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View Full Version : Libertarians: The Paranoid Style In American Politics




bobbyw24
06-22-2010, 11:29 AM
Suddenly Libertarianism has become the newest fashion among the paranoid in American politics. But be not deceived; they are just as reactionary and extreme as their more deranged and schizophrenic political brethren on the far, far right who want to "take back" the government they hate in order to cripple it.

But libertarians are getting a measure of respect in much of the main stream press, and approval by 38 percent of Americans, largely as a result of its two most prominent figures, Rep. Ron Paul, a likeable Texas Republican, and his son Randall (Rand), who has captured the Republican nomination for the Kentucky Senate seat being vacated by a true oddball, Jim Bunning, a former star major league pitcher.

Perhaps Rand Paul, a practicing opthamologist who ran as a Tea bagger, seemed sane compared to Bunning and the Kentucky Republican establishment that ran Bunning out of office, then endorsed a front man for the GOP regulars. I'm not sure why the Pauls ally themselves with Republicans, most of whom stand for policies, deficit spending, and the kind of central government they hate. They could follow the lead of liberal socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, who votes with the Democrats (not all the time) but lists himself as an independent. Rather, as we shall see, these libertarians are not independent from the right-wing Republican Party.

But the Pauls and Libertarianism are getting a relatively friendly press because they are not firebrands and Libertarianism seems a rather benign, principled ideology, which calls for the smallest central government possible. Ron Paul has been a loyal Republican in the House, but when he ran for President in 2008 he seemed more eccentric than threatening. And he has differed from most of the Congress in opposing George Bush's war in Iraq and his violations of civil liberties.

The positions of the Libertarian Party ,founded in 1971, seem benign and consisting of mere slogans. It is holding its convention this spring with the theme "Gateway to Liberty," and some of its positions on civil liberties (not civil rights) and the war in Iraq, which Ron Paul opposed, are admirable. But where principled libertarianism goes off the rails is its insistence on a small government as envisioned by agrarian President Thomas Jefferson. It's not only hypocritical, but useless and dangerous.

I recall ongoing conversation I had some years ago with one of the officials of the Cato Institute, Washington's leading, and richest libertarian think tank. He held that Jefferson made a mistake, in setting a precedent for expanding presidential power when he undertook to make the Louisiana Purchase, 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi. from New Orleans to the Canadian border for about $15 million.

My Cato friend argued, as Jefferson's conservative critics argued then, that the Constitution did not specifically permit such presidential power. Jefferson, who feared that the Spanish, French and English could establish colonies along the Mississippi and cut off the nation's western expansion, argued that the Constitution did not prohibit the president from taking such action.

Since then, libertarians have regularly argued that presidents and the Congress have trampled on the Constitution's limitations and expanded government for purposes that limited te freedom of the individual to make his/her own decisions and take responsibility for his/her actions. That is essentially the Cato view, which favors "the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-friedman/libertarians-the-paranoid_b_620966.html

Bruno
06-22-2010, 11:31 AM
If the article had any any reason to continue reading it, it was lost at "tea bagger"

bobbyw24
06-22-2010, 11:32 AM
If the article had any any reason to continue reading it, it was lost at "tea bagger"

Yeah-it started off saying okay things then went south

lester1/2jr
06-22-2010, 11:33 AM
whats wrong with tea bagger. anyway this is another terrble article by the logically threatened establishment against the thing that is inevitably going to replace them

FrankRep
06-22-2010, 11:34 AM
I stopped reading at Huffington Post. :D

Bruno
06-22-2010, 11:37 AM
whats wrong with tea bagger

Do you know what it means?


I stopped reading at Huffington Post. :D

that was at the bottom of the OP! :eek: :D

FrankRep
06-22-2010, 11:38 AM
that was at the bottom of the OP! :eek: :D

The URL. :)

ravedown
06-22-2010, 11:52 AM
its good to read articles like this in order to prepare for the kind of arguments that will inevitably be thrown around as the elections get closer. there is so much fear and anger in this article by Mr Friedman. He spends a lot of time slamming Ron and Rand Paul's domestic views-but doesn't mention their foreign policy, wonder why?

lester1/2jr
06-22-2010, 11:55 AM
what we need now are libertarian candidates unlike rand paul sharon angle and the rest who can openly say "yes I have these politically incorrect views, if you don't like it don' t vote for me" instead of hemming and hawing and / or getting pissy about being "attacked"

dean.engelhardt
06-22-2010, 11:56 AM
its good to read articles like this in order to prepare for the kind of arguments that will inevitably be thrown around as the elections get closer. there is so much fear and anger in this article by Mr Friedman. He spends a lot of time slamming Ron and Rand Paul's domestic views-but doesn't mention their foreign policy, wonder why?

