Ron Paul: Selling His Birthright

He was never expected to win. That is not the problem. He was expected to articulate a vision of free men and free markets that would at least have some influence on American politics. It was to be an exercise in public education rather than political power; its purpose was (or should have been) to increase the sentiment for liberty. This is important because politics begins in public sentiment for certain perceived common goods, and requires an education in practical reason on the best methods and policies for reaching those goods. From that standpoint, a campaign like Ron Paul's could have been very valuable, in much the same way that the populist campaigns of “Fighting Bob” La Follette was a success; although the candidate lost, the campaign won in that his major causes became part and parcel of American politics. Ron Paul is not likely to have that kind of success, neither for himself nor for his cause.

It is not that other candidates do not use the rhetoric of liberty. Mitt Romney, for example, claimed to be a champion of the “free market,” and then proposed giving the automakers $20 billion. McCain opposed the Cheney/Bush “tax cuts,” and then insists on making them permanent. (I put “tax cuts” in quotes because there were no such cuts; there was a tax shift. Borrowing is taxing as well, but merely a tax you shift to the next generation.) And Huckabee wants to slap us all with a 30% sales tax and massive tax increases at the state and local level. And all of them—except Ron Paul—actively support an illegal and pointless war. They all use the rhetoric of constitutional liberty, but in reality they all support the torture state, the imperial presidency, the bankrupt government, and foreign adventures. A Ron Paul campaign that at least broke into double digits would have served as a warning to political leaders of both the right and the left that there remains in this country a significant sentiment for freedom and constitutional government.

Alas, I think the Ron Paul campaign has been counter-productive. It could be argued from his poor results that such sentiments are confined to a fringe group and need not be taken seriously in political calculations. He has demonstrated that you can ignore the reality of freedom so long as you pay homage to the rhetoric. Paul himself was never able to get beyond that rhetoric to articulate a coherent vision and practical policies. Indeed, clicking on the “issues” button on his own website gives only the most superficial discussion of the issues. Comparing all the candidates' web sites, Paul has, if anything, the most superficial discussions. Had Paul been consistently able to break even into the 10-15% range, he might have had a great influence on American politics; he might have established himself as the leader of a group that the Republican Party could not afford to ignore. As it is, he only demonstrated their impotence.

It is not that he did not have the money to do the job. Indeed, he has been successful in fundraising. But he has been less successful in finding useful ways to spend the money. He was no better than Romney or Giuliani at using his political funding wisely. And he turned out to be both a poor campaigner and poor debater. Well, there is not much he can do about his naturally whiny voice, but at least he was willing to defend the Constitution against all comers. Or so I thought. But in his latest ad, he is using all that money he raised not to defend the Constitution, but to attack one of its bedrock principles; he is as willing to abandon the Constitution for political advantage as is any of his rivals, Republican or Democrat. The principle that Ron Paul is now attacking is that of birthright citizenship. (see the ad here.)

Of course the ad plays to the immigration issue, and does so in the standard fear-mongering terms that might be expected from nearly any other campaign; he does not use the opportunity to articulate a “libertarian” view, but a purely nationalistic and even xenophobic one. Nevertheless, that is an issue that can be argued either way, and I do not here argue it one way or the other. His particular view is not where the problem comes in. Rather, the problem is that in the course of this ad, he calls for an end to a bedrock constitutional principle, that of “Birthright citizenship.” This has been a part of American tradition since the founding and part of the Constitution since the 14^th amendment. Ending it would require repeal of at least part of the 14^th amendment. This is a strange “defense” of the Constitution. Even that's okay; after all, the Constitution is not holy writ and has a mechanism for change. But should this principle be abandoned? Can it be overturned without great harm to our understanding of citizenship and the role of government?

Birthright makes citizenship an “act of God,” as it were. Repealing the 14^th amendment would make the granting of citizenship purely an act of some government department or other. We would all become, in effect, “naturalized” citizens, whose membership in the body politic was in the gift of the bureaucracy. At a time of the torture state and the imperial presidency, in a time when the government seeks the power to declare some citizens “enemy combatants” (whatever that means) and to strip them of all rights before bringing them to trial, this is a dangerous idea. And whatever one thinks of this idea, one cannot really call it a “libertarian” idea. Indeed, making citizenship a gift of government seems to me to be the opposite of libertarianism, because what the bureaucracy gives, the bureaucracy may take away.

