Just dusted this one off and gave it a read today. It's really given me a jolt.

Hayek: Why I Am Not a Conservative

I would also like to add, since I haven't had much time to post here, that I have left the Republican Party. The treatment of Ron Paul and his supporters in Minneapolis and St. Paul by the GOP was fascist and disrespectful. I've changed my registration in North Carolina from Republican to Libertarian. I continue to work for B.J. Lawson's campaign and will support Republicans and Democrats who are libertarians.

http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=8995232&nav=menu227_3

Riddle me this, Lane:

According to your logic, Paul allowing the Constitution Party of Montana to put his name on th Presidential ballot under their Party is equivalent to him endorsing the entirety of their platform. On the other hand, does it also not work by your logic that if he asks the Constitution Party to take his name off the ballot under their line, then he is un-endorsing their platform?

I've read some criticism of Dr. Paul here after visiting this forum for the first time in a while just now. Firstly, I need to address an unjustly harsh and, IMO, flatly incorrect statement from W Lane Startin in the comments section of "WTF Paul? Part Two."

Paul has always been quick to abandon libertarian ideals on social issues to appease the Christian Right. He has a lot more in common with Huckabee than he doesn't. Always has.

Ron Paul has never been anything other than a statist Reagan Republican with a slightly different spin. I don't know what's more shameful, the fact he calls himself a libertarian, or the fact that so many people believe him.

Interesting you link an Idaho Statesman article. The Idaho GOP has been foisting this exact brand of ideological chutzpah on the general public for years.

Paul has maybe presented his positions in language to appease the Christian Right, but he's never really actually abandoned libertarian positions on those issues. He's put up with attacks by the Christian right on many libertarian positions of his (especially drugs) by Christian right GOP opponents in his district, and he's always come out on top. He's been for domestic partnership contract rights for gays (as he stated openly in the video interview with John Stossel, and during the GOP primary I might add), legalizing drugs (which is an expressly anti-Huckabee position), protection of civil liberties, has been very anti-war and anti-interventionism, and holds other libertarian positions that resemble nothing which Mike Huckabee promotes. The only issue where he has pretty much always disagreed with the Libertarian Party platform is abortion, and the only other issue where he's disagreed with perhaps a majority of libertarians is on the issue of Constitutional interpretation of federalism, as he's more inclined to argue that 10th Amendment takes precedence over 14th Amendment in some cases. He moved in the wrong direction on immigration, for sure, but he also expressly moved in the right direction on other issues, like the Death Penalty.

To make a statement like "he has more in commmon with Mike Huckabee than he doesn't" is a huge exaggeration of reality. I would argue that he probably only holds about 20% in common with Mike Huckabee, given that Huckabee is central planner on economic issues.

As for the endorsement of Young, it's disappointing, but understandable. Ron Paul is a politician, and he knows that if substantive steps are going to be made on reversing the growth of the authoritarian state, he's going to have to work with some candidates who maybe aren't all that perfectly aligned with him on the issues. For instance, he's endorsed Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, who is a pro-Iraq War candidate but has been in line with him on issues of national sovereignty. Young has co-sponsored Ron Paul's Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Income Tax, which gives Ron access to him to persuade him that he won't have with many other members of the Republican Congressional delegation. Further, if Young wins re-election, then he's going to owe Ron Paul politically. This is a powerful ace in the hole to have. It's easy for us to criticize politicians like Ron Paul for making moves like this when they have been so principled in their stances and actions, but like I said: Ron Paul is a politician, and a smart one at that, and he knows that the game needs to be played if his agenda is going to move forward.

Remember, for the Bartletts and Youngs out there, he's also endorsing the real deals like B.J. Lawson, who is a solid minarchist libertarian 100% aligned with him on the issues and the only Ron Paul-endorsed Congressional candidate who will be speaking at the Rally for the Republic and will also be emceeing a large part of the event. If that's not a signal of what Ron Paul is committed to, I don't know what is.

Furthermore, the Club for Growth isn't exactly the free market group it pretends to be. They're promoting the privatization of Social Security (which is NOT free market economics, but rather corporatist central planning run amuck; the real libertarian position on Social Security is its abolition), and they're promoting managed trade agreements (masquerading as free trade) and draconian tort reform that undermines the enforcement of contracts and private property and Coasian bargaining to resolve disputes. If anything, the Club for Growth is a corporatist organization masquerading as a free market organization.

