It’s bad enough the possibility that there might have been some hanky-panky going on regarding the vote count at the Iowa Straw Poll this week, in which Ron Paul received 4,671 votes to Michele Bachmann’s 4,823, a difference of just 152 votes. But to see one national media outlet after another completely ignoring Dr. Paul’s virtual tie for the #1 spot, and others who continue to dismiss Paul as "fringe," despite Paul’s being the most mainstream and commonsensical of all the candidates, is amazing.
The shills for the State do not see how obvious they are now. And the shills aren’t just the left-biased news media, but on the right as well. In his loving devotion to the State, Rush Limbaugh said, regarding the GOP’s giving Ron Paul any actual attention, "This is nuts on parade."
Oh, really, Mr. Limbaugh? And whose "Operation Chaos" scheme was it that helped give us the tyrannical President Obama? Hmmm?
"Nuts," indeed.
I dare any of the Iowa or national news reporters to interview people on the street and ask if they were of the 4,671 people who voted for Ron Paul, and, if so, ask them why they voted for Paul. You will find answers not in the "fringe," or in the land of ignorance and fantasy as with supporters of some of those other candidates. No, you will find people who believe in and understand the ideas of freedom and peace, and who want there to be a free and prosperous America for their future generations.
So many Americans now have been cradled by Big Daddy Government. Economically and culturally Americans have become infantilized, and their coma-like passivity is being disturbed by this Ron Paul person, who dares to advocate independence, and that people grow up and be responsible for their lives and stop being babies.
The idea of the fiat money way of life, the use of value-less paper as the sole government-mandated medium of exchange, has been so ingrained, its century-long status quo being challenged makes people very uncomfortable. Ron Paul has been exposing the instability of the whole system, and that frightens people.
So, rather than deal with reality as Paul suggests, the pundits and the government groupies of mainstream news would prefer to just continue sucking their thumbs and hope for some magical cure, as the Limbaugh-Romney-Obama-Krugman statists hope for.
The people who snub those who advocate a challenge to the status quo and a challenge to government-controlled money and banking, government-controlled medicine, and a challenge to the U.S. government’s immoral and bankrupting wars of aggression – aggressions that do nothing but provoke foreigners to act against us – the people who close the door to the challenger and keep it open for the statists, despite all the destruction the State has wrought, is further confirmation of my assertion that statism is a sickness.
But why do we – the people who just want to live our lives and be left alone, and who mind our own business and do not support acts of aggression against others – why do we have to suffer at the hands of these statists? Ron Paul is advocating for our freedom and independence, that we have a right to live our lives, without aggression and intrusions into our lives and businesses by our neighbors and by the government. We have a right to trade freely with others without Big Daddy Government’s permission, we have a right to travel freely without being cancer-scanned and groped by sickos or asked to show our papers, and we have a right to earn a living without being harassed and having our labor enslaved by the State.
The media act as though that’s too much for us to ask and too much for Ron Paul to advocate, so the media babyishly snub him and his unapologetic message of freedom and peace.
Ron Paul wants to remove the government’s monopoly in money production and distribution, allow for competition in currencies, and have money that is backed by something of actual value, like gold and silver. Dr. Paul understands that paper money leads to tyranny. Paul wants to undo the current institutionalized irresponsibility of letting banks engage in risky investments and not being held accountable, that allows the banks to get bailed out by the taxpayers and by future generations via the government’s perpetual debt machine.
Paul understands that GM should have been made to go bankrupt. All businesses that are run irresponsibly or unprofitably need to restructure themselves or close, including banks as well. The problem with "Too Big To Fail" is that the whole banking and monetary system is a government-corporate cartel that protects the top bankers from accountability, and restricts entrepreneurs’ right of free entry into the field.
We had much more freedom, and much more prosperity, growth and progress in the years prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. With freedom there is prosperity. In total contrast, in the past century of government usurpations and intrusions, we have had stagflation, wars of aggression, corporatism, and now the inevitable collapse of the system, a collapse that Paul wants to avoid.
But these ideas apparently are too much for our news media government flunkies. As the State has grown larger and larger by each generation, the news media, the intellectuals and academics have shrunk in their capacity toward intellectual curiosity, discovery and searching for the truth. The State and its compulsory powers tend to stifle questioning and challenging of its authority, and its power has an allure to it that seems to have been just too tempting for the journalistic elites to resist.
In his article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State, economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted how the change occurred within intellectuals from being more independent to being State apologists:
If one donor or sponsor no longer supported (intellectuals), many others existed who would happily fill the gap. Indeed, intellectual and cultural life flourished the most, and the independence of intellectuals was the greatest, where the position of the king or the central government was relatively weak and that of the natural elites had remained relatively strong.
A fundamental change in the relationship between the state, natural elites, and intellectuals only occurred with the transition from monarchical to democratic rule. It was the inflated price of justice and the perversions of ancient law by kings as monopolistic judges and peacekeepers that motivated the historical opposition against monarchy. But confusion as to the causes of this phenomenon prevailed. There were those who recognized correctly that the problem was with monopoly, not with elites or nobility. However, they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed the elitist character of the ruler for the problem, and who advocated maintaining the monopoly of law and law enforcement and merely replacing the king and the highly visible royal pomp with the "people" and the presumed decency of the "common man." …
A "tragedy of the commons" was created. Everyone, not just the king, was now entitled to try to grab everyone else's private property. The consequences were more government exploitation (taxation); the deterioration of law to the point where the idea of a body of universal and immutable principles of justice disappeared and was replaced by the idea of law as legislation… and an increase in the social rate of time preference (increased present-orientation)…
…while the natural elites were being destroyed, intellectuals assumed a more prominent and powerful position in society. Indeed, to a large extent they have achieved their goal and have become the ruling class, controlling the state and functioning as monopolistic judge…
Now, this is not to suggest that people such as Rush Limbaugh, Chris Wallace or Candy Crowley are "intellectuals," but they are amongst the so-called news "journalists" of the day, which is part of the crowd of news and pundits, academia, the professional economists and those in pop culture who shill for the State and its constant expanded power over the infantilized lives of the people.
When someone such as Ron Paul says he wants the people to have their freedom – that is, freedom from the State’s reaching into their private personal and economic lives – and who actually speaks in terms of morality (e.g. it’s immoral to start wars of aggression against other countries who were of no threat to us), and if Ron Paul’s proposals result in shrinking the State’s size and power, that seems to be a huge threat to the thumb-sucking apologists of the State. Certainly more than any threat from government’s destroying the economy, forcing future generations into debt slavery, provoking foreigners to retaliate against us, or from the government’s own police state.
As Dr. Paul stated, "We are trying to reverse 100 years of history, the change from a republic to an empire…" Apparently, Paul agrees with Murray Rothbard, who called for an outright repeal of the 20th Century:
Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the 20th century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.
With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.
One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up…to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, to obliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat them into plowshares and pruning hooks, and usher in a 21st century of peace, freedom, and prosperity.
I’m verklempt.
Tuesday
S & P STATES THE OBVIOUS
Politicians did not get much time to pat themselves on the back for supposedly rescuing the economy with the debt limit deal last week. The ink was barely dry when Standard & Poor's downgraded the US debt ratings anyway, roiling world financial markets. Anyone who has taken an honest look at the government's fiscal situation, taken into account how Washington works and the direction it is going would have a very difficult time arguing with S&P's decision, although a strong case can be made that this was too incremental a downgrade and that it took far too long for S&P to admit the obvious.
Nonetheless, the administration nitpicked over a $2 trillion "mistake". S&P rejoined with the fact that $2 trillion here or there hardly makes a difference in the time frame under discussion. That, if nothing else, should tell you the magnitude of the problem. $2 trillion has become a drop in the bucket.
S&P cited Congress's inability to act like grownups and make necessary, meaningful cuts, which is true. I must take issue however, with their suggestion that tax increases are part of the answer. Taking capital out of the private sector, where it can create real value in the form of new jobs and products, and instead giving it to Washington to waste and squander is not the solution. Tax increases may seem penny-wise to some, but in reality they would be very pound-foolish. The government currently takes in $2.2 trillion in taxes per year, which is far too much already. It spends $3.7 trillion, which is ridiculous and criminal. The problem is runaway government spending, not the American people having too much money.