I am not a libertarian, for reasons I have laid out before (see Why I am not a Libertarian.) Nevertheless, I wish the libertarians well, and I believe a Distributist state would resemble the libertarian ideal more than it would resemble anything else. Further, I believe that libertarianism is impossible without well-distributed property. So I had good reasons for wishing Ron Paul well. I am truly saddened to see him sell out his principles for a few votes. As it is, he is not likely to get those votes; he sold his birthright and didn't even get what Esau got: a mess of porridge. It is, I think, a sad ending to a promising campaign.

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Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Moyers

This evening, Bill Moyers held excellent interviews with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, two candidates who have been more or less excluded from serious coverage by the mainstream media. Ron Paul, in fact, has been excluded from the next Fox News debate, despite his respectable 10% showing in Iowa, while Kuinich has been “dis-invited” by ABC as well as being excluded from the Des Moines Register debate (which even had Alan Keys, for crying out loud). Both candidates conducted themselves well, especially Ron Paul. Bill himself did a good job; in largely sympathetic interviews, he nevertheless challenged the candidates on some of their more problematic points. Moyers pointed out to Ron Paul that it is the private media, and not the federal government, that has excluded him. I don't think Paul had a good answer on this point, because libertarians generally don't. Libertarians generally don't like to acknowledge the fact that private owners, when they become too rich, can raise barriers to free markets just as effectively as the government can. The point that my libertarian friends never get is that free markets are created by regulation of a certain sort, just as they are destroyed by regulation of another sort. It is important to be able to tell one sort from the other.

Kucinich was taken to task for his rather odd “endorsement” of Barack Obama in Iowa, bypassing some candidates that may have more affinity with his point of view. In any case, they were very good interviews, much better than what one usually on television. The interview with Ron Paul can be seen here and the one with Dennis Kucinich here.

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The Left and Ron Paul

Can a liberal vote for Ron Paul?

Click here.

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Taxes: What Should they Buy?

Fourth in a four-part series on taxes.

“Taxes are theft!” judges one reader of this humble blog, and more than a few libertarians would agree with him. As near as I can tell, this judgment is based on a view of man as a completely autonomous individual, dependent on no one but himself, answerable to no one, and subject to compulsion by no one. Under this view, to the degree that taxes are compelled they cannot be just.

My problem with this view is that it does not describe any man or woman I have actually met. Every person of my acquaintance emerges not from autonomy, but from dependence. We are all called into being by the ready-made community of the family. Most of what we are comes not by an individual “consumer” choice but by gift. Along with the gift of family, there are the gifts of language, nationality, religion, community, city, state, and nation. Our values are socially formed by these gifts of social context and only after that formation do we find ourselves in a position to accept or reject these received values. What “freedom” we have consists mostly in decisions about how to use the gifts we are given; how to re-arrange them and pass them on. Our very being itself turns out to be already a “being-in-community” which mirrors in some fashion that ultimate community of persons that is at the root of all being, namely the Trinity. At their most basic level, humans are social beings, already formed by institutions “outside” themselves.

And since man is a social being he has social obligations; the gift demands a return if it is to survive to the next generation. Hence, each man has obligations which may, in certain circumstances, be compelled of him. Individual goods are themselves the product of social goods and are dependent upon such social goods; if there is a break-down in the social goods, no individual goods will survive. We are all dependent upon each other; the common good precedes any individual good. A philosophy of pure individualism contradicts the social nature of man. Clearly, there are common goods which no individual (or very few) could provide by themselves. The obvious example is the common defense, but there are others, and they are normally supported by taxation.

But if this rule of the common good gives us the ground for legitimate taxation, it also gives us the ground for judging when taxes are illegitimate. For if the legitimate purpose of taxes are to pay for those things necessary for the common good, then taxes are illegitimate when they purchase not the common good, but individual and particular goods. That is, when good money is taken from all to provide goodies for a few, goodies not connected with the common good, then they are illegitimate.

When we examine the actual expenditures of the modern state, we have ample grounds for questioning whether all of this money, or even most of it, goes to the common good, or are just private goods paid for by the commons. And while we should never (in my opinion) proclaim that “All taxes are theft!” we have more than ample grounds for shouting, “Most taxes are theft!” The one-word difference is crucial.

