Social Security will become about 6% of GDP in the long-run according to the latest SS Trustees Report. Medicare and Medicaid spending will be 15% of GDP by 2040 according to the CEA health care report.

SS, Medicare and Medicaid alone will make up 21% of GDP thirty years from now. During the Bush years, the government’s tax revenues were about 17% of GDP.

The moral of the story here is that if you don’t want higher taxes, you need enthusiasts and activists who (unlike the Tea Partiers) present responsible and realistic proposals to curb the growth of entitlement spending and, yes, military spending also.

Otherwise, quit complaining about higher taxes. As Milton Friedman once pointed out, to spend is to tax and the status quo right now has spending sharply increasing over the next few decades.

Ironically, Mr. Paul’s willingness to play the pork game ably displays the fact that he is not a utopian. The best he can do in getting money back into looted pockets is to get it back into his district. That’s not a perfect solution, as you point out: it is a most decidedly unutopian (topian?), imperfect answer to a difficult problem.

Likewise with Mr. Paul’s advocacy of commodity backed currency. He has actually laid out plans for a gradual return to sound money, as have many other advocates of the same policy. No one is saying that tomorrow we’ll wake up to the gold standard circa 1839. But some, for example, advocate allowing competition in money rather than a sole, government legislated legal-tender, which would allow contracts to be written so that they could be paid off with any tender the parties agree to (Mr. Paul is in this money competition camp). Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, wrote a famous, detailed essay about a gradual return to a non-fiat currency based on the US Government’s current holdings of specie and keeping legal tender laws intact.

Mr. Paul, unlike any other politician on the right, has also laid out plans for ending the Social Security ponzi scheme. It involves ending Social Securty taxes on everyone under a certain age and paying for the payments due to those above that age with savings from scaling back the American military machine. That’s ambitious, to be sure – but it is not utopian. Utopian would be thinking that a society can continue to support Social Security with greater longevity, a lower birth rate, and two trillion dollar wars paid for with borrowed money.

Therefore, I think you paint with too broad a brush by implying that Mr. Paul and other libertarians are “utopian.” The spectrum of libertarian organizations and the policies they advocate are worth more considered thought than just tossing them aside in one lump with an epithet. Consider the work, for example, of the Cato Institute. How many of their libertarian policy suggestions have become law? Quite an impressive list, actually.

At any rate – thank you for the cordial and stimulating discussion stemming from Silent Cal. If that quiet Vermonter were still kicking today, I don’t think there’s any doubt about which of the GOP’s 2008 field he would have liked to have seen win the nomination.

+HRC

A more apt analogy would be if someone steals your wallet and then I vote to get some of the money back in order to give it to your neighbor. The money isn’t going back into the pocket of the individual taxpayer, but to the pockets of special interests who just happen to live in Paul’s district.

If the rational for doling out pork is that it returns some of the money to the people, then shouldn’t we be in favor of more pork (at least in relation to other budget items)?

. . . would you agree that the reason Mr. Paul does not get more support from the right has very little to do with his pork votes and everything to do with his stance against America’s foreign wars?

Partially. I think some people oppose Paul because of his stance on wars just as some people uncritically support him for the same reason.

I respect Paul and think he should have a place at the table. But my problem with him is the same problem I have with all libertarians—indeed, all utopianists: they tend to offer solutions that work fine in theory but are unworkable in reality.

For example, Paul is in favor of returning to gold and silver as legal tender. All there are a number of problems with this idea, one of the biggest is that there is not enough gold on the planet to back our current currency. The fact the he advocates for an idea so unrealistic tends to make me think that he is more committed to paleolibertarianism than he is in being an effective representative.

But in a way this is beside the point – would you agree that the reason Mr. Paul does not get more support from the right has very little to do with his pork votes and everything to do with his stance against America’s foreign wars?

+HRC

Do Tea partiers favor repeal of their SSI, SSDI, Medicare and veterans’ benefits, as well as tax subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction? Just curious. You dismissed the accusation without addressing it, which makes me somewhat skeptical.

I am an anti-democrat. Your point is?