And yet we can't even have a serious discussion about bringing our troops home and ending our expensive occupations around the world – things the president used to claim to favor!
Even without this downgrade, major investors are waking up to what lies down the road for the United States in fiscal terms. China is showing more signs of losing its taste for our debt. Others are following suit. What we are about to see is the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. When that happens, we will no longer be in a position to have pretend debates about things we probably should spend a little bit less on - we will be forced to implement serious spending cuts as our sources of credit dry up. Of course, we can try to postpone the day of reckoning by printing more money but the resulting “inflation tax” will be far worse than a reduction in government benefits.
Hyperinflation devastates the middle class. After Weimar Germany hyper-inflated their currency in the 1920s, an entire life savings couldn't buy a postage stamp. The bank wouldn't even send customers a check for all the money they had saved their whole lives. It wasn't worth the paper it was printed on or the stamp to send it. This is what is meant when it is said that the middle class gets wiped out. The pieces for this to happen here are all falling into place, and have been since 1971. The only way to avoid that sort of chaos now is for Congress to immediately reduce federal spending and take the Constitution seriously again. The welfare/warfare state will end either way, but winding it down responsibly is a far better way to do it.
Nonetheless, the administration nitpicked over a $2 trillion "mistake". S&P rejoined with the fact that $2 trillion here or there hardly makes a difference in the time frame under discussion. That, if nothing else, should tell you the magnitude of the problem. $2 trillion has become a drop in the bucket.
S&P cited Congress's inability to act like grownups and make necessary, meaningful cuts, which is true. I must take issue however, with their suggestion that tax increases are part of the answer. Taking capital out of the private sector, where it can create real value in the form of new jobs and products, and instead giving it to Washington to waste and squander is not the solution. Tax increases may seem penny-wise to some, but in reality they would be very pound-foolish. The government currently takes in $2.2 trillion in taxes per year, which is far too much already. It spends $3.7 trillion, which is ridiculous and criminal. The problem is runaway government spending, not the American people having too much money.
And yet we can't even have a serious discussion about bringing our troops home and ending our expensive occupations around the world – things the president used to claim to favor!
Even without this downgrade, major investors are waking up to what lies down the road for the United States in fiscal terms. China is showing more signs of losing its taste for our debt. Others are following suit. What we are about to see is the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. When that happens, we will no longer be in a position to have pretend debates about things we probably should spend a little bit less on - we will be forced to implement serious spending cuts as our sources of credit dry up. Of course, we can try to postpone the day of reckoning by printing more money but the resulting “inflation tax” will be far worse than a reduction in government benefits.
Hyperinflation devastates the middle class. After Weimar Germany hyper-inflated their currency in the 1920s, an entire life savings couldn't buy a postage stamp. The bank wouldn't even send customers a check for all the money they had saved their whole lives. It wasn't worth the paper it was printed on or the stamp to send it. This is what is meant when it is said that the middle class gets wiped out. The pieces for this to happen here are all falling into place, and have been since 1971. The only way to avoid that sort of chaos now is for Congress to immediately reduce federal spending and take the Constitution seriously again. The welfare/warfare state will end either way, but winding it down responsibly is a far better way to do it.
Monday
WHAT I THINK.......KAREN KWIATKOWSKI
The ongoing media blackout on all things Ron Paul is somewhat curious. One blogger calls the Meet the Press crowd knuckleheaded for their omissive reporting of winners and losers. Headlines blare, "Bachmann First, Pawlenty Third!" as if, by not saying Ron Paul’s name and crediting him with his earned reward, they can create an alter-reality.
Second is not first. Bachmann’s and Dr. Ron Paul’s 28.6% and 27.7%, respectively – less than a percentage apart, is a great horse race. Bachmann won by a nose, they would say. If this were the Kentucky Derby, we’d be on the edge of our seats focused entirely on Paul and Bachmann, not focusing excessively about horses at the back of the back, or those hoping to race later.
Real horse races start off at the same point in time and space. Bachmann may have had a bit of a head start in Iowa – although familiarity may also breed contempt, so the degree of that advantage is not known. The Bachmann campaign’s purchase and distribution of 6,000 straw poll voting tickets (where a third of those went uncast) also sheds real light on the fundamental power of the very different Paul strategy, and the wide and compelling appeal of his liberty, peace, and small government message.
The omission and outright denial of the intense and growing Ron Paul phenomenon is useful because it tells us many things – some we knew, and some we may not realize.
Mainstream media and the GOP itself seems to be ignoring that the Iowa Straw poll showed, for the first time in this poll’s history, a whopping 56% of the voters chose budget hawks, with a proven record of voting "No" on more borrowing. The Cut, Cap, and Balance baloney was pushed by the Republicans in Name Only on every other party member. Paul and Bachmann were among a handful that resisted. Iowa voters, in a state as heavily subsidized and dependent on federal largesse as any other state, seem to appreciate the need for Washington to spend less, borrow less, promise less, receive less.
Media analysts are also not talking about the fact that Paul and Bachmann are popular because they are seen as calmly uncompromising. In Dr. Paul’s case, we have a wise, kind and gentlemanly statesman who is always gentle in his policy rebukes, preferring to educate everyone he can on the hows and the whys of limited government. Bachmann, to her credit, promotes an image of a politician who will hold to her principles, not bend to the party elders, or to the good old boys in the House of Representatives. She has been ladylike in her reaction to a number of slights from her fellow GOP’ers, the paranoid left, and government-co-opted media. Many of the attacks on Bachmann have been sexist, related to her photogenicism, her aches and pains, her husband’s activities, and her similarities to Sarah Palin rather than whether her candidacy can be categorized as neoconservative, social conservative or populist.
The Iowa straw poll also indicates that there is major division in the GOP – conservatives in and out of the Republican Party, independents, constitutionalists and libertarians find themselves searching for representation. These people – the majority of voters in this country when taken altogether – want a kind of honest simplicity in their politicians. This majority of Americans believe that war should be fought only in defense of America, and that lobbyists, massive international banks and corporations should not be creating policy in D.C. This majority of Americans value the idea of independence and self-ownership. They also value the idea of community helping those in need. This majority of Americans want an equal opportunity on an even playing field, and I suspect, more than anything they want their money’s worth from our extremely expensive federal government. They want to know that the government won’t inflate away their entitlements, but they also want to know that their children and grandchildren will not suffer for decades of baby boomer excess now that the bills are coming due.
This may be a major reason for media and GOP silence – and outright mockery – of Ron Paul and his rock solid and growing constituency across the land. Paul’s popularity today is glaring proof of American disgust with years of Republican Party lies about their frugality, honesty, common sense, and good stewardship of the Republic. Of course, many who fell for Obama’s program in 2008 are also disgusted, and they now see that most politicians and presidents say whatever they think we wish to hear, only to conform with an inherited status quo, and willingly compromise, sit, roll and beg.
But there is another reason for the noticeable government and mainstream media silence on Ron Paul’s repeated success, and his ever-growing popularity. Ron Paul can win, and if he achieved the GOP nomination he would be our next president. Ron Paul can cut short what will otherwise be an eight-year term of Obama, and end what has been a frantic 12 year federal spending spree that will ultimately lead to serious default, renegotiation and writing down of major categories of debt, and an inflation-ravaged entitlement collapse at home. Gold, guns and survival skills, private security forces, underground food networks, and an explosion in decentralized alternate energies – along with a collapse of governing structures, services, and public schools in many rural or otherwise under populated areas – all this is coming. Leaders who understand how this future was constructed, leaders who engender trust and confidence, and leaders who can wisely and quickly oversee the federal retrenchment that must and will occur – such leaders are few and far between.
Ron Paul is such a leader. We see the field – it contains the sadly overwhelmed Obama, as arrogant, as fascist-friendly and as warlike as FDR, and all the strident Keynesians clawing to the microphone, calling themselves Republicans, and Ron Paul. Of all the men or women we could choose to gently deliver this country through its very difficult rebirth into a new constitutionalism, a new liberty, and a new era of prosperity – Ron Paul is the people’s choice. If the people were truly free to choose, they would choose Ron Paul. This is the idea that so terrifies the parasitical political class, and its media handmaids. They cannot bear to say his name. But you can trust that they are closely watching the Ron Paul revolution unfold across the country, as they nervously feed on the decimated and rotting carcass of a once proud Republic.