Of course, there can be different judgments on what constitutes the common good. But there can be no doubt that the system of special bills for special friends (“earmarks”) which burden every budget bill are nothing but theft. And even things that fall in the common good can be used in such a way that much of the money goes for other purposes. For example, we certainly do need an army for defense, but does our defense really require troops stationed in more than 130 countries? Certainly there are private contractors on whom the military is dependent, but do we really need the army of parasites and mercenaries provided by Halliburton and Blackwater? I tend to doubt it.

To take another random example, we can note farm subsidies. Now, a secure food supply is in the common good. As someone who likes to eat three or more times a day, I want to see secure and prosperous farmers, as my own security depends on them. Further, I have no objection (and much praise) for a fund which insures the farmer against the vicissitudes of the weather and the market, since the farmer himself cannot control these things. This fund ought to be largely supported and controlled by the farmers themselves, and it is not unjust if this fund receives a contribution from the general taxes, or at least, from those tax-payers who actually eat. But the current system is not an insurance program at all, but a subsidy, and one not so much to the “farmer” as to the giant “agri-businesses” such as Archer-Daniels-Midland and the like.

Further, we can note that not every common good needs to be paid for by general taxes. Take transportation, for example. Certainly it is a common good, and a prosperous people need a good transportation system. However, it turns out that most expenditures for particular forms of transportation constitute a subsidy for private persons. We build highways, but the only ones who can use them are those who can afford the high capital costs and operating expenses of an automobile. And when we invest so much public money in highways, we privilege one group of users over another, and force people to buy a car whether or not they want to, or whether or not it makes economic sense for them to do so. Now, its not that I think the government should get out of the transportation business; there are good arguments for public roads, since every particular route would have to be a monopoly anyway; you could not efficiently have two competing roads operating on the same route. However, these roads should be paid for by user fees (tolls) and not by general taxation. Indeed, subsidizing the roadways turns out to be both contradictory and self-defeating (see Free Markets, Free-ways, and Falling Bridges.)

We can also note areas where the free market has proven itself incompetent. Modern medicine is one of these areas. Indeed, so long as we are talking about a market that is so dependent on licenses and patents, there cannot be, even in principle, a free market at all (see Sicko-phancy!) We did have a free market in medicine, in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and it was a disaster. Hence, there is ample justification for a public system of health care. The specific taxes applied to this can certainly be debated. I will not here enter into that debate, but I will merely note that such a system ought to be supported by taxes dedicated to that purpose, such that if the costs rise, the public will have instant feedback via an increase in those specific taxes.

Our other big problem is retirement funds. Now, in days gone by, there were two sources of social security: have a lot of money or have a lot of children. We have made the latter unfashionable and the former damned near impossible (median wages haven't risen in 30 years). As a practical matter, we cannot do away with the system in any near term without causing social chaos (besides, the old folks vote.) Nevertheless, the system itself is not sustainable and in reality constitutes a surtax on labor incomes that is now used to support the general fund. In other words, it is just an additional income tax on one class of workers but not on others (see Social Insecurity.)

Looking over the budget as a whole, it is my unscientific judgment that at least one-third to one-half of the expenditures are for things that are mere subsidies, or that could be moved from the general taxes to special funds and user-fees. Hence taxes could be cut, conservatively speaking, by one-third to one-half, and could be done without harming, and indeed improving, things that really contribute to the common good. However, cutting taxes depends entirely on cutting expenditures. Candidates don't like to talk about cutting expenditures because each cut cuts into a constituency, either one that contributes a lot money or a lot of votes. We are left with vague promises of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” only to see all three increase. Or we get nonsense like Huckabee's “revenue neutral” plan, which on inspection turns out to be “all taxes on the rich are theft; everybody else pays 30%.” And all will end up continuing the program of borrowing to pay for “tax cuts” while spending like drunken sailors. Such “cuts” are not cuts at all, since borrowing is not tax-cutting but tax-shifting; taxes are shifted from the current generation to the next one. We are, quite literally, spending our children's money.