Hey guys,

if any of you are interested, B.J. is having a money bomb on June 29. (http://lawsonlibertyfund.com) We have a goal of having $100k in the bank by the end of the month, and we're 2/3 of the way there, so we really need this to go well. Please donate what you can to help us out, but more importantly, we need to reach people about it and get the word out, so anything that you guys could do in social networking website to pimp B.J. and the money bomb would be tremendously helpful and even more valuable than a donation. Thank you in advance.

Paige Michael-Shetley
Liberty Republican
Youth Coordinator, Lawson for Congress

After months of hiatus from my blog, I'm back, and it with me. Check out my latest post, where I refute Kos's "Libertarian Dem" article.

http://libertyrepublicans.blogspot.com/

Having been inspired by Ron Paul's campaign and by the great work that you all do on this blog, particularly you FD, I have started a new blog myself. The name of it, having copycatted you guys somewhat, is appropriately titled Liberty Republicans.

I enthusiastically invite all on this blog to come over and post comments. If you would like to be a writer for the blog, I will be more than happy to add you. FD, I would love for you to come over and help me out on this one. We're all in the liberty movement together.

Yesterday was the Louisiana Caucus, where delegates to the state convention where elected to select delegates to the national convention. According to all reports, Ron Paul supporters outnumbered supporters of all the other candidates by a significant number. So what did representatives of the other candidates do? They pooled their delegates under a label of "Pro-Life/Pro-Family" to pool together the support of all of the candidates combined, which gave them a majority in every Congressional disricts. (Interesting that Giuliani reps did this, as he is pro-choice and, in the view of most GOP voters, takes stands that are anti-family; oh, the hypocrisy of the desperate!)

http://www.nolanchart.com/article1382.html

It's quite clear now that there is a anti-Ron Paul agenda among not just GOP voters, but GOP leadership itself. January 22, 2008: the day democracy died in America.

I think sometimes on this board we lose sight of what this is all about: us. Our country. Our future. But most of all, our people. I'd like to interject with a little bit of a personal testimony.

The past year has been quite turbulent for me. And the end of last academic year, I was practically on top of the world. I had a very good GPA, I was headed to study abroad at the London School of Economics, and I was preparing to apply to graduate schools and to write my Honor’s Thesis in Economics. On top of it all, my faith in politics was restored: my hero since high school, Ron Paul, was running for President. I knew all along that he would catch on and gain some notoriety, and I knew that this was an unprecedented opportunity for the cause of liberty and for our country. I knew the odds of winning were extremely long: we were in a party that had long been controlled by people with an agenda that ran completely contrary to ours. They didn’t take control over night: it took them about two decades. But they have control from top to bottom. The summer ended with me earning top marks at LSE, having the absolute time of my life in London, making tons of new friends (and stories), taking a terrific vacation to Greece, and a marathon of a journey back home. (Word of forewarning: London airports are THE WORST in the world.) I was energized and ready to go for a terrific year on campus, both in building Ron Paul’s campaign and in enjoying the academic success I had always known.

But there was an event that brought everything down almost immediately upon my return. The Sunday of the second week or the semester, my parents came over to my house in Chapel Hill. After we went out to lunch, they sat me down in my living room and old me something that was just unimaginable: after 24 years of marriage, they separated (while I was in Europe, mind you) and were going to file for divorce. This floored me. I was extremely close to both of them, and although they had arguments as all couples do, they always patched it up quickly. I just could not imagine the home I grew up in being split in two from here on out. I was in complete pain, and this lasted pretty much the rest of the semester. Whenever I would sit down and try to study or do work, I just couldn’t: whereas I always enjoyed school, the joy was completely gone. It interrupted me when I would do work for Students for Ron Paul, and resulting in much of my flawed leadership that I’m sure you all noticed. I ended up withdrawing for the semester simply to avoid was an inevitable academic collapse, and I maintained leadership in the group both because it was something I truly believed in at a time when I was doubting much of everything else I had thought about life and because it was something that genuinely eased the pain a bit. But not a time went by when I wasn’t thinking about it. It was, quite simply, a Hell for me, and almost immediately after I was in Heaven. I guess this was my Icarus moment.

