state domestically, and the UN, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, GATT and NATO -which they BOTH continuously and blindly support – expand the police state internationally.
Due to serious abridgments of the US Constitution and principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, the United States are now run by a dictating oligarchy known as the UNITED STATES. And this dictating oligarchy is dominated by cultural Marxists and corporate fascists who have hijacked the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively.
The "DemoPublicans" have established the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of administering their police state and the PATRIOT Act has become their new Constitution.
If you accept the idea that the Democrats and Republicans (again the "DemoPublicans") have become two departments of the same police state – two wings of the same ugly bird – you will have to accept that ultimately it does not matter whether a Democrat or Republican is elected to the presidency. It does not matter if Obama or Romney is elected president. Establishment politicians in either of these "two" parties will continue to use the Federal Reserve System to monetize debt (print money out of thin air) and use this fraudulent "fiat" currency to build their welfare-warfare state.
It could be said that Republicans specialize in printing money to build weapons and wage wars – Democrats specialize in printing money to address the sick and the poor. The Republicans thus CREATE the sick and the poor with their WAR-fare policies and the Democrats HEAL the sick and the poor with their WELL-fare policies.
Thus when an entity controls the HEALING and HURTING of Humankind, doesn't that entity, in essence, CONTROL Humankind? Well, welcome to the DemoPublican control mechanism – something you might think about the next time you vote or mindlessly scream out for your Clinton-, Bush-, Obama-, Gingrich- or Romney-candidate.
Taken as a whole, the Demopublican machine – now assembled more by supra-national, international banking families than American citizens – has destroyed US politics that used to center on constitutional principles. Controllers in this CFR-led embryonic world government have created a well-oiled machine to maximize the plunder of millions, if not billions of people, through the mechanism of central banking, debt and the hurting-healing cycle. Would it not be reasonable to posit that the Democratic and Republican Parties are thus primary tools in what seems to be a master plan of globalization?
Ron Paul – a strict limited-government Constitutionalist with an appreciation for ethnonationalism – does not fit in with the New World Order's management plans. Therefore, if he wins the popular vote not only in Iowa and New Hampshire but across the nation, the DemoPublican controllers have a serious problem.
They can either rig the elections so it looks like Dr. Paul did "not" win, or they can blackmail him by threatening his family, like they did when Ross Perot was getting too popular.
If Dr. Paul walks away from the GOP to go Indy, in reality he will "spoil" nothing, for as discussed above, the Democrats and Republicans are the same political party in effect, so there is nothing that CAN be "spoiled".
Also, since the DemoPublicans must continue the cockfight between them – so the illusion that they are "different" parties can be maintained – this fighting has been, of necessity, escalating into a GRIDLOCK. Note the endless fighting about extending payroll tax cuts, Obamacare and illegal immigration. Thus, even if Ron Paul is labeled a "spoiler" – for thwarting the Establishment Controller's plan to get one of their puppets nominated or elected – he will spoil nothing.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR RON PAUL TO BE A SPOILER, BECAUSE:
A) THE DEMS AND GOP ARE THE SAME PARTY IN EFFECT, AND;
B) EVEN IF OBAMA GETS REELECTED, THE DEMS AND GOP WILL BE GRIDLOCKED AND THUS NOTHING WILL GET DONE.
Summary:
The term "spoiler" is used by two groups of people:
1) the ignorant or IQ-challenged person who knows little or nothing about politics or the art of war, and
2) the statist propaganda-merchant who is trying to give the public the illusion that there is a "difference" between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
The reason the statist propaganda-merchant is trying to perpetuate the meme that there is a difference between the two major parties is so the general public will not look elsewhere for the solution to their problems. If one can get the Democrats and Republicans fighting with each other, it gives the illusion that they are "different" to the degree they "fight." Indeed they DO have "differences"; however, the differences are over trivial issues. On all the major issues the Democrats and Republicans are identical, overtly and covertly, thus they are the same political party in effect. You saw how many of Bush's policies Obama kept in place when he came into office ostensibly to "change" things. The same thing will happen if the Republicans take back the White House, ad infinitum.
So this is why Ron Paul is such a threat to the Establishment. He's running on the GOP ticket basically so he can get mainstream media exposure. The mainstream tried to ignore him in the last election. Remember how Hannity practically spat on Dr. Paul in the 2008 election? Remember how all the other pundits treated him? Then, when he suddenly raised millions of dollars with his "money bombs" and millions of voters started joining the grassroots Ron Paul Revolution – which kicked off the Tea Party Revolution – it wasn't "politically correct" to spit on him any longer. Worse, they couldn't ignore him into oblivion like they ignored all other dissenting candidates. Third-party candidate Ross Perot was only able to get mainstream media exposure because he purchased it with his personal wealth. Neither Ralph Nader nor Harry Brown, on the other hand, have been able to purchase such exposure; thus they have never been able to get an alternative vision into the public domain.
Thus, if Ron Paul continues to get support from the rest of the nation he's currently getting in Iowa, the GOP should technically nominate him, but it's a long-shot they will.
After all, for Ron Paul to win and use the vote to destroy the cultural Marxist-infested, totalitarian fiat empire, being built by controllers of the "liberal world order" is incomprehensible to them even though Pat Buchanan details in his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, the reasons why the moment of globalism and "free" trade has passed.
But such is the power of the zeitgeist for the world is in revolt, from the Middle East to Wall Street. The 99-percent don't know exactly HOW they have been screwed, but they do know that they HAVE been screwed – at least for the past 100 years. From the Tea Partiers to the Wall Street Occupiers in America, WE THE PEOPLE are fed up with:
1) a Congress that has been bought and sold by corporate fascists,
2) Presidents that start wars and act like Marxist dictators,
3) an activist Supreme Court that legislates from the bench making one-size-fits-all laws that ignore the original intent of the Founders.
WE THE PEOPLE are fed up with many other things, but both the "Right" and the "Left" can agree with much of what Ron Paul offers, because his principles are American principles, and American principles are Constitutional Principles which accommodate both liberals and conservatives, Left or Right.
So don't let CFR-infested, Establishment propaganda spewed through the mainstream media or the DemoPublican police state dissuade you from voting for Ron Paul, whether he stays on the GOP ticket, goes Independent or starts a new party.
It is vital that all Americans stay true to their conscience, NOT their political parties. Remember, the US Constitution does not even mention political parties. In fact, many of the Founders warned us against them; they called them "factions" and said that membership in them is dangerous to a democratic form of government. They warned us to stay away from entrenched political parties – such as the Democrats and Republicans – because entrenched political parties are only one step away from dictatorships.
It is not too late to act. Vote out the incumbent congressmen and vote in Ron Paul no matter what scare tactics the pundits on CNN, FOX News or MSNBC attempt to use on you. Ron Paul CAN get 38% of the vote and win the presidency. This is not an opinion; it's mathematical fact.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