Second is not first. Bachmann’s and Dr. Ron Paul’s 28.6% and 27.7%, respectively – less than a percentage apart, is a great horse race. Bachmann won by a nose, they would say. If this were the Kentucky Derby, we’d be on the edge of our seats focused entirely on Paul and Bachmann, not focusing excessively about horses at the back of the back, or those hoping to race later.
Real horse races start off at the same point in time and space. Bachmann may have had a bit of a head start in Iowa – although familiarity may also breed contempt, so the degree of that advantage is not known. The Bachmann campaign’s purchase and distribution of 6,000 straw poll voting tickets (where a third of those went uncast) also sheds real light on the fundamental power of the very different Paul strategy, and the wide and compelling appeal of his liberty, peace, and small government message.
The omission and outright denial of the intense and growing Ron Paul phenomenon is useful because it tells us many things – some we knew, and some we may not realize.
Mainstream media and the GOP itself seems to be ignoring that the Iowa Straw poll showed, for the first time in this poll’s history, a whopping 56% of the voters chose budget hawks, with a proven record of voting "No" on more borrowing. The Cut, Cap, and Balance baloney was pushed by the Republicans in Name Only on every other party member. Paul and Bachmann were among a handful that resisted. Iowa voters, in a state as heavily subsidized and dependent on federal largesse as any other state, seem to appreciate the need for Washington to spend less, borrow less, promise less, receive less.
Media analysts are also not talking about the fact that Paul and Bachmann are popular because they are seen as calmly uncompromising. In Dr. Paul’s case, we have a wise, kind and gentlemanly statesman who is always gentle in his policy rebukes, preferring to educate everyone he can on the hows and the whys of limited government. Bachmann, to her credit, promotes an image of a politician who will hold to her principles, not bend to the party elders, or to the good old boys in the House of Representatives. She has been ladylike in her reaction to a number of slights from her fellow GOP’ers, the paranoid left, and government-co-opted media. Many of the attacks on Bachmann have been sexist, related to her photogenicism, her aches and pains, her husband’s activities, and her similarities to Sarah Palin rather than whether her candidacy can be categorized as neoconservative, social conservative or populist.
The Iowa straw poll also indicates that there is major division in the GOP – conservatives in and out of the Republican Party, independents, constitutionalists and libertarians find themselves searching for representation. These people – the majority of voters in this country when taken altogether – want a kind of honest simplicity in their politicians. This majority of Americans believe that war should be fought only in defense of America, and that lobbyists, massive international banks and corporations should not be creating policy in D.C. This majority of Americans value the idea of independence and self-ownership. They also value the idea of community helping those in need. This majority of Americans want an equal opportunity on an even playing field, and I suspect, more than anything they want their money’s worth from our extremely expensive federal government. They want to know that the government won’t inflate away their entitlements, but they also want to know that their children and grandchildren will not suffer for decades of baby boomer excess now that the bills are coming due.
This may be a major reason for media and GOP silence – and outright mockery – of Ron Paul and his rock solid and growing constituency across the land. Paul’s popularity today is glaring proof of American disgust with years of Republican Party lies about their frugality, honesty, common sense, and good stewardship of the Republic. Of course, many who fell for Obama’s program in 2008 are also disgusted, and they now see that most politicians and presidents say whatever they think we wish to hear, only to conform with an inherited status quo, and willingly compromise, sit, roll and beg.
But there is another reason for the noticeable government and mainstream media silence on Ron Paul’s repeated success, and his ever-growing popularity. Ron Paul can win, and if he achieved the GOP nomination he would be our next president. Ron Paul can cut short what will otherwise be an eight-year term of Obama, and end what has been a frantic 12 year federal spending spree that will ultimately lead to serious default, renegotiation and writing down of major categories of debt, and an inflation-ravaged entitlement collapse at home. Gold, guns and survival skills, private security forces, underground food networks, and an explosion in decentralized alternate energies – along with a collapse of governing structures, services, and public schools in many rural or otherwise under populated areas – all this is coming. Leaders who understand how this future was constructed, leaders who engender trust and confidence, and leaders who can wisely and quickly oversee the federal retrenchment that must and will occur – such leaders are few and far between.
Ron Paul is such a leader. We see the field – it contains the sadly overwhelmed Obama, as arrogant, as fascist-friendly and as warlike as FDR, and all the strident Keynesians clawing to the microphone, calling themselves Republicans, and Ron Paul. Of all the men or women we could choose to gently deliver this country through its very difficult rebirth into a new constitutionalism, a new liberty, and a new era of prosperity – Ron Paul is the people’s choice. If the people were truly free to choose, they would choose Ron Paul. This is the idea that so terrifies the parasitical political class, and its media handmaids. They cannot bear to say his name. But you can trust that they are closely watching the Ron Paul revolution unfold across the country, as they nervously feed on the decimated and rotting carcass of a once proud Republic.
Wednesday
SUPER CONGRESS A GIFT TO K STREET
The Super Congress created by the recent debt ceiling increase deal is a typical example of something nefarious attached to a bigger bill that is rushed through Congress without giving Members ample opportunity to consider the full ramifications. This commission may turn into an early Christmas present for the well-heeled lobbyists of K Street. This is because the commission presents a huge opportunity for lobbying firms to sneak their client's pet projects and issues into whatever legislation is created by the commission. The fact that automatic cuts to defense are named if the committee deadlocks simply signals to the military industrial complex to bring their A game to the lobbying effort.
One red flag I am constantly aware of in my position as a Congressman is that highly complex and convoluted legislation frequently has dangerous provisions hidden in the fine print. Elaborate legislative packages force lawmakers to take the bad with the good, and often if they refuse, they are accused of voting against the positive provision - never mind the blatant Constitutional violations in the bill, the spending, the waste, and the unchecked expansion of government. I don't usually have to read too much of a bill like that before encountering something unconstitutional, or simply unwise. Then I have to vote no.
That doesn't seem to be the case with a majority of legislators, unfortunately. In order to ram through one special interest's favorable treatment or giveaway, a certain amount of horse-trading is done. The end result is mammoth bills with myriads of unrelated provisions that favor those with the best lobbyists at the expense of everyone else.
The creation of a 12 member committee to preside over $1.5 trillion in spending decisions, and the exclusion of the rest of Congress also means lobbying firms can focus their efforts on an anointed few, which is certainly more manageable for them than having to deal with the entire Congress. Every cut considered will, of course, have a recipient on the other end whose livelihood is being threatened. The probable outcome is that any cuts realized will be more a function of lobbying prowess than the merits or demerits of the actual programs on the chopping block.
Make no mistake - I am enthusiastically for cutting government spending. The goal should be to eventually reduce government down to the size and scope of its constitutional limitations. However, the process of getting there must also be constitutional. Concentrating such special authority to fast track legislation affecting so many special interests to a small, select committee is nothing more than an unprecedented power grab. Only fears of an impending catastrophe could have motivated Members to allow this legislation to be rushed through Congress. The founding fathers had strong feelings about taxation without representation and under no circumstances would they have felt excluding 98% of Congress from fiscal decisions was appropriate.
I see nothing good coming out of this Super Congress. I suspect it will be highly vulnerable to corruption and special interests. No benefit can come from such careless disregard of the Founders' design.
One red flag I am constantly aware of in my position as a Congressman is that highly complex and convoluted legislation frequently has dangerous provisions hidden in the fine print. Elaborate legislative packages force lawmakers to take the bad with the good, and often if they refuse, they are accused of voting against the positive provision - never mind the blatant Constitutional violations in the bill, the spending, the waste, and the unchecked expansion of government. I don't usually have to read too much of a bill like that before encountering something unconstitutional, or simply unwise. Then I have to vote no.