However, this six month experience has really taught me a lot about life, particularly about people and relationships with them. I’ve learned that know matter how much you love someone and think you know them, there are many things you don’t. I’ve learned quite powerfully something that is seemingly ingrained in us for a long, but was nonetheless confirmed to me: nobody is perfect. Absolutely no one. When you experience these realizations in such an intense way, it is quite shocking; shell-shocking, in fact. But a funny thing happened over the course of this: I’ve become closer to each of my parents than I have ever been in my life. Over a while, I somewhat took the fact that they were my parents and provided love and a steady foundation for granted, and it created an environment in which I did not really investigate them as people that thoroughly. Now this has happened, and I’ve come to know and appreciate each of them more than I ever have. Which has led me to an ultimate realization: not only is it possible to love someone while knowing their flaws and some of their dark secrets, but in fact it is possible to love and appreciate them more because you do. What I found is that I had always had this picture of them as these icons, if you will: they were my parents, they put everything of their being into raising me and giving me the opportunities they gave me in my life, and they have always treated me with the utmost love and generosity. Seeing their flaws eliminated this idealistic image I had always had of them. It allowed me to look to their core and discover who they really were and what their underlying motivations really are. What I have found are two people who, at their very core, are as unselfish as it gets and who are motivated 100% by love for their families and, especially, their son. The realization became clear to me: you cannot truly love and appreciate someone until the idealistic images you have of them are destroyed and you find out who they are at the very deep core.

This brings me to Ron Paul. I would certainly say that Ron Paul is probably the first person outside of my family I truly loved, dating back to freshman year of high school. I first learned of him at a time when I first became truly interested in politics, particularly economics and political philosophy. This was a time when I didn’t have many friends in life, and probably my only connection to the “in” crowd was the fact that I was an average basketball player at best. Politics, particularly libertarianism, became my passion, and Ron Paul was, and always will be, my hero.

2004 was probably the roughest year of my life in terms of politics. Even as a partisan Republican, I had come to despise George W. Bush. Everything he campaigned on when he ran for President in 2000- small government, humble foreign policy, restoring honor to the White House, being a “uniter, not a divder”- was a complete lie. He ran the biggest deficits in history. He instituted the biggest expansion of government involvement in education in history. He instituted the largest expansion of the welfare state in history. His administration deliberately lied to the American people about a number of things, chiefly pre-war intelligence on Iraq. They used the pretext of the most horrifying event in this history of our country to create a culture of fear and hatred of people thousands of miles away from here and to launch an illegitimate and undeclared war on a country that had nothing to do with the people who attacked us. This is a time when a genuine and informative debate should have been taking place on the reasons why our enemies attacked us on 9/11, a debate that would no doubt have produced the realization of the irrationality and undesirability of spreading the war into Iraq. I had a sense of this all along, and I sensed the war was wrong and hoped it wouldn’t take place. But it did, and at first I made a horrifying decision that I regret t this day: to be a good Republican instead of a good American, or even a good libertarian.

I defended the Bush position when talking to everyone, even when I sensed it was wrong. I got tired of it briefly, and I considered supporting a couple of Democrats: not because I agreed with their entire agenda, because I most certainly didn’t, but because I was disenchanted with Bush. I liked both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, but I couldn’t bring myself completely to them until either of them could prove they could get the nomination. Both their campaigns floundered, and the Democrats gave me Kerry, who I saw as no better than Bush. Given that choice, I went back to Bush and became an apologist, even though I knew he was wrong. I interned at the North Carolina Republican Party headquarters, and I participated in the nationwide 24-hour GOTV effort that basically won re-election for Bush by turning out evangelical voters. For years, I told people that I voted for Badnarik in that election to escape the pain, and I really wish that I had not only done so, but worked for his campaign as well; but the unfortunate truth is that I in fact cast my ballot, with great pain, for President Bush. Immediately after the election, I switched my party registration from Republican to Libertarian, and I disassociated myself with Bush permanently. When the LP was decertified in North Carolina, I pretty much gave up on politics for a while.

