Comments (23)

• Anthony

  Wow, that must be one of the single most pathetic justifications for big government I've ever heard. The liberals should be envious.

  Published: August 1, 2007 6:52 AM

• Skip Oliva

  "conservatives are — duh! — not, by temperament, revolutionaries."

  No, they're just murderers and thieves.

  Published: August 1, 2007 7:14 AM

• mark

  John Derbyshire is one of the journalists who is well informed enough to know that elections are now determined by demographics.

  IT THE DEMOGRAPHICS STUPID!

  It won't matter what condition the economy is in or the state of national security. Landslide victories of Nixon and Reagan are over.

  RED STATE/ BLUE STATE is here to stay the outcome will be close either way.

  The philosophy of limited government is but a religion. Get over it.
  

  Published: August 1, 2007 7:58 AM

• Brad

  Well, that's why I'm not a Conservative anymore. I think it was clear to me by Bush I that much of the republicans/conservatives had given up the fight against big government and decided to join it. I held out for several years that there might be enough of the Old Right left in the party and the cause, but the kill shot was Bush II's Medicare Part D, the last part of the Socialist Triad of the New Deal and the Great Society, which added an estimated $11 Trillion to the accrual basis Federal Debt in one swoop of a pen.

  I think Mr. Derbyshire just doesn't realize that revolution will come one way or another. It can be bloodless by and large if people simply stop caving into the thuggery, or it can be militant after the economy blows a nut and people are plunged into misery. We have about ten years to decide which, in my opinion, after which the countdown starts. There simply is not enough possible production, even considering growth, to make good on all the equity and creditor stakes that have been put forth. Shrugging your shoulders and going with the lemmings over the cliff is not sane.

  Published: August 1, 2007 8:05 AM

• Number Six

  While a Ron Paul victory would represent a major breakdown of the vetting process for presidential candidates, there does seem to be a segment of the electorate that is interested in a candidate that isn't bought and paid for by special interests. As for the idea that Paul as President would constantly be at odds with Congress and the left-wing establishment, a Paul victory would give proponents of limited government control of at least one branch of government, or one more than they have control of now.

  CSPAN recently aired an interview that Paul did on a New Hampshire public radio program. The host noted that Paul is often the lone "no" vote on many bills; she asked how he could win a general election if he is in the minority with his colleagues so often. To me, the answer was obvious. A recent CNN poll found that a majority of the public think the government does too much. Yet we get bigger and bigger government. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that only about half of eligible voters vote for in presidential elections; for congressional elections, it's about 38 percent. Thus control of government is dictated by about 26 percent of eligible voters (in the case of Congress, less than 20 percent wins the day). Those who engage in rent-seeking behavior - e.g. those who receive subsidies, industry protection in the form of tariffs, etc. - have the greatest incentive to vote. I suspect that the many of those who think the government does too much don't vote. If Paul gets even a sizeable chunk of these potential voters to vote, he could be at the vanguard of a formidable movement.

  But if you don't like the Paul candidacy, just keep repeating over and over: the Federal Reserve protects us from recessions; the War on Drugs is a good thing; and so on ad infinitum.

  Published: August 1, 2007 9:30 AM

• George Gaskell

  Reading through those policy positions, an American conservative can hear the mystic chords of memory sounding in the distance, and hear the call of ancestral voices wafted on the breeze: Hayek, von Mises, Rothbart, Nock, Kirk, John Chamberlain...

  Rothbart?

  Published: August 1, 2007 9:35 AM

• Bill, Ron Paul Supporter

  Conservative vs Liberal, Republican vs Democrat, Red vs Blue, etc are meerly labels. There ARE no differences between parties or candidates (EXCEPT RON PAUL). All do the following:
  1. Support massive standing armies and enormous military-intelligence-security complexes to support intervention, entangling alliances, economic interference and ultimately, violence, murder and WAR.
  2. Support protectionist policies hurting consumers and exporters.
  3. Support fiat money that is has not stopped the business cycles but has given us rolling recessions in different sectors of the economy.
  4. Support every expanding economy killing young to old wealth transfers. This is especially amusing given that old folks are on average richer than younger ones.
  5. Support any form of interference in the lives of citizens in the forms of:
  a. Drug and alcohol prohibition.
  b. Regulation and licensing of medical personnel.
  c. Business regulation.
  d. Propery takings and theft.
  

  Published: August 1, 2007 9:38 AM

• George Gaskell

  A recent CNN poll found that a majority of the public think the government does too much. Yet we get bigger and bigger government. I'm not sure why this is.