That doesn't seem to be the case with a majority of legislators, unfortunately. In order to ram through one special interest's favorable treatment or giveaway, a certain amount of horse-trading is done. The end result is mammoth bills with myriads of unrelated provisions that favor those with the best lobbyists at the expense of everyone else.
The creation of a 12 member committee to preside over $1.5 trillion in spending decisions, and the exclusion of the rest of Congress also means lobbying firms can focus their efforts on an anointed few, which is certainly more manageable for them than having to deal with the entire Congress. Every cut considered will, of course, have a recipient on the other end whose livelihood is being threatened. The probable outcome is that any cuts realized will be more a function of lobbying prowess than the merits or demerits of the actual programs on the chopping block.
Make no mistake - I am enthusiastically for cutting government spending. The goal should be to eventually reduce government down to the size and scope of its constitutional limitations. However, the process of getting there must also be constitutional. Concentrating such special authority to fast track legislation affecting so many special interests to a small, select committee is nothing more than an unprecedented power grab. Only fears of an impending catastrophe could have motivated Members to allow this legislation to be rushed through Congress. The founding fathers had strong feelings about taxation without representation and under no circumstances would they have felt excluding 98% of Congress from fiscal decisions was appropriate.
I see nothing good coming out of this Super Congress. I suspect it will be highly vulnerable to corruption and special interests. No benefit can come from such careless disregard of the Founders' design.
Thursday
WHAT I THINK......CRAIG WHITE
In the May 6 debate among Republican candidates in South Carolina, the moderator got a good laugh when he put the following question to Ron Paul:
"Congressman Paul, you say that the federal government should stay out of people’s personal habits. You say marijuana, cocaine, even heroine, should be legal if states want to permit it. You feel the same about prostitution and gay marriage. Question, sir: why should social conservatives in South Carolina vote for you for President?"
Before looking at Paul’s answer, let’s consider where social conservatives stand in their political battle. Most, but not all, are political conservatives as well (although that term may be difficult to define). Since the consciences of evangelical Christians were touched by legalized abortion in the 1970s, in national politics, the politically conservative majority of social conservatives have had one big target, one political fortress they have stormed every four years: the presidency. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but every four years they take up weapons and armor and go into battle. The war plan since the late 1970s has been: elect a conservative Republican president, who will nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Seeing that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional, the eventual conservative majority on the Court will someday overturn Roe v. Wade. Win at the top, and force the rest of the country to go along. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, many social conservatives have hoped for what Ronald Reagan called for: a smaller federal government with less of a role in American life.
Let’s be frank: while there have been some social conservative successes in changing people’s minds (more Americans now call themselves "pro-life," for example), and some little political victories here and there, overall, the political strategy is just not working. From abortion to gay marriage to federalism, it has been a long, slow, rolling defeat for social conservatives. The justices nominated by Republican presidents have been the greatest disappointment. Very few of these have shown any sign of wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade. Even if they had, judging by the last three decades, the American people as a whole are not really interested in leaving a Republican in the White House for long enough for the strategy to work. At the rate we are going, 200 years from now there will not be a "conservative" majority on the Court on abortion or other social issues – and if there were at some point, there would be a new "liberal" majority soon after, which would reverse it.
The old conservative slogan of getting the government (meaning for most the federal government) off people’s backs wasn’t even put into action by Ronald Reagan: the government grew during his eight years. The idea was quietly abandoned by the first George Bush, Reagan’s heir, who made it clear that to him, more freedom and less government was not "kind and gentle." The second George Bush even made "big government conservatism" a thinkable slogan rather than an oxymoron.
After some 35 years of social conservative support for the Republican Party on the federal level, we have a gigantic government, with an enormous military and immense entitlement programs. That government is so deep in debt that our national fiscal credibility was recently questioned even by official rating agencies. (The debt crisis "fix" has done nothing about that problem.) Our government shows no sign of reversing Roe v. Wade on abortion or holding the line on traditional marriage. Our currency is incredibly debased. For over 20 years it has been impossible for poor or middle class people to actually save money, since the interest rate offered doesn’t even keep up with official inflation (and we continue to be taxed on interest, as if it were "income" rather than an attempt to keep up with government-produced shrinkage of the underlying currency in our bank accounts and our pockets). Since the 1970s, real wages have not risen. Manipulated low interest rates led to the now-burst bubble in the only realistic hope for middle class people to stay even with inflation, their housing. The economy and the tax system appear to be rigged in favor of hedge fund managers and big bank CEOs, who, when crisis strikes, get rescued and bonused-up while the middle class gets foreclosed. In short, from a social or traditional conservative point of view, the last few decades have been a scarcely-mitigated disaster.
Yet can someone like Ron Paul really hope for support from social conservatives? After all, social conservatives have a reputation for favoring the kind of approach Michelle Bachman signed up for recently in Iowa with "The Marriage Vow." The basic idea in that pledge is to defend Christian values and encourage Christian virtues through legislation, or constitutional amendments, that will cover the entire United States. To put it another way, they want to increase the power of the Federal government, while Ron Paul wants to slash it. The moderator in that debate got a good laugh because his question resonated. Social conservatives, at least since the late 1970s, are known for approaching the political battlefield the way Wellington approached Napoleon at Waterloo: with the declared intention of decisively defeating their enemies and sending them into exile.
Paul responded to the question about marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. with an answer that is unusual on the American political scene, but one based in the very earliest American approach to politics: it’s about liberty. "They will [support me] if they understand my defense of liberty is the defense of their right to practice their religion and say their prayers where they want and practice their life." We have to "protect liberty across the board," without "inconsistency." "If not, you’re going to end up with government that’s going to tell us what we can eat, and drink, and whatever." To this, he added another note that ought to appeal to social conservatives: an appeal to personal responsibility. "How many people here would use heroine if it was legal? I’ll bet nobody would put their hand up. ‘Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroine, so I need these laws.’"
In his short, time-pressured answer, Paul also hinted at but did not express what is really the heart of his approach to politics in the United States. That approach might appeal to social conservatives if they would really consider it. First, responding to the words "federal government" in the question, he used the phrase, "if I leave it to the states, it’s going to be up to the states." Packed into this handful of words is the fact that Ron Paul is a consistent constitutionalist. Here is where Paul is unique: unlike some maverick who grumbles like Ross Perot that we are "off track" somehow, Paul is both a seasoned politician and a consistent thinker and writer with a track record that goes back decades. When he argues that we should go back to the Constitution, he has thought that through even into the details, he means it, and he will talk about it, third rails and all.
In effect, Paul offers a deeply divided electorate a startling compromise: a return to the U.S. Constitution. That compromise could win votes of social conservatives and liberals alike, if he can persuade them that the federal government cannot afford most of what it is doing, and that returning to the Constitution would both save the country from drowning in debt, and leave each state free to make its own choices on most issues. That was, after all, the public aim of the Founders.
The original aim of the writers of the Constitution, written into the document itself, was an amazingly restricted federal government. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is a very short list of areas in which the Congress is meant to be able to legislate – and the President’s job is to execute the laws, which, again, cover a very few areas. Arguing for the ratification of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton insisted that the State governments would do far more of the day-to-day work of governing than the federal government, because the federal government’s scope was so limited. Madison poured contempt, in Federalist Papers no. 41, on those who claimed that the "general welfare" clause meant that the legislative powers of the federal government were unlimited, rather than confined to the skeletal list in Article I, Section 8. His scathing attack on this idea begins, "No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction." Both he and Hamilton assumed throughout the Federalist Papers that the Constitution was written in plain English that normal educated persons could understand, and that the job of the courts ("beyond comparison the weakest" of the three branches of government, wrote Hamilton in no. 78) would be simply to interpret it – not to help it "evolve" to fit a people with evolving ideas (that was the job of the people through the amendment process, not the courts). They also insisted, again and again, that the proposed federal government had limited, defined powers – and actually reading that list in Article I, Section 8 explains how Hamilton could argue with a straight face (in no. 84) that the proposed Constitution would save the people of the United States money, by giving them a cheaper government, considering the state and federal levels together, than they had under the Articles of Confederation.