When Ron Paul got into the race, I was immediately jovial. I thought that this would be the beginning of a movement to reclaim the intent of our country and to restore liberty to our land. I don’t agree with all of Ron Paul’s positions, as he comes from a slightly different variant of libertarianism than I do, but he is a libertarian nonetheless and has done more for liberty throughout his career than any of his contemporaries. And he is truly the most honest and honorable man in Washington, and his record is 100% in line with his principles. As I said, I knew this would be an incredible uphill battle, and it has been. But I watched the fundraising shoot up. I watched the poll numbers go up. I watched the amount of genuine enthusiasm skyrocket. All of this occurred while the media deliberately blacked us out, whereas they gave Howard Dean much more coverage in 2004. As time went on, and as we continued to dumbfound the pundits, I thought maybe, just maybe, the long-term movement we started might just go all the way now.

At this point, though, there’s no use in denying what is inevitable. Ron Paul will not be the Republican Nominee, and he will not be the 44th President of the United States. The deck was stacked against us from the beginning. What his campaign has done, though, is to launch something much more permanent: a movement for liberty. This is a bipartisan movement: libertarians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, libertarians of all schools, have now gotten the spark and the platform. Libertarianism has gone from something associated mainly with pot smoking and free love and nerds no one knows about to being a force capable of raising $20 million in a quarter of Presidential election. The progress is undeniable. We’ve launched at least three Congressional campaigns that will give Ron Paul both needed allies and heirs to the cause when he is gone, and one of these campaigns is occurring right in nt District with BJ Lawson, who is the finest candidate for Congress I have ever seen. He has a command of the issues that is unmatched, and he is an unbelievable speaker and purveyor of the message of liberty. Already, just as a result of his conversations with people, he’s been invited to an event sponsored by a progressive organization, and he has piqued the interest of a leader of a black advocacy organization in Durham. This, while the District 4 Chair of the NCGOP has thrown all of her support behind BJ’s opponent and has tried to systematically shut BJ out, and she has not been discrete about it. But we have many things going in our favor. The District 4 Chair has angered many people in the NCGOP with her conduct. We are building an impressive campaign with top notch people and technologies and an innovative strategy that is bound to succeed. We will be able to raise tons of money to compete with David Price, both locally and in the Ron Paul network. In terms of the primary, we have an opponent in Augustus Cho who is, for lack of a better word, a tool; he will be no problem. We have people in this district who, like the rest of America, are fed up with the war and with Washington and want real change. But our biggest advantage is our message and our man.

Going back to the beginning of my message, I would like to link the lessons that I learned about life through the experience of my parents’ divorce to Ron Paul. The nature of this linkage involves the story that came out in The New Republic online last week detailing ugly and revolting excerpts from newsletters that were published under Ron Paul’s name. Make no mistake about it: these excerpts were horrifying and appealed to the worst of both politics and human nature. I believe Ron Paul 100% when he says he did not write these words, and there's strong evidence suggesting he did not. But what is inescapably certain is that they are not at all a representation of who Ron Paul is and what he has stood for throughout his life. For these words that were in these newsletters, he has written condemnations of racism that far surpass them in power and intellect. Ron Paul is a champion of liberty for all, and he always has been. If he was a man with a secret nasty agenda, it would have shown itself in a voting record extending 10 terms in Congress and 30 years, but it’s not there. However, at best, there is certainly no excuse for the fact that these words went out under his name. To conclude any different is to be intellectually dishonest. I believe him when he says he didn’t write them and didn’t see all of them, but he should have exercised much more due diligence over them to ensure that what went out with his name attached to it reflected his own beliefs. Racism and homophobia are some of the ugliest and most destructive forces in our society, and as he has said, they are the enemies of liberty: they are two of the ugliest forms of collectivism there is, which leads to the mindset that we need groups and government to control and define us instead of individuals defining themselves as such in a free society. He absolutely has some explaining to do in order to shore things up, and he owes it more than anyone to the people who have supported him for so long and have worked so hard in this campaign.

