How long are Ron Paul’s coat tails?

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TAMPA, August 29, 2012 ― As I walked up to the Gate B entrance of the Tampa Bay Times Forum last night, I was greeted by the sound of a large crowd inside chanting “President Paul!” followed by “End the Fed!” For a moment I thought I was back at Ron Paul’s “We are the Future Rally.” I was not. I was entering the Republican National Convention.

While Paul was not nominated and will not be a speaker at the RNC, he has something usually reserved only for winners in the general election. Ron Paul has coat tails.

After weeks of negotiations culminating in a heated debate at the RNC on Tuesday, Ron Paul finally had a portion of the delegates he’d won at Republican state conventions seated on the RNC floor. Even with his total diminished by agreement, Paul actually won Iowa, Minnesota and Nevada, garnering approximately 200 delegate votes total.

That delegate strength has allowed Paul to achieve his secondary goal of influencing the Republican Party platform. According to senior campaign advisor Doug Wead, the Republican Party platform will contain major planks of Paul’s, including auditing the Federal Reserve System, requiring a congressional declaration of war before engaging in military operations, a commission to examine instituting a gold standard, and keeping the internet free and unregulated.

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Ron Paul’s “We are the Future Rally” unlike any other political event

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TAMPA, August 27, 2012 ― Everyone knows what to expect from a political rally. Speakers recite the party line on various subjects. The audience already agrees with them and knows what they are going to say. The crowd cheers. The opposition is trashed. The crowd cheers again. The keynote speaker is introduced. Standing ovation. More talking points.

Ron Paul’s “We Are the Future Rally” couldn’t have resembled that model less. Rather than politics, the entire program focused on ideas.

His first three speakers were libertarian philosophers Lew Rockwell, Walter Block and Butler Shaffer. There were no talking points. Instead, attendees were treated to intellectual arguments for individual liberty from three of the most powerful libertarian thinkers alive.

Not everyone agreed, either. Block’s controversial argument for a new libertarian stance on abortion actually drew boos. Block argued that a woman has a property right in her body and thus can evict a “trespassing” fetus from her womb, but does not have a right to take the fetus’ life. Block claimed that this was possible now during the third trimester of pregnancy and that as the science advanced, it would be possible earlier and earlier.

Some of the more conservative among Paul’s following weren’t ready to hear it.

There were speeches by politicians Barry Goldwater, Jr. and South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis, but even these were atypical. Goldwater read from and commented on passages from his father’s Conscience of a Conservative, while Davis focused exclusively on attacking the Federal Reserve System.

Paul’s official campaign blogger and rising conservative star Jack Hunter continued with a talk on conservative philosophy, citing Ronald Reagan, Russell Kirk and other noteworthy conservatives. Hunter reminded supporters of Reagan’s “three-legged stool” theory of conservatism: equal parts national security conservatives, religious conservatives and economic/libertarian conservatives. Hunter argued that it was the absence of the libertarian leg that led to the profligacy of the Bush years. He quoted Reagan saying, “libertarianism is the very heart and soul of conservatism.”

None of this is to suggest that the affair was a quiet seminar with attendees nodding their heads and taking notes. Right from senior campaign advisor Doug Wead’s opening remarks, the atmosphere was electric and the applause thunderous. As usual, remarks on the Federal Reserve System and Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy got the most enthusiastic response.

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Repealing Glass-Steagall did not create the banking monster

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TAMPA, August 22, 2012 – As we approach the Republican and Democratic National Conventions with two major party candidates that don’t substantively disagree on anything, debate about the causes of the housing bubble and what should be done about it will inevitably recur.

Both candidates advocate massive government intervention. They just disagree about the details.

Neil Barofsky weighs in with the generally accepted argument that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was the creator of what he calls “the monster,” highly leveraged investment banks taking extraordinary risks that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Barofsky is right about Wall Street being a monster, but the repeal of Glass Steagall wasn’t its Frankenstein. As Tom Woods explains in his bestseller, Rollback,

“But did the repeal of two provisions of Glass-Steagall allowing affiliation of commercial banks with securities firms through their control by the same holding company contribute to the losses and risk that permeated the system? Certainly not. For one thing, commercial banks bought mortgage-backed securities for their AAA rating, their attractive return, and the minimal capital requirements associated with holding them; they did not acquire these assets because they were connected to investment banks that were trying to unload them.