That shows up the problem with the big strategy of the majority of social conservatives, who expect a conservative president to appoint judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds: what about the New Deal, the Great Society, the War on Drugs, and the undeclared foreign wars of the last 60 years? What about the vast body of Federal legislation that has nothing to do with the short list in Article I, Section 8? What about the Patriot Act? None of these are any more constitutional in terms of the clear original intent of the text and those who ratified it than the basically unlimited abortion right proclaimed in Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions. (The moderator’s question would have been unthinkable to social conservatives in 1788: no one dreamed the federal government would ever get involved in such issues, or would dare to do so without amending the Constitution.) Social conservatives who want to eat their cake and have it too, who think they can get Roe v. Wade overturned on constitutional grounds, but leave the rest of these programs and activities untouched, are either ignorant of the text and original understanding of the Constitution, or deluding themselves, or indulging in rank hypocrisy. If they are intelligent and know any history, it looks like the latter.
The rest of the conservative candidates, and almost all conservative leaders, seem stuck with that "hypocrite" label regarding the Constitution. In that document’s name, they thunder against programs they don’t like, without revealing that they have no intention of dismantling the unconstitutional programs (or stop getting into unconstitutional undeclared wars) that they do like. They appear eager and willing to share the "constitutional hypocrite" label with their supporters. Paul, however, offers an escape from hypocrisy: a consistent originalist approach to the Constitution (as amended, of course). On those grounds, he would begin to put an end to the entire federal welfare and entitlement apparatus, all of which are outside the arena of the powers of Congress as listed in Article I, Section 8. Paul has stated that such programs must be brought to an end completely, but in a gradual way, so as to minimize harm those who have built their lives around them.
Note that this is a far more specific, and sweeping, promise to cut government than Ronald Reagan ever made, and that Paul has the credentials, beyond any other conservative politician, to prove his sincerity on this issue. For decades, he has not voted in favor of programs he believes are unconstitutional (his yes votes are rare indeed). He wants the states and churches and other voluntary organizations to take up the slack, gradually, as the federal government lets go, in anti-poverty efforts – using the money that would be left in their pockets due to a Federalist Papers-sized federal government. He wants individuals to save for their own retirement, and look after their own families. That ought to warm the hearts of social conservatives, and set those of small government conservatives on fire. No other conservative politician is anywhere near this constitutional consistency and credibility on the issue of a smaller federal government. And by the way, on abortion, Paul is on the record calling for Congress to exercise its power, granted in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, to exclude the Supreme Court from appellate jurisdiction on the issue, moving it right back to where it was in January 1973, with the states.
Why would anyone on the left, or middle-of-the-road independents, vote for such a program? For two possible reasons: first, the other half of this constitutional consistency concerns the power to declare war, which the Constitution gives to Congress, not the President. As Tom Woods points out, George Washington and many subsequent American presidents understood that they could order the armed forces to defend themselves or America’s territory, but anything beyond that required them to go to Congress for a declaration of war – that they had no power to start wars, only to lead them after Congress started them. This is, in fact, the only serious originalist approach to the text of the Constitution. Whenever Democrats or Republicans have promised to end the wars in recent years, they have forgotten the pledge when they got the power. Left-wing or independent Americans who are tired of seeing their armed forces involved in endless, undeclared wars, and tired of seeing that no vote seems to change that, might just jump at the chance to vote for someone who really would bring the troops home, even if it meant they would have to shift efforts to have government take care of poverty, or to sculpt society as they wish, to the state level. One left-of-center
American who has made that choice is Robin Koerner, who recently called for Democrats who care about "peace and civil liberty" to become "Blue Republicans" for a year and vote for Ron Paul.
Second, more and more Americans, including many independents, appear to be realizing that the government’s official commitments are far beyond its ability to pay in today’s dollars (battered as those are compared to those of even, say, ten years ago). Many of these same Americans realize that the government has a tempting "stealth" escape: gradual further debasement of our money will enable the government to pay its commitments, in money with the same numbers and presidents’ faces, but with vastly reduced value. Creating digital dollars in the trillions with nothing to back them is guaranteed in and of itself to make everything in the world more expensive in dollar terms, but the government can blame oil producers or other wicked foreigners, or greedy corporations, for what it is doing itself. Given the size of entitlements (along with the Pentagon budget), the government’s clear inability to pay them, the Federal Reserve’s full control over ex nihilo currency creation, and the average American’s lack of economic sophistication, who can believe the government is likely (or will want) to resist this sneaky escape from insolvency? Independent voters who see these facts may decide that getting the federal government out from under its crushing obligations honestly is the only approach with a hope of avoiding economic catastrophe.
That leaves one horsefly in the milk jug, from the social conservative point of view: their enthusiasm for military action abroad clashes with Paul’s "non-interventionism" pretty badly. Perhaps Paul’s approach is impossible for them to swallow. There are several arguments in favor of change that social conservatives might heed, however. First, non-intervention is the original foreign policy of the United States. This is the clear message of Washington’s farewell address. It was restated in glowing words by our fifth president, John Quincy Adams: "wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Adams continued that an America that used force to change the world for the better would gradually lose her own virtues, gaining instead "an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished luster the murky radiance of dominion and power." Adams, repeating the wisdom of his parents’ generation, the Founders, believed in American "exceptionalism" all right, but not in American power to impose its ways on the world. Like the Founders, he also didn’t believe exceptionalism was guaranteed to last, and impervious to our actions. Even Dwight Eisenhower, hardly a lily-livered liberal, warned Americans of the dangers of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex. This is a current in American thought that was the mainstream for centuries, and perhaps some social conservatives can bring themselves to see it as such. Next, they might even read fellow social conservatives such as Andrew Bacevich for a different perspective on what our military forces are doing and achieving beyond our shores. According to CIA expert Michael Scheuer, the former head of the bin Ladin unit (and no pacifist!), it is not true that "we're hated because of our freedoms…in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world." Attacks on a non-interventionist U.S. would likely shrink to the level of attacks on, say, Switzerland. (If they hate us for our freedom, why aren’t they attacking the Swiss?)
Social conservatives might also consider my own exhaustive, non-partisan argument in Iraq: the Moral Reckoning that launching the U.S. war in Iraq was unjust according to just war theory. A variety of well-known religious conservatives, including Chuck Colson, Richard Land, George Weigel, Robert George, and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (RIP), all made brief defenses of the justice of that war before it was launched in 2003. However, there has been little or no serious acknowledgement of the other side of the argument, at least by pro-war religious conservatives. It is true that many of the opponents of the war were "liberals" or even radicals in American terms – but arguments deserve to be heard, no matter where they come from. In the scholastic tradition of the high Middle Ages, no important thesis was considered safely proven until it had been "chewed in the jaws" of a rational disputation. Thomas Aquinas found the best objections available to his own ideas, published them with his ideas, and answered them. Surely the best traditions of social conservatives include a careful look at opposing arguments, and an attempt to answer them. So far, my arguments, far more extensive than any arguing that the Iraq war was just, have not been addressed by those who disagree with me. Some social conservative ought to do it – he or she might even find that my arguments change minds.
But finally, perhaps social conservatives will consider today’s situation in the light of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Under the Articles of Confederation, taxes were not collected, the bills were not getting paid, and the loose coalition of basically independent states was not getting a lot of respect in the wider world. For a long list of rather ordinary kinds of decisions, the votes of nine out of thirteen states were necessary, and no amendment of the Articles was possible without the states’ unanimous consent. The larger states, like New York and Virginia, were fed up with their inability to over-ride smaller states’ insistence on the status quo in everything that worked in their favor, and wanted a legislature that reflected the population of the states. Smaller states, on the other hand, saw no reason to give up the "one state-one vote" situation. Rhode Island, which was infamous for this approach, had even boycotted the Convention for fear it had nothing to gain from any change. Deadlock seemed cemented into place. When the Convention had come to a standstill, the Great Compromise of 1787 was suggested by the Connecticut delegation: the lower house of the new congress, with certain powers, would provide delegates to each state based on its population, but the upper house, with a different set of powers, would provide equal representation for each state. When the situation seemed impossible, everyone gave something up, and a compromise provided a way forward.