Really, it just a bunch of junior high style name calling. I didn't bother reading after a few lines either. There's not much prep for namecallers, just let them make an ass of themselves. This is written for the mindless base.

Elwar
06-22-2010, 11:58 AM
If the article had any any reason to continue reading it, it was lost at "tea bagger"

It also gives any credibility to Rupert Murdoch's Cato Institute.

ravedown
06-22-2010, 12:09 PM
Really, it just a bunch of junior high style name calling. I didn't bother reading after a few lines either. There's not much prep for namecallers, just let them make an ass of themselves. This is written for the mindless base.

i usually hear about 75% of the points in this article whenever discussing the Pauls or the libertarian position with my dem/lib friends (very well educated and politically active btw) and im sure most others have also- " end medicare?!! end the fed/fda/irs etc???!!!!" you're immediately labeled "out of touch" and disregarded-the same as this article claims.
its not a bad idea to re-read this article a couple times because i know it will influence some debates ill have with some huffpo addicts i see in the bar this wknd.

Elwar
06-22-2010, 12:20 PM
i usually hear about 75% of the points in this article whenever discussing the Pauls or the libertarian position with my dem/lib friends (very well educated and politically active btw) and im sure most others have also- " end medicare?!! end the fed/fda/irs etc???!!!!" you're immediately labeled "out of touch" and disregarded-the same as this article claims.
its not a bad idea to re-read this article a couple times because i know it will influence some debates ill have with some huffpo addicts i see in the bar this wknd.

YouTube - New Hampshire Liberty Forum - Keynote Speaker: Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio (Part 1) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKOTqRb5nvg)

Captain Shays
06-22-2010, 12:21 PM
Expect more and more articles like this one that mixes some kind words and truth with total distortions, revisions and mockery of libertarian/Constitutional principles.

Like we're the crazy ones when their policies have us policing the world and sticking our noses in every other country's business and involving us in wars that have no legitimate value relative to our national security. When you mention that they bring up "Bush lied and people died" in Iraq. Really? I just point out to them that Democrats were the party in power during half the Civil War, the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Somolia, Serbia, Kosovo, while Clinton had 30,000 covert troops in Columbia for six years causing the U'wa tribe (Google it) to threaten to commit mass suicide if Al Gore's Occidental Petroleum didn't stop trashing their rain forest and kept us in Iraq for 8 years bombing the crap out of them 400 times killing over 1,000 Iraqi's not to mention the sanctions and no fly zones he kept in place the whole time. And they think libertarians are crazy?

Last week it was announced that with combining our national debt to the corporation we know as the Federal Reserve System ($13 Trillion) with the unfunded liabilities of Socialist Security, Socialist Medicare, Socialist Medicaid, Socialist Housing, Socialist Food Stamps, Socialist Dept of Education amount so over $130 TRILLION. ALL of those unconstitutional programs were started by stinking liberal Democrats and ALL of them are working towards our demise. Slimy stinking scumbag Democrats and Republicans who are just like them and they call libertarians crazy.

These insaniacs need to be stopped.

fisharmor
06-22-2010, 01:43 PM
And they think libertarians are crazy?

You know what they say... it's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you.

Scofield
06-22-2010, 01:55 PM
It also gives any credibility to Rupert Murdoch's Cato Institute.

What?

What does Rupert Murdoch have to do with the Cato Institute in 2010?

silentshout
06-22-2010, 01:56 PM
Yeah, I don't think I am going to read the whole article. I just had lunch :)

ChaosControl
06-22-2010, 02:14 PM
That site needs to get better writers.
Partisan hack b.s. like referring to people as "teabaggers" is a way to make me stop paying attention to the article.

NYgs23
06-22-2010, 03:23 PM
I don't know why any of you paid attention to the article past the first line, let alone "teabaggers."

NYgs23
06-22-2010, 03:29 PM
P.S. Which two factual errors do you note in this line from our ingenious intellectual: "But since Jefferson, the limits of government have been steadily enlarged -- by John Adams's Alien and Sedition laws, Andrew Jackson's federal bank..."

JeNNiF00F00
06-22-2010, 03:32 PM
Do you know what it means?


Yeah but if we are "teabaggers" then, who are we teabagging? :P

NYgs23
06-22-2010, 03:37 PM
Sentence fragment: "But he wrote in the wake of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's crusade against communists, the rise of the John Birch Society, which joined McCarthy in attacking President Eisenhower as a 'conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.'"

This guy really needs a proofreader.