Moreover, severe regulatory firewalls essentially prevent this kind of affiliation from contributing to losses or increased risk on the part of the commercial bank involved. The reverse problem, that affiliation with a commercial bank might bring down and investment bank, is exceedingly unlikely, given the relative magnitudes of assets held by each institution. The commercial banks’ assets were only a tiny fraction of those held by the investment banks they were affiliated with. These banks were in no position to cause the investment banks any serious problem, much less their complete downfall.”

If that’s true, then why was that “sucker going down,” as President Bush so eloquently put it?

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Why does Ron Paul insist on a declaration of war?

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TAMPA, August 14, 2012 – Ron Paul insists that the U.S. government shouldn’t go to war without a declaration of war by Congress. His son Rand has also taken this position, as have a few other libertarian-leaning Republican candidates. The U.S. Constitution delegates the declaration of war power to the Congress, but they have not exercised this power since WWII.

Why is this important?

Most people misunderstand the declaration of war power as “permission” to start a war. By that definition, George W. Bush argued that H.J. Res. 114 (October 16, 2002) fulfilled this constitutional requirement regarding the Iraq War. With that resolution, Congress authorized the president to use military force in the war on terror.

The declaration of war power is not the power to start a war. It is the power to declare that a state of war already exists. This can only be true if the nation in question has committed overt acts of war against the United States.

Each time the U.S. Congress has declared war, the resolution has followed the same format.

1. Congress cites the overt acts of war committed by the nation in question against the United States.

2. It recognizes the existence of the war because of those overt acts.

3. It directs the president to utilize the military to end the war.

The process is some what analogous to a criminal trial. The president “makes his case” to Congress that certain actions by a foreign nation amount to acts of war. Congress then deliberates, renders its verdict and passes sentence. The president is directed to execute the sentence.

Here is just one example. When James Polk asked Congress to declare war on Mexico in 1846, he said,

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Audit the Fed first shot in Ron Paul’s revolution

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TAMPA, August 3, 2012 – “When I was your age, I went to the movies for a dime and bought a big bag of popcorn and a soda for a nickel.”

My father said that to me a hundred times when I used to pay $2.75 to go to the movies and another $1.25 for the popcorn and soda. For five generations, Americans have understood steadily rising prices as an immutable law of nature. Yet history shows that this just isn’t true.

The Federal Reserve of Minnesota publishes historical inflation figures on its website going back to 1800. The attached chart from that website shows annual inflation rates from 1800 through 2008. I added the last column to calculate the price movements of a basket of goods that cost $100 in 1800.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in finance for the numbers to jump off the page. The basket of goods that cost $100 in 1800 only cost $58.10 in 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve System was created). For that entire first full century of American history, steadily decreasing prices were something Americans took for granted.

In the ninety-nine years since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, that same basket of goods has risen to $1,265.14.

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Obama Romney debate could be a staring contest

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TAMPA, July 16, 2012 – Since this is a presidential election year, everyone is focused on the White House. As usual, this election is being hyped as some sort of crossroads in American history: The American electorate will either choose to make an irreversible turn down the road to socialism or conservatives will save the country by electing a Republican president who will restore the American principles of free enterprise and individual responsibility.

It all makes a pretty good story until one attempts to back it up with tangible evidence: Why is Barack Obama a “socialist?” Why is Mitt Romney different?

The first answer you’d get on Obama from most conservatives is Obamacare. That was virtually the single issue for most Tea Party rallies in 2010. Yet Republicans are going to nominate the former governor who pioneered the same program in Massachusetts. If Obamacare makes the president a socialist, then why doesn’t Romneycare make his opponent one also?

Romney answered that question throughout the Republican nomination debates by taking a states rights position. He had signed a healthcare program into law in Massachusetts that was good for that state, but president Obama had been wrong to impose it upon the whole country.

Why the program is socialist when the federal government imposes it nationally but not when the state government imposes it on its millions of citizens is unclear.

However, that point is moot given other facts that came to light following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare. It turns out that despite repeatedly stating that Obama was wrong to impose the healthcare program on the  whole nation, Romney actually told Obama to do exactly that just three years ago.

Oops.

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Occupy Wall Street talking gibberish about healthcare

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TAMPA, July 5 2012 – Thank heaven for the great Steve Zahn, who in his hilarious turn as Lenny in the Beatlesque That Thing You Do, coined a phrase that applies to nearly every political sentiment expressed here in the land of the free.

“You’re talking gibberish.”