Ron Paul offers the country a unique compromise, a return to constitutional government. The situation is perhaps even more deadlocked than that of 1787. From the perspective of the Founders’ design, our federal government is a flagrantly unconstitutional, bankrupt Leviathan, controlling huge swathes of our lives, trying to control much of the world as well, and spending our great great grandchildren’s notional money to do it. Social conservatives are not changing American minds in large numbers on domestic issues. On foreign policy, their affection for maintaining and expanding military action abroad seems like a major electoral handicap in light of the sweeping election victory of Barack Obama, the only major candidate who had openly opposed the Iraq war. For 2012, one more conservative candidate who offers Americans even more government control over their lives, with more toughness abroad and more national coercion on moral issues, is unlikely even to win the Republican nomination (consider the "moderate" Bushes and McCain). Such a candidate will be a hypocrite on the Constitution – surely an important consideration. If he or she somehow wins the nomination, and somehow wins the general election as well, Americans are almost sure to divide their votes so as to frustrate him or her with a Democratic congress. There are millions of non-theist (or theist but pragmatic) Americans who strongly disagree with social conservatives on what ought to be illegal. Thus, in the best business-as-usual scenario social conservatives are likely to get, the nation would also keep its "imperial diadem," with its "murky radiance of dominion and power," if John Quincy Adams is to be believed. At home, the moral issues stalemate would continue, and the debt burden would go on growing.
Given this choice, might social conservatives consider Ron Paul’s Great Compromise of 2012, a return to constitutional government? Consider again the details: a massive tax cut for all, the end of the death of the dollar by a trillion cuts, and a return of real saving by ordinary Americans. A gradual transfer of almost all the assumed, unconstitutional powers and burdens of the federal government back to the states and the people. A truly defensive "Defense Department." (Under Paul, it might even get back its old, honest name of the War Department.) Liberals would have to give up social engineering on the national level. Due to democracy itself, liberals could work in each state to make it whatever kind of left-leaning welfare state they liked, but social conservatives could go on fighting them on the state level, and could also work in conservative states for whatever laws they liked. New York and California might end up with gay marriage and easy abortion – not much of a change there. Texas or South Carolina, though, might ban them both – a big change. Radicals on the left and right would suffer an end to American attempts to reshape the world – but realists would at least get an American government that would not go broke. Might social conservatives decide it sounds like 1787?
If they don’t, it appears likely Paul will do better than last time around, perhaps far better, but still fall short of the Republican nomination or the presidency. In that case, the political status quo will almost surely continue, with either a Republican or a Democratic nominal head. We will continue to live under what Bacevich calls Washington Rules, a phrase that could describe our domestic as well as foreign policies. Social conservatives will get full-throated pledges of allegiance from Republican candidates, "Tea Party" and otherwise, but, based on decades of evidence…not much else. And perhaps we will stumble down Status Quo Road for another decade or two, the dollar’s decline will gradually halt, and tens of trillions of dollars of misbegotten debt will gradually work themselves out of our system (as in Japan?). Perhaps we will "grow our way out" of our problems, perhaps with tax cuts! If so, we will all forget about that foolish false prophet Ron Paul. But if investors like Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, and Peter Schiff, who predicted the current credit crisis, are right, we will either shrink the welfare/warfare state, or it and its mountain of debts will shrink our economy, soon.
Social conservatives who have hitched your wagon to political conservatism in America: You can’t get everything you might like, you really can’t. You are not a majority in today’s America. If you insist on going for victory, like Wellington at Waterloo, you will instead get the status quo one more time: the independents, the leftists, and the middle-of-the-roaders will throw their weight against you, and all together they outnumber you by a mile. Standard political conservative candidates, if they win, will throw war and some rhetoric in your direction, but not domestic substance. But four more years of the status quo might prove the final straw. Is it time for a new Great Compromise?
"Congressman Paul, you say that the federal government should stay out of people’s personal habits. You say marijuana, cocaine, even heroine, should be legal if states want to permit it. You feel the same about prostitution and gay marriage. Question, sir: why should social conservatives in South Carolina vote for you for President?"
Before looking at Paul’s answer, let’s consider where social conservatives stand in their political battle. Most, but not all, are political conservatives as well (although that term may be difficult to define). Since the consciences of evangelical Christians were touched by legalized abortion in the 1970s, in national politics, the politically conservative majority of social conservatives have had one big target, one political fortress they have stormed every four years: the presidency. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but every four years they take up weapons and armor and go into battle. The war plan since the late 1970s has been: elect a conservative Republican president, who will nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Seeing that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional, the eventual conservative majority on the Court will someday overturn Roe v. Wade. Win at the top, and force the rest of the country to go along. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, many social conservatives have hoped for what Ronald Reagan called for: a smaller federal government with less of a role in American life.
Let’s be frank: while there have been some social conservative successes in changing people’s minds (more Americans now call themselves "pro-life," for example), and some little political victories here and there, overall, the political strategy is just not working. From abortion to gay marriage to federalism, it has been a long, slow, rolling defeat for social conservatives. The justices nominated by Republican presidents have been the greatest disappointment. Very few of these have shown any sign of wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade. Even if they had, judging by the last three decades, the American people as a whole are not really interested in leaving a Republican in the White House for long enough for the strategy to work. At the rate we are going, 200 years from now there will not be a "conservative" majority on the Court on abortion or other social issues – and if there were at some point, there would be a new "liberal" majority soon after, which would reverse it.
The old conservative slogan of getting the government (meaning for most the federal government) off people’s backs wasn’t even put into action by Ronald Reagan: the government grew during his eight years. The idea was quietly abandoned by the first George Bush, Reagan’s heir, who made it clear that to him, more freedom and less government was not "kind and gentle." The second George Bush even made "big government conservatism" a thinkable slogan rather than an oxymoron.
After some 35 years of social conservative support for the Republican Party on the federal level, we have a gigantic government, with an enormous military and immense entitlement programs. That government is so deep in debt that our national fiscal credibility was recently questioned even by official rating agencies. (The debt crisis "fix" has done nothing about that problem.) Our government shows no sign of reversing Roe v. Wade on abortion or holding the line on traditional marriage. Our currency is incredibly debased. For over 20 years it has been impossible for poor or middle class people to actually save money, since the interest rate offered doesn’t even keep up with official inflation (and we continue to be taxed on interest, as if it were "income" rather than an attempt to keep up with government-produced shrinkage of the underlying currency in our bank accounts and our pockets). Since the 1970s, real wages have not risen. Manipulated low interest rates led to the now-burst bubble in the only realistic hope for middle class people to stay even with inflation, their housing. The economy and the tax system appear to be rigged in favor of hedge fund managers and big bank CEOs, who, when crisis strikes, get rescued and bonused-up while the middle class gets foreclosed. In short, from a social or traditional conservative point of view, the last few decades have been a scarcely-mitigated disaster.
Yet can someone like Ron Paul really hope for support from social conservatives? After all, social conservatives have a reputation for favoring the kind of approach Michelle Bachman signed up for recently in Iowa with "The Marriage Vow." The basic idea in that pledge is to defend Christian values and encourage Christian virtues through legislation, or constitutional amendments, that will cover the entire United States. To put it another way, they want to increase the power of the Federal government, while Ron Paul wants to slash it. The moderator in that debate got a good laugh because his question resonated. Social conservatives, at least since the late 1970s, are known for approaching the political battlefield the way Wellington approached Napoleon at Waterloo: with the declared intention of decisively defeating their enemies and sending them into exile.
Paul responded to the question about marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. with an answer that is unusual on the American political scene, but one based in the very earliest American approach to politics: it’s about liberty. "They will [support me] if they understand my defense of liberty is the defense of their right to practice their religion and say their prayers where they want and practice their life." We have to "protect liberty across the board," without "inconsistency." "If not, you’re going to end up with government that’s going to tell us what we can eat, and drink, and whatever." To this, he added another note that ought to appeal to social conservatives: an appeal to personal responsibility. "How many people here would use heroine if it was legal? I’ll bet nobody would put their hand up. ‘Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroine, so I need these laws.’"