It is unfortunate that Ron Paul, the only actual Republican in the race, has taken the “all taxes are theft line.” It is not merely that it prevents him from getting elected (since most sensible people don't believe that), but more importantly it prevents him from speaking about the more important issue, namely, insisting one fiscal discipline. Spending only as much as you take in, and spending it only for the common good. That platform might actually win, if backed with sufficient funds for a credible campaign. But win or lose, it would certainly be a great moment of political education.

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Ron Paul and Hilaire Belloc

The Democratic Party is jubilant just now because, among other things, they are awash in cash. The millions of dollars in corporate cash that flowed to the Republican Party during the heyday of Karl Rove is now flowing to the Democrats. Now, it is just possible that Corporate America has experienced a mass conversion, a change of heart than has resulted a change of contributions.

This is possible, but I doubt it. Rather, the money flows on what might be called the “Vicar of Bray” principle, namely that “whatsoever king shall reign,” the corporations will still retain their power and influence. It is power, and not principle, the directs the flow of cash. The corporations treat these lobbying and political expenses like any other investment; they expect (and get) a high return on their dollars. These returns come in the form of favorable tax treatment, friendly “regulations,” subsidies, and an endless stream of the kinds of “goodies” that only a beneficent government can provide. Government becomes a contest of competing oligarchs and the will of the people—the foundation of a democracy—becomes the will of those with lots of cash.

The great enabler of this form of oligarchic government is the Party System and especially the two-party system. This system is not constitutional, but it might as well be, since it is written into the laws of every state and of the federal government as well. The two parties enjoy a position in government that is sanctioned by positive law, and in practice no candidate can run—or even get on the ballot—without their sanction. But the parties themselves stand as mere proxies, not for real principles, but for principalities and powers.

None of this is news, of course. Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton noted all these problems as far back as 1911 in their book, The Party System. Belloc was, of course, a member of Parliament who resigned, calling Parliament noting more than “secret government by the rich.” Well, the secrets out, and has been out for a long time. But with power vested in the parties, the people seem to have little power to change things.

IHS Press will issue a new edition of The Party System with a foreword by Ron Paul. This is appropriate, since Congressman Paul does not quite fit into the standard political categories dictated by the two-party system. Actually, few of us do, but all of us find ourselves forced to hold our noses and vote, usually for the best of a bad lot. But Ron Paul has chosen the deliberate path of the rebel, much as Belloc and Chesterton did.

Now, I am not a libertarian, for reasons I have outlined previously (“Why I am not a Libertarian”). I do not think it is a complete theory. Nevertheless, I believe that a distributist state would more resemble the libertarian ideal than it would resemble anything else. Hence, I have a certain sympathy for certain forms of libertarianism. And I have a certain sympathy for a candidate who has read at least one book of Belloc's. And mostly, I have a great deal of sympathy for a candidate who stands on principle. So I will likely vote for Ron Paul, even though I am not in complete agreement with him.

Paul does understand that the solution is in our power, and more to the point, in our constitution. As he notes:

the United States Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections. Ballot access is one of the few areas where Congress has explicit constitutional authority to establish national standards. So we have no excuse for not having taken care of this problem.

Further, he understands the major effect of this problem:

The sad fact is that if we today have allowed a decline in our vigilance and watchfulness over our precious freedom, our independence, and our right to manage our affairs for ourselves – such that we feel today that government is simply not responsive to the wishes of the average man and woman – the reality is that this divorce between the will of the people and the workings of the “democratic machine” happened a long time ago, and it did so in a country that we can rightly call the nursery of our own democracy: England.

Finally, Ron Paul takes his goal directly from Hilaire and Cecil:

An “Executive responsible to the representative assembly” is what Belloc and Chesterton have set forward as the ideal, and yet how many unconstitutional wars, unauthorized wiretaps, signing statements, and foreign renditions do we have to have before this representative body – the Congress – flexes its muscle and takes a stand upon matters of law and our Constitution?

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ABC News "Spikes" Ron Paul Interview

ABC News has apparently decided that Ron Paul is not quite ready for prime time. His interview with John Stossel will not be aired, and has been relegated to the Web. See the story here.

Who's "up" and who's "down" has a lot to do with media decisions about who they will cover. With control of the media shrinking, (see Roy Moore's article on this) so does the range of "valid" opinion. Control of the public space passes to a few private hands, who then control what the rest of us can know.

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