Thanks to Ron Paul, a new generation understands it’s all right to favor the free market and to oppose war. Libertarians have done more than anyone else to expose the Democrats as just another wing of the war party, and to show there’s no real debate in America over foreign policy. This is considered extremely uncouth by those who wish to maintain the pretense that open discussion of important issues takes place in the land of the free.
After decades of virtually no progress at all against the war on drugs, the prohibitionist regime is beginning to crack all around us. The standard bromides in its favor elicit only cynical chuckles from a rising generation that knows better.
Ordinarily, federal bailouts would be bipartisan and all but unanimous, with self-described supporters of the market economy solemnly informing us that just this once, it had to be done. Progressives have not distinguished themselves here as they might have; Rachel Maddow once said we wouldn’t have had an economy without the bailouts. It’s the libertarians who have stood against the establishment tide, as usual.
In other words, we are having discussions that we did not have in the past. Libertarians have staked out positions that a lot of ordinary people share, but which they never saw articulated in public, thereby giving people the confidence and courage to express dissent.
Ten years ago, these dissident views would have been drowned out by the establishment consensus, which closes ranks whenever an issue of real importance arises.
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