Once again, Balko nails it:
I have no idea if Paul is a racist. I suspect that he isn’t, at least today. But he’s certainly had no problem benefiting from the support of people who are. It’s more than a little disingenuous for him to now defend himself by invoking what the criminal justice system has done to the black community when for fifteen years a newsletter bearing his name, and the profits from which went into his bank account, celebrated and encouraged the black-people-are-savage-criminals lie in particularly vile and perverse ways.
The newsletter defended the Rodney King beating, for God’s sake, on the bullshit argument that King was part of a criminal class of people. The implication is that some people deserve substandard treatment under the rule of law because of the color of their skin. There’s nothing remotely libertarian about that.
Libertarians are nothing if not capable of devouring our own. I'm OK with that. Right or wrong, Paul is currently an embarrassment to the causes that he champions. I think he is intelligent enough to realize this, eventually. But he is also stubborn enough to not realize it immediately. His nonchalance in the Blitzer interview shows it.
There is also the small matter that I frankly no longer believe his pleas of ignorance about the content of the newsletters.
Which truly sucks, because Paul has gotten more people talking about liberty, the Constitution, and a fundamental reassessment of our foreign policy this past year than anyone ever expected him to. And if there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that the "Ron Paul Phenomenon" really has been about the ideas, not the man--after all, it certainly hasn't been because he is a particularly adroit or engaging speaker.
My hope is that the movement will outlive its namesake. I also know better than to count on this.
Looking ahead, this makes Barack Obama much, much more appealing to my mind. Some excerpts:
Obama's preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton's (and Edwards's) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama's language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago...
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems...
Goolsbee and Obama's understanding of the free market as a useful means of promoting social justice, rather than an obstacle to it, contrasts most starkly with the rest of the Democratic field on issues of competition, free trade and financial liberalism...The evidence that Obama heeds Goolsbee's lessons is ample, his healthcare plan being but one of many prominent examples. Whereas Clinton has recently taken to pulling protectionist stunts and rethinking the fundamental theoretical soundness of free trade, and Edwards is behaving like the love child of Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, Obama instinctively supports free trade and grasps the universe of possibilities that globalisation opens up...
We could do worse.
1 comment:
Agreed that Obama wouldn't be as bad as Clinton, but the problem is that divided government tends to grow the least. With the Ds controlling both houses of Congress, I'll probably hold my nose and vote for the Club for Growth candidate (if I vote at all).
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