Lenny’s prescient warning against calling the band “The One-ders” was ignored, resulting in the band’s name being universally mispronounced, until it was changed to “The Wonders” by the band’s eventual manager.

The lesson? When gibberish is accepted as reason, bad things happen. The stakes are much higher for healthcare.

There are limitless reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare. Unfortunately, those opposed are also talking gibberish. Conservatives are trying to spin the decision as a blow for limited government because it was rendered by a conservative judge. That’s bad enough. Occupy Wall Street’s argument against the decision is even worse.

At least the left’s opposition to the law, where it exists, has remained consistent. True believers in government-provided healthcare object to the Affordable Care Act because it makes use of private insurers. Occupy Wall Street is 100% correct on one thing. “The law will deliver 20+ million new customers and $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies directly to the private health insurance companies.”

Libertarians couldn’t agree more. The Act is nothing more than a half trillion dollar theft for the health insurance industry. That it benefits big business does not make it a “free market” solution. It’s just more welfare, of the corporate variety, that libertarians oppose like any other forcible redistribution of wealth.

The gibberish comes in when Occupy argues for its solution. Proposing “Medicare for All,” a single-payer healthcare system 100% operated by the government, Occupy makes this statement.

“We believe that healthcare is a human right, not a commodity or a luxury for those who can afford it.”

Gibberish. Why? Let’s think for a moment about what this statement really means. To do that, we’re going to have to define the words used in the statement. The first one is “healthcare.”

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Morning Joe Wrong on Ron Paul and Social Security

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TAMPA, June 21 2012 — Ron Paul appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday, giving one of his most succinct criticisms of the Republican Party to date. Host Joe Scarborough had recently endorsed Paul and explained why he had voted for him in his Republican presidential primary.

For most of the segment, the hosts concentrated on Paul’s ideas, policy positions and vision for the future of the party. However, near the end of the segment, Sam Stein decided to ambush Paul on Social Security. After Paul explained his position on letting young people opt out of the program, Stein asked Paul if he collected Social Security payments himself. When Paul replied in the affirmative, Stein implied that Paul was being hypocritical by collecting Social Security payments while asking young people to opt out.

Non sequitur.

Ron Paul’s plan to phase out Social Security does not ask people who have paid into the program to forego the benefits. Those he wants to give the opportunity to opt out would also not be taxed to support Social Security. Perhaps somewhat surprised by the line of inquiry, Paul did not give the best answer he’s ever given to this question. However, he explained it in detail in my own interview with him last year.

Under Paul’s plan, those who have paid into the program would continue to receive the benefits they were promised. The funds not collected from young people who opt out would be raised from savings realized by Paul’s cuts to overseas military spending and elimination of federal departments.

So, Paul is not asking young people to do something that he is not willing to do himself. As he pointed out on Morning Joe, he’s still paying into Social Security right now.

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Exclusive Interview: Rand Paul weathers endorsement storm

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TAMPA, June 18 2012 – 218 years ago, George Washington signed the Jay Treaty, reestablishing economic relations with the British. Claiming that John Jay and the Federalist Party had sold America out to the British and betrayed France, Jefferson’s Republicans denounced Jay as a monarchist and a traitor.

His effigy was burned and one newspaper went so far as to print, “John Jay, ah! the arch traitor – seize him, drown him, burn him, flay him alive.”

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky might know how Jay felt. Since endorsing Mitt Romney for president on June 7, Paul has endured a barrage of criticism from his father’s supporters and those who consider themselves part of the larger “liberty movement.”

There have even been a few death threats.

I spoke to Senator Paul last Thursday. He was understandably concerned by the more outlandish reactions, but put them in perspective.

“The people that are over the top and even making death threats on the internet, I hope they are not serious, but they are a small number of people making a disproportionate number of the comments. A lot of those people may not even vote or may not have voted for my father. They don’t represent the majority of the people that support what we’re fighting for.”

Overlooked during the controversy is Paul’s promise to his constituents to endorse the Republican nominee. Paul won a decisive victory in Kentucky with far more than Ron Paul supporters behind him. Without promising to endorse the nominee, Paul may have never even won the Republican nomination, much less become a U.S. Senator.

“I’ve said all along that I would endorse the Republican nominee. I made that promise during my own campaign, because it was a concern for many Republicans that my dad hadn’t endorsed the Republican nominee in the past. People should understand that it doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my philosophy or adopted anyone else’s.”

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