What we come to realize through this experience is that Ron Paul is flawed, probably fatally as a Presidential candidate in our current time. The image that many have of him as something of a messiah I think is shattered. But it is when this message is shattered that we can see who he really is by doing research and reading his writing. Upon doing so, you realize that he is a man who is 100% driven by love of his family and the ideal on which this country was founded. When candidates file for the New Hampshire primary, there is a tradition in which the candidates sign a document and write a personal message on them. The other candidates resorted to cheap sloganeering from their campaign. Ron Paul wrote simply: “For Liberty.” This is what is at the heart of it all for him, and you will see that in every speech, online column, and book that you read from him. But as he has said all along, “I have my shortcomings, but the message has no shortcomings.”

The movie “V for Vendetta” has been associated many times with this campaign by supporters, and rightly so. What we have is a true uprising to take back our liberty. But this is not going to be a 2 hour movie, and it’s not going to be one Presidential election. This is going to take years to complete. We know that our country is on the verge of collapse, but the unfortunate truth is that the conditions of the system dictate that people aren’t quite ready to understand that and to understand why it’s happening. But they’re waking up. They’ve woken up to the tune of $20 million in one quarter, and one day fundraising records. They’re waking up when they listen to us talk to them and explain to them how the system works. As I said earlier, the people who have taken over the Republican Party did not do so overnight, and political parties are almost never taken over overnight. George W. Bush’s Presidential run was planned six years in advance. Ronald Reagan was running for President for basically 16 years before he became President. Hillary Clinton has been charting her path to the White House since she was First Lady. Barack Obama was launched onto the Presidential stage before he won election as Senator from Illinois. The progressives fought years to get into a position with the Democratic Party to advance the ideas of universal health care and combating climate change. It’s going to take us years, too, for libertarians to take the country back to the intent as laid out by our Founders: that of a free country. But we’ve got one hell of a start.

The only way we will be able to accomplish this, though, is if we work together. Paleolibertarians, cosmo-libertarians, geolibertarians, neolibertarians, progressive libertarians, right and left libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, and big-l Libertarians; WE ARE ALL LIBERTARIANS! We all find common ground with each other on values and ideas about 90% of the time. Why are we letting this 10% keep us from moving forward? We are 20% of the electorate; if we all came together, we would do so many great things, and we would be able to organize and bring more into our tent. If we do not do what we can do in the next 4 years, which is to make 10% of Congress solidly libertarian and to get many more elected to state and local office from any party, then we have no one to blame but ourselves and our petty bickering for keeping us apart and driving us to failure. If we unite, we are guaranteed to succeed, because if there is one thing that is universal among every American, it is the fundamental desire to be free.

Ron Paul knew he would not win the election for a number of reasons, but he threw himself out there to be hammered and ridiculed for us, because he knew the message was the truth and that people would understand it. The base we have now is all because of him. It took him a few months to accomplish what the Libertarian Party has been trying to accomplish for four decades, almost four now. Despite his flaws, which all of us have in some form or another, he is our man and our hero. But as he would tell us, we need to keep sight of what is at stake and what our motivation is. The Founding Fathers gave us the greatest ideal known to man, and it’s been our responsibility over time to maintain it. We’ve shirked on our responsibility, and we’re teetering on collapse for it. Ron Paul is our new Founding Father: he’s founded a new movement to reclaim the ideal our previous founders gave us, and it’s our responsibility to maintain it and carry it forward. We cannot shirk on this responsibility. We need to keep working: for Paul’s campaign, for other campaigns, and for the cause of liberty. We need to get BJ elected in District 4, and we need to get other libertarians elected around the country, both Republican and Democratic.

Right now, we are at the point where V has exposed the British Government for what it is and destroyed an armed unit while being fatally wounded by gunfire: Ron Paul has exposed socialism, interventionism, fiat monetarism, and our government in general for what it is, and he has destroyed their veil permanently. We all have our V masks now. The next step, which will be a high step, is to blow up Parliament. (Figuratively, of course) The Ron Paul R3VOLUTION lives on!