In his short, time-pressured answer, Paul also hinted at but did not express what is really the heart of his approach to politics in the United States. That approach might appeal to social conservatives if they would really consider it. First, responding to the words "federal government" in the question, he used the phrase, "if I leave it to the states, it’s going to be up to the states." Packed into this handful of words is the fact that Ron Paul is a consistent constitutionalist. Here is where Paul is unique: unlike some maverick who grumbles like Ross Perot that we are "off track" somehow, Paul is both a seasoned politician and a consistent thinker and writer with a track record that goes back decades. When he argues that we should go back to the Constitution, he has thought that through even into the details, he means it, and he will talk about it, third rails and all.
In effect, Paul offers a deeply divided electorate a startling compromise: a return to the U.S. Constitution. That compromise could win votes of social conservatives and liberals alike, if he can persuade them that the federal government cannot afford most of what it is doing, and that returning to the Constitution would both save the country from drowning in debt, and leave each state free to make its own choices on most issues. That was, after all, the public aim of the Founders.
The original aim of the writers of the Constitution, written into the document itself, was an amazingly restricted federal government. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is a very short list of areas in which the Congress is meant to be able to legislate – and the President’s job is to execute the laws, which, again, cover a very few areas. Arguing for the ratification of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton insisted that the State governments would do far more of the day-to-day work of governing than the federal government, because the federal government’s scope was so limited. Madison poured contempt, in Federalist Papers no. 41, on those who claimed that the "general welfare" clause meant that the legislative powers of the federal government were unlimited, rather than confined to the skeletal list in Article I, Section 8. His scathing attack on this idea begins, "No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction." Both he and Hamilton assumed throughout the Federalist Papers that the Constitution was written in plain English that normal educated persons could understand, and that the job of the courts ("beyond comparison the weakest" of the three branches of government, wrote Hamilton in no. 78) would be simply to interpret it – not to help it "evolve" to fit a people with evolving ideas (that was the job of the people through the amendment process, not the courts). They also insisted, again and again, that the proposed federal government had limited, defined powers – and actually reading that list in Article I, Section 8 explains how Hamilton could argue with a straight face (in no. 84) that the proposed Constitution would save the people of the United States money, by giving them a cheaper government, considering the state and federal levels together, than they had under the Articles of Confederation.
That shows up the problem with the big strategy of the majority of social conservatives, who expect a conservative president to appoint judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds: what about the New Deal, the Great Society, the War on Drugs, and the undeclared foreign wars of the last 60 years? What about the vast body of Federal legislation that has nothing to do with the short list in Article I, Section 8? What about the Patriot Act? None of these are any more constitutional in terms of the clear original intent of the text and those who ratified it than the basically unlimited abortion right proclaimed in Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions. (The moderator’s question would have been unthinkable to social conservatives in 1788: no one dreamed the federal government would ever get involved in such issues, or would dare to do so without amending the Constitution.) Social conservatives who want to eat their cake and have it too, who think they can get Roe v. Wade overturned on constitutional grounds, but leave the rest of these programs and activities untouched, are either ignorant of the text and original understanding of the Constitution, or deluding themselves, or indulging in rank hypocrisy. If they are intelligent and know any history, it looks like the latter.
The rest of the conservative candidates, and almost all conservative leaders, seem stuck with that "hypocrite" label regarding the Constitution. In that document’s name, they thunder against programs they don’t like, without revealing that they have no intention of dismantling the unconstitutional programs (or stop getting into unconstitutional undeclared wars) that they do like. They appear eager and willing to share the "constitutional hypocrite" label with their supporters. Paul, however, offers an escape from hypocrisy: a consistent originalist approach to the Constitution (as amended, of course). On those grounds, he would begin to put an end to the entire federal welfare and entitlement apparatus, all of which are outside the arena of the powers of Congress as listed in Article I, Section 8. Paul has stated that such programs must be brought to an end completely, but in a gradual way, so as to minimize harm those who have built their lives around them.
Note that this is a far more specific, and sweeping, promise to cut government than Ronald Reagan ever made, and that Paul has the credentials, beyond any other conservative politician, to prove his sincerity on this issue. For decades, he has not voted in favor of programs he believes are unconstitutional (his yes votes are rare indeed). He wants the states and churches and other voluntary organizations to take up the slack, gradually, as the federal government lets go, in anti-poverty efforts – using the money that would be left in their pockets due to a Federalist Papers-sized federal government. He wants individuals to save for their own retirement, and look after their own families. That ought to warm the hearts of social conservatives, and set those of small government conservatives on fire. No other conservative politician is anywhere near this constitutional consistency and credibility on the issue of a smaller federal government. And by the way, on abortion, Paul is on the record calling for Congress to exercise its power, granted in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, to exclude the Supreme Court from appellate jurisdiction on the issue, moving it right back to where it was in January 1973, with the states.
Why would anyone on the left, or middle-of-the-road independents, vote for such a program? For two possible reasons: first, the other half of this constitutional consistency concerns the power to declare war, which the Constitution gives to Congress, not the President. As Tom Woods points out, George Washington and many subsequent American presidents understood that they could order the armed forces to defend themselves or America’s territory, but anything beyond that required them to go to Congress for a declaration of war – that they had no power to start wars, only to lead them after Congress started them. This is, in fact, the only serious originalist approach to the text of the Constitution. Whenever Democrats or Republicans have promised to end the wars in recent years, they have forgotten the pledge when they got the power. Left-wing or independent Americans who are tired of seeing their armed forces involved in endless, undeclared wars, and tired of seeing that no vote seems to change that, might just jump at the chance to vote for someone who really would bring the troops home, even if it meant they would have to shift efforts to have government take care of poverty, or to sculpt society as they wish, to the state level. One left-of-center
American who has made that choice is Robin Koerner, who recently called for Democrats who care about "peace and civil liberty" to become "Blue Republicans" for a year and vote for Ron Paul.
Second, more and more Americans, including many independents, appear to be realizing that the government’s official commitments are far beyond its ability to pay in today’s dollars (battered as those are compared to those of even, say, ten years ago). Many of these same Americans realize that the government has a tempting "stealth" escape: gradual further debasement of our money will enable the government to pay its commitments, in money with the same numbers and presidents’ faces, but with vastly reduced value. Creating digital dollars in the trillions with nothing to back them is guaranteed in and of itself to make everything in the world more expensive in dollar terms, but the government can blame oil producers or other wicked foreigners, or greedy corporations, for what it is doing itself. Given the size of entitlements (along with the Pentagon budget), the government’s clear inability to pay them, the Federal Reserve’s full control over ex nihilo currency creation, and the average American’s lack of economic sophistication, who can believe the government is likely (or will want) to resist this sneaky escape from insolvency? Independent voters who see these facts may decide that getting the federal government out from under its crushing obligations honestly is the only approach with a hope of avoiding economic catastrophe.
That leaves one horsefly in the milk jug, from the social conservative point of view: their enthusiasm for military action abroad clashes with Paul’s "non-interventionism" pretty badly. Perhaps Paul’s approach is impossible for them to swallow. There are several arguments in favor of change that social conservatives might heed, however. First, non-intervention is the original foreign policy of the United States. This is the clear message of Washington’s farewell address. It was restated in glowing words by our fifth president, John Quincy Adams: "wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Adams continued that an America that used force to change the world for the better would gradually lose her own virtues, gaining instead "an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished luster the murky radiance of dominion and power." Adams, repeating the wisdom of his parents’ generation, the Founders, believed in American "exceptionalism" all right, but not in American power to impose its ways on the world. Like the Founders, he also didn’t believe exceptionalism was guaranteed to last, and impervious to our actions. Even Dwight Eisenhower, hardly a lily-livered liberal, warned Americans of the dangers of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex. This is a current in American thought that was the mainstream for centuries, and perhaps some social conservatives can bring themselves to see it as such. Next, they might even read fellow social conservatives such as Andrew Bacevich for a different perspective on what our military forces are doing and achieving beyond our shores. According to CIA expert Michael Scheuer, the former head of the bin Ladin unit (and no pacifist!), it is not true that "we're hated because of our freedoms…in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world." Attacks on a non-interventionist U.S. would likely shrink to the level of attacks on, say, Switzerland. (If they hate us for our freedom, why aren’t they attacking the Swiss?)