  It's an inherent feature of democracy. Or, as Bastiat put it, it's "the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."

  Democratic government, as with any tragedy of the commons, the political process immediately becomes a race to see how much of the other guy's stuff you can grab while simultaneously keeping him from grabbing yours.

  As long as there exists an organization that has the power to take other people's property, you will see people gravitating toward that organization and attempting to control it for their gain.

  You can't reform coercive government. They all have the inherent tendency to be used as an instrument of theft.

  This is a design feature, not a bug.

  Published: August 1, 2007 9:43 AM

• TLWP Sam

  Maybe this link might answer a few questions:

  http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/FAQ.htm

  Actually I thought to some extent John Derbyshire sorta agreed near the end of his article. Namely there's too much crud and people with powerful personal interests to rewind the system. But anyway where does the impetus for revolution come from?

  As this article points out,
  
  http://www.lewrockwell.com/boukhonine/boukhonine10.html

  , there's no huge payoff for most people to upset the existing system. The new system (presuming the transition would be relatively bloodless) is probably only really going to benefit existing property owners. So until anyone wants to have a go at a coup d'etat, the reality is you're just have to wait it out for the present system crumble in a way that's conductive for a Libertarian society to emerge and not simply descend into mindless chaos. And hope that it's soon, after many a Hebrew slave thought that the Egyptian overthrow would be just around the corner when it was more like 400 years. :\

  Published: August 1, 2007 10:38 AM

• Stranger

  It is quite correct to say that conservatives are not revolutionaries and abhor revolution. However they are energetic counter-revolutionaries and have shown in the past that they can forcefully organise themselves to destroy an upstart threat to society if pushed far enough.

  Published: August 1, 2007 10:54 AM

• Reactionary

  George and Sam,

  I agree with your comments and offer the following hopeful observation. Just think how quickly society would right itself if, say, we repealed every single civil rights law on the books, or mandatory taxation, or the federal courts.

  Also, substantial numbers of citizens (60% of eligible voters, iirc) stay home on election day. How is it possible to even vote out an entity with its own army. In my wildest dreams, I'd call these people Ron Paul's silent majority but let's not get carried away.

  As you say, it will just have to get worse before it gets better.

  Published: August 1, 2007 11:05 AM

• Number Six

  The overall thrust of the article seems to be, "Paul's candidacy is doomed. He wants to end government agencies and programs that I agree with (e.g. the Federal Reserve and the DEA). Even when he has a valid point (e.g. the U.S. should get out of the U.N.; the IRS is too powerful), anyone advocating these views will incur the wrath of the liberal establishment, so why bother? It's better to moderate your views so that you actually have a chance of taking the reins of power." One might very well ask why Derbyshire and his ilk bother with their pursuit of "the art of the possible" as well. Pragmatic "conservativism" has given us the biggest rate of government growth since the LBJ years. When a supposedly conservative president favors Medicare Part D and ethanol subsidies, it may be time to join Paul's quixotic quest for the presidency.

  As for the comments of George Gaskell, I tend to agree that democracy is "theft by majority vote" (I'm not sure who coined that term, although Gary North has used it on occassion). As Hans Herman Hoppe has argued, a monarchy would be an improvement over a democracy (lower time preferences), although one could easily argue that any form of government that establishes a territorial monopoly on the legitimate use of force is inherently coercive.

  Published: August 1, 2007 11:12 AM

• Darren

  Yes, a very strange argument from Derbyshire. I think he's a great example of the tendency of conservatives to toss freedom out the window if it means gaining control of the machinery of coercive government.

  Published: August 1, 2007 12:56 PM

• George Gaskell

  I think he's a great example of the tendency of conservatives to toss freedom out the window if it means gaining control of the machinery of coercive government.

  Exactly.

  That reminds me of a funny Gaping Void cartoon:
  http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003302.html

  Published: August 1, 2007 1:19 PM

• Jean Paul

  The challenge to the practical libertarian is to propose a strategy for change other than "cross your fingers and suffer until the revolution comes".

  That means pushing through policy which is minimally destructive or even beneficial to established empires (said empires being the stabilizing power behind the status quo).

  Related but tangential comment - I think voucher privatization is the most just, and perhaps unsurprisingly, fastest way to liberalize the state.

  The tax records are available; the citizenship records are available; every citizen taxpayer should receive shares in proportion to their lifetime net present-value of dollars paid into the system.

  I haven't seen a lot of writing on this approach. I understand it was tried in various perverted forms in eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR.