For Liberty,

Paige Michael-Shetley
Chairman, UNC Students for Ron Paul
Volunteer and Youth Coordinator, Lawson for Congress

With many anti-war and pro-civil liberties leftists being attracted by Ron Paul's candidacy, the left-wing blogosphere has been very active this year in throwing the "racist" charge at him throughout the year. Lately, Kos has pretty much made the blog the "Daily 'Ron Paul is a racist' Reminder," oddly spending lots of time trashing him while stating he has absolutely no fear of his candidacy and labeling him a fringer who has no chance of winning. (Why spend time on him if you're not worried about him, Markos? Don't you think it's a waste of time?)

Now is the time to set the record straight and to, well, do a little bit of critical thinking. Firstly, I submit to everyone, this little nugget from Freedom Under Siege, page 14, which was published five years before the infamous 1992 newsletter:

There are times when it seems like we get our system of values from television
productions. Professional wrestling is one of the few programs which started
on TV in the late 1940s and now claims more viewers than ever. There are no
rules, and it is associated with contrived (but unreal) violence: mockery of the
referee, racism, absence of sportsmanship, yelling, screaming, and hatred.
Reasonable rules of decency are totally ignored. The shows get worse every
year; belts, chains, and cages are now part of the acts. Twenty wrestlers are put
into a ring without a referee and a free-for-all erupts -- the more violent, the
more the crowd cheers the ridiculous charade.

Here, Dr. Paul write that "racism" is a "bad value" portrayed by the "rediculous charade" of 1980s professional wrestling. That is not at all the writing of a racist. Are we to believe that a 52 year-old soon to be candidate of a third-party who through his history in Congress and previous writings displayed a certainty in his views, including his opposition to racism as expressed here, and did so in a highly scholarly manner that avoids unverifiable speculation would all of the sudden become a raging racist peddler of ignorant stereotypes? That's just completely irrational.

The next point I would like to address is his statement in the 2001 issue of the Texas Monthly in which he stated that he did not write the newsletter comments. The left blogosphere has had a field day with these, claiming that they make "no sense" and stink of doing some politically-advantageous running. Here's the question: what is the advantage of someone who has won three straight elections, each by increased margins, who has de facto established himself as an entrenched House incumbent for as long as he wants to be there, and who has not actively sought any type of higher political office, all of the sudden backtracking from comments that hadn't been brought up for several years and had yet to cost him any type of political trouble? Furthermore, why would he even waste his time to write on the topic of racism not once, but twice, in which his comments are essentially identical to the Ayn Rand's argument, over the years in his online column while this is the case? Furthermore, if Dr. Paul was so much as courting the racist vote, why would he specifically argue that the War on Drugs and the Death Penalty are unjust in their discriminatory treatment against minorities? I'm sorry, but the idea of a sinister politically-advantageous scheme by Ron Paul to dupe the voters into thinking he's not racist when in fact he is is just an idea that, quite frankly, "makes no sense." (But is actually somewhat interesting, considering that the people who perpetuate it, i.e. the left-wing blogosphere, love to bash him for possessing the irrationality of a "conspiracy theory nut.")

Can we finally throw the untrue and unfoundable "Ron Paul is a racist" charge out?

I would like to announce that B.J. Lawson, the Triangle Meetup Coordinator in North Carolina, has officially launched his Congressional Campaign in District 4 in North Carolina. This is currently the district of Democratic Congressman David Price, an entrenched establishment figure. The district comprises of Chapel Hill and Durham and parts of Raleigh/Wake County, and it contains a very high university and young professional population, making it a hot ground for a libertarian-leaning candidate like Mr. Lawson. Please visit his website today: http://www.lawsonforcongress.com

We are going to be involved in a big time battle. After the NCGOP found out that BJ was a Ron Paul supporter, they recruited the Orange County GOP Chair to run, so we do have a primary opponent who is backed by the establishment.

We are going to make a major fundraising push online within the Ron Paul network. But suffice it to say: BJ Is a truly outstanding candidate. He has a grasp of the issues that is simply unmatched by any candidate I have ever met, and this includes Ron Paul himself. He has a background as an engineer and a MD, the latter career he left to start a health care software company. We have a real shot to win this district: we've assembled a terrific staff, we've got a population that has a lot of libertarians and a hugely anti-war and pro-civil liberties liberals, and we have a dynamic candidate. With the Ron Paul internet network and an awesome website on our side, we have the ability to not only quash our primary opponent, but also to match or beat Congressman Price.