Social conservatives might also consider my own exhaustive, non-partisan argument in Iraq: the Moral Reckoning that launching the U.S. war in Iraq was unjust according to just war theory. A variety of well-known religious conservatives, including Chuck Colson, Richard Land, George Weigel, Robert George, and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (RIP), all made brief defenses of the justice of that war before it was launched in 2003. However, there has been little or no serious acknowledgement of the other side of the argument, at least by pro-war religious conservatives. It is true that many of the opponents of the war were "liberals" or even radicals in American terms – but arguments deserve to be heard, no matter where they come from. In the scholastic tradition of the high Middle Ages, no important thesis was considered safely proven until it had been "chewed in the jaws" of a rational disputation. Thomas Aquinas found the best objections available to his own ideas, published them with his ideas, and answered them. Surely the best traditions of social conservatives include a careful look at opposing arguments, and an attempt to answer them. So far, my arguments, far more extensive than any arguing that the Iraq war was just, have not been addressed by those who disagree with me. Some social conservative ought to do it – he or she might even find that my arguments change minds.
But finally, perhaps social conservatives will consider today’s situation in the light of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Under the Articles of Confederation, taxes were not collected, the bills were not getting paid, and the loose coalition of basically independent states was not getting a lot of respect in the wider world. For a long list of rather ordinary kinds of decisions, the votes of nine out of thirteen states were necessary, and no amendment of the Articles was possible without the states’ unanimous consent. The larger states, like New York and Virginia, were fed up with their inability to over-ride smaller states’ insistence on the status quo in everything that worked in their favor, and wanted a legislature that reflected the population of the states. Smaller states, on the other hand, saw no reason to give up the "one state-one vote" situation. Rhode Island, which was infamous for this approach, had even boycotted the Convention for fear it had nothing to gain from any change. Deadlock seemed cemented into place. When the Convention had come to a standstill, the Great Compromise of 1787 was suggested by the Connecticut delegation: the lower house of the new congress, with certain powers, would provide delegates to each state based on its population, but the upper house, with a different set of powers, would provide equal representation for each state. When the situation seemed impossible, everyone gave something up, and a compromise provided a way forward.
Ron Paul offers the country a unique compromise, a return to constitutional government. The situation is perhaps even more deadlocked than that of 1787. From the perspective of the Founders’ design, our federal government is a flagrantly unconstitutional, bankrupt Leviathan, controlling huge swathes of our lives, trying to control much of the world as well, and spending our great great grandchildren’s notional money to do it. Social conservatives are not changing American minds in large numbers on domestic issues. On foreign policy, their affection for maintaining and expanding military action abroad seems like a major electoral handicap in light of the sweeping election victory of Barack Obama, the only major candidate who had openly opposed the Iraq war. For 2012, one more conservative candidate who offers Americans even more government control over their lives, with more toughness abroad and more national coercion on moral issues, is unlikely even to win the Republican nomination (consider the "moderate" Bushes and McCain). Such a candidate will be a hypocrite on the Constitution – surely an important consideration. If he or she somehow wins the nomination, and somehow wins the general election as well, Americans are almost sure to divide their votes so as to frustrate him or her with a Democratic congress. There are millions of non-theist (or theist but pragmatic) Americans who strongly disagree with social conservatives on what ought to be illegal. Thus, in the best business-as-usual scenario social conservatives are likely to get, the nation would also keep its "imperial diadem," with its "murky radiance of dominion and power," if John Quincy Adams is to be believed. At home, the moral issues stalemate would continue, and the debt burden would go on growing.
Given this choice, might social conservatives consider Ron Paul’s Great Compromise of 2012, a return to constitutional government? Consider again the details: a massive tax cut for all, the end of the death of the dollar by a trillion cuts, and a return of real saving by ordinary Americans. A gradual transfer of almost all the assumed, unconstitutional powers and burdens of the federal government back to the states and the people. A truly defensive "Defense Department." (Under Paul, it might even get back its old, honest name of the War Department.) Liberals would have to give up social engineering on the national level. Due to democracy itself, liberals could work in each state to make it whatever kind of left-leaning welfare state they liked, but social conservatives could go on fighting them on the state level, and could also work in conservative states for whatever laws they liked. New York and California might end up with gay marriage and easy abortion – not much of a change there. Texas or South Carolina, though, might ban them both – a big change. Radicals on the left and right would suffer an end to American attempts to reshape the world – but realists would at least get an American government that would not go broke. Might social conservatives decide it sounds like 1787?
If they don’t, it appears likely Paul will do better than last time around, perhaps far better, but still fall short of the Republican nomination or the presidency. In that case, the political status quo will almost surely continue, with either a Republican or a Democratic nominal head. We will continue to live under what Bacevich calls Washington Rules, a phrase that could describe our domestic as well as foreign policies. Social conservatives will get full-throated pledges of allegiance from Republican candidates, "Tea Party" and otherwise, but, based on decades of evidence…not much else. And perhaps we will stumble down Status Quo Road for another decade or two, the dollar’s decline will gradually halt, and tens of trillions of dollars of misbegotten debt will gradually work themselves out of our system (as in Japan?). Perhaps we will "grow our way out" of our problems, perhaps with tax cuts! If so, we will all forget about that foolish false prophet Ron Paul. But if investors like Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, and Peter Schiff, who predicted the current credit crisis, are right, we will either shrink the welfare/warfare state, or it and its mountain of debts will shrink our economy, soon.
Social conservatives who have hitched your wagon to political conservatism in America: You can’t get everything you might like, you really can’t. You are not a majority in today’s America. If you insist on going for victory, like Wellington at Waterloo, you will instead get the status quo one more time: the independents, the leftists, and the middle-of-the-roaders will throw their weight against you, and all together they outnumber you by a mile. Standard political conservative candidates, if they win, will throw war and some rhetoric in your direction, but not domestic substance. But four more years of the status quo might prove the final straw. Is it time for a new Great Compromise?
Tuesday
WHEN A CUT IS NOT A CUT
One might think that the recent drama over the debt ceiling involves one side wanting to increase or maintain spending with the other side wanting to drastically cut spending, but that is far from the truth. In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real debate is over how much government spending will increase.
No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the "cuts" being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family "saving" $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth about their unrepentant plundering of the American people.
The truth is that frightening rhetoric about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite of stagnant revenues. If your family's income did not change year over year, would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely suggesting a different list of purchases than the other.
In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of "cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut". It would only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.
A balanced budget is similarly simple and within reach if Washington had just a tiny amount of fiscal common sense. Our revenues currently stand at approximately $2.2 trillion a year and are likely to remain stagnant as the recession continues. Our outlays are $3.7 trillion and projected to grow every year. Yet we only have to go back to 2004 for federal outlays of $2.2 trillion, and the government was far from small that year. If we simply returned to that year's spending levels, which would hardly be austere, we would have a balanced budget right now. If we held the line on spending, and the economy actually did grow as estimated, the budget would balance on its own by 2015 with no cuts whatsoever.
We pay 35 percent more for our military today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in 10 years? This country doesn't have double the population, or double the land area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by such an obscene amount.
In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger "cut" than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.
No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the "cuts" being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family "saving" $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth about their unrepentant plundering of the American people.
The truth is that frightening rhetoric about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite of stagnant revenues. If your family's income did not change year over year, would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely suggesting a different list of purchases than the other.
In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of "cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut". It would only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.
A balanced budget is similarly simple and within reach if Washington had just a tiny amount of fiscal common sense. Our revenues currently stand at approximately $2.2 trillion a year and are likely to remain stagnant as the recession continues. Our outlays are $3.7 trillion and projected to grow every year. Yet we only have to go back to 2004 for federal outlays of $2.2 trillion, and the government was far from small that year. If we simply returned to that year's spending levels, which would hardly be austere, we would have a balanced budget right now. If we held the line on spending, and the economy actually did grow as estimated, the budget would balance on its own by 2015 with no cuts whatsoever.
We pay 35 percent more for our military today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in 10 years? This country doesn't have double the population, or double the land area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by such an obscene amount.
In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger "cut" than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.
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