  Most privatization is done direct into the hands of special interests, or at an incremental fee to taxpayers unrelated to contributions (both approaches compounding insult and injury upon each other).

  No one ever seems to advocate a fair privatization into citizens' hands.

  Published: August 1, 2007 3:07 PM

• Darren

  Hmm...interesting. Kind of like Ragnar Danneskjold, the philosopher-pirate in Atlas Shrugged, who raided government gold shipments and returned an amount of gold bars to people equivalent to what the government had confiscated from them in taxes.

  Published: August 1, 2007 3:25 PM

• M E Hoffer

  To keep thinking/using the Frame of "Conservative"/"Liberal" is to box ourselves out of any semblance of understanding of the solutions for the grave problems we face. Those terms, as we've seen from our collective experience, are useless to us. Serving, only, to corral our thoughts into channels that irrigate, not the Tree of Liberty, but, the Moat that separates us, from each other, and, more importantly, from the Power, that is, of ourselves.

  The plaintive hope that: "the whole thing needs to fall apart...", is just another lame form of "Rational" voter ignorance.

  Representative Paul's use of the Constitution, as measuring stick, can be grafted, even into today's parched political soil, to stem the graft that is impoverishing us.

  The Evolution to Devolution is the only "spin" needed. Any winding, from that path, to placate perceived 'interests', will only compound our, current, folly and insure compounds as our premiums earned.

  Published: August 2, 2007 9:58 AM

• Mark

  IT'S THE DEMOGRAPHICS STUPID!

  http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050508_family.htm

  The Democrats know this. The Ruplicans know this. Why are the Libritarians the last to know?

  I got angry when I saw Paul Kraugman's post at the economistsview.com. The Democrat plan is so obvious when you understand what's really happing. They plan to chip away at a swing state by creating another marginal constituency via health care for children.

  If Ron Paul wanted to really make a splash, he tell it like it is. The country is divided based on Demographics.

  "IT'S THE DEMOGRAPHICS STUPID"

  Published: August 3, 2007 7:23 AM

• lester

  Yesterday I listen to a radio call in show and also had dinner with my extended family. whenever a political subject comes up most people who work for a living don't like the government and understand how ineffective they are. You never hear people say "yeah they are doing amazing things with our tax dollars these days". Politicians just don't care what we think. they see themselves as entrepenours not public servants.

  Published: August 4, 2007 9:55 AM

• Anthony

  True Lester, but people are unfortunately just as cynical about markets nowadays - in some cases with good reason (i.e. where State intervention is to blame), in others not so much.

  Published: August 4, 2007 6:01 PM

• lester

  anthony- it was pretty hilarious to hear my father, who has worked editing explanations of the tax code for attorneys for about 30 years, talk about how difficult it was for him to fill out his own tax form in regards to his winter home in Florida. You can imagine how difficult it is for everyone else. I'm a total novice on economic issues and found that by and large everyone present, all of whom had real world business experience far surpassing my own, agreed with most of the stuff I was saying about ron paul and state intevention and in fact added on to itwith their own experiences. the problem came with

  1.a general lack of belief in the possibliity of change

  2. a general cynicism towards people who want to change things.

  3. a total lack of belief in people being able to force the government to spend less.

  So Ron paul or someone like him is ridiculous to them because if you take away the IRS and income tax, you will , in their minds, cause chaos because where will the government get that revenue?

  
  So I think it reinforces the notion that Paul is a VERY radical anti status quo candidate and I myself need to present more concrete methods of explaining how he will cut spending BEFORE i go in to the tax cut /anti state stuff.

  and how IS he going to cut spending with a democratic congress?

  Published: August 5, 2007 9:39 AM

• Anthony

  By my standards Ron Paul is not even THAT much of a revolutionary. I can imagine how the mainstream must perceive him though. What really bugs me is how we have to put up with the government's mess simply because the image prevails that it's too costly to clean it up. Even if this were so it would not justify the current situation. My aspiration is to become a tax attorney/economist to deal with this behemoth of a system, as much as is possible.

  Published: August 5, 2007 10:56 AM

• lester

  that's great. I would just reinforce to you the idea that people don't want big dramatic proclamations of liberty. they want to know how the new ( actually old) system would work, how it would effect them, and who it would benefit. My brother in law, for example, is an accountant who makes his living doing taxes. So he'd be out of a job. I think the next step is to prsent a blue print for a ron paul/ libertarian presidency so people will know what they are voting for. thusfar, we've only heard vague references to a "transition period". HOW will we cut spending?

  Published: August 5, 2007 11:50 AM