I should have responded more thoughtfully to what you wrote, but I don’t think that betting against 401(k)’s is the same thing as betting against civilization. The last fifty years have been a very abnormal time for capitalism. In the long run, any possible success we can have will be predicated upon our not doing this anymore, and starting to do something different.

Paul is on the record, for at least three decades, as saying that he thinks a currency system based on precious metals is the key to financial solvency here and abroad. He thinks that it would be good for the country if everyone invested the way he did. He got this idea from a fully developed, if heterodox, economic school, many practitioners of which were predicting the 2008 downturn while mainstream economists were busy forecasting clear sailing.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of distortion and corruption of the mandate of government to reward the good and punish the evil. Just because I don’t want to legalize public drug use, doesn’t mean I want to go around reporting every neighbor who uses marijuana, or have a person thrown into prison for a pot seed under a car mat (this actually happened under zero tolerance in the ’80′s). Or that I advocate that the government and employers drug test welfare recipients or prospective employees. To me, this is absurd and intrusive.

To go even farther in this vein, many herbalists are painfully aware of the suppression of botanical and natural medicine by government influenced by the wealth of Carnegie in the early 1900′s. I could say more in this vein, but I shall let it go for the sake of brevity.

It is, however, not just the Right that oversteps reason in these areas. The Communists were even more oppressive in their regulation of “decadent” music, sexual behavior, literature and other aspects of culture. When one belongs to the State, one doesn’t dally in unsanctioned activity.

I don’t believe that Ron Paul has the end word on what is constitutional either. I don’t believe the man takes the time to examine all sides to the issues before precribing some panacea for our ills. His view that we should let the states decide on Sharia law, and other controversial questions shows a dangerous lack of reflection on constitutional intent, as far as I am concerned. I even start to wonder who is supporting the man.

And insofar as cutting “entitlements” goes, he shows no sensitivity, that I have seen, about who he could be hurting with sudden and drastic measures, no matter how much I would support a gradual, gentle change in these areas.

Suppose I played for the Jets. What if at the beginning of the season I placed a huge bet that the team wouldn’t make it to the playoffs? Now assume also that I can demonstrate there’s absolutely nothing corrupt about my action. In no way will I ‘throw a game’ in order to win the bet. Even if I could demonstrate this, the NFL would kick me out. Why?

Well I could say that the team was lousey this year and I have a duty to ‘provide for my grandchildren’ and if that meant putting my money against them so be it. But the NFL would reply that I have a duty not to be disloyal, and betting against the team is disloyal, even if its objectively a rational bet to make.

Paul’s portfolio is essentially a bet against civilization. It’s about as close as you can get to ‘bomb shelter and canned food and shot guns’ as you can get with a 401K. So sorry you don’t have to use your 401K as a flag if you’re running for one of the highest office’s in civilization, but at a certain point its fair to call you out on what is essentially disloyality to civilization. If you’re rooting for the world to burn, the world should see you as something other than a friend.

Because the idea of investment isn’t to make money and secure your family against future uncertainty, it’s to show that you’re really flying the flag. Better to put your grandchildren at risk than to make people who look at your financial statements feel bad things.

http://www.acton.org/sites/v4.acton.org/files/pdf/5.2.439-457.ARTICLE.Schansberg,%20D.,%20Eric–Common%20Ground%20between%20the%20Philosphies%20of%20Christianity%20and%20Libertarianism.pdf

Ron Paul strikes me as a creepy opportunist more than anything else. His investment portfolio, centered heavily on gold and shorting stocks, is so over the top as to be borderline unpatriotic in my opinion….he’s the type of person whose rooting for the world to collapse so he can pat himself on the back and say “see I was right after all”. He happily embraced racist kooks back in the 80′s in order to mop up support from the aging old school racists of the right wing fringe, now that that crew is mostly in the grave or too senile to be of help to him he mucks around looking for other nuts to fill out his niche.

Paul enjoys the intellectual affirmative action of being hyped in the popular media as a man of principle. He is hyped as an idealist who is ‘honest’ and so is given credit for being above ‘mere politics’. Of course this narrative allows one to write Paul off for being ‘too idealist’, for not ‘being practical’ but at the cost of giving him undue credit.

I’m not quite seeing this. Bedford Falls was not created in the movie by any particular regulation. It was created by the choices of individuals. In fact, both Pottersville and Bedford Falls are examples of the maxim that ‘life is what you make of it’. Both alternate universes have the same type of government, enjoyed the same type of New Deal policies like FDR’s closing of the banks during the panic, bank examiners, and so on. One place is nice because people choose to act nice, the other place is sucky because people choose to act sucky. As someone who leans left, I acknowledge the fact that ‘right policies’ still will only get you so far.

Paul’s opposition to moral legislation betrays his failure to appreciate the government’s divine mandate to punish evil and praise good. Domestically, that’s a mandate to make moral distinctions between good and evil behavior.

There’s a slight problem with government’s ‘divine mandate to punish evil and praise good’, it’s a complete moral failure. It’s a worse historical failure than communism is. At the end of that road you are left with either a human beign claiming the right to rule over other people as God (i.e. North Korea in our modern age, Ancient Egypt in older ages) or as an agent of God (i.e. ‘the divine right of kings’).

This ‘mandate’ can only work when its jurisdication is highly circumscribed. On most moral issues the gov’t has no right to speak either way because the gov’t has no legitimate authority to speak. To use a rough analogy, one can say sex is a major moral issue for a married couple. That doesn’t mean you have the right to peep into your neighbor’s bedroom window at 2 in the morning and start lecturing them about what you think they are doing right and wrong in the bedroom. As important as that couples sex life is for them, it is more important that you keep your place and mind your business and if you fail to do that your neighbor has a right to point his shotgun in your face and tell you to get out of his window!

Stephen P

2. Ron Paul is both a libertarian and a constitutionalist.

It’s a good point to note that there’s a sharp difference between libertarians and constitutionalists. Libertarians are mostly cut from the same cloth as Ayn Rand. Yes Rand disagreed with other libertarians, but fundamentally there’s no difference between so-called ‘objectivists’ who follow Rand and other libertarian types. Both systems of thought suffer the same defect, they are anti-American IMO.

By anti-American I mean they are foreign systems of thought obsessed with policies. What’s interesting about the Constitution is that its less about policies than procedures. The Founders thought less about specific policy issues (should the US expand its land by lauching imperial wars? Should it have universal public education? Should it have an income tax? Should it have a safety net?) than they did about procedures. They didn’t con themselves into thinking they could figure out what policies would be good in a young and growing nation. They figured it was better to create a good system of procedures for figuring out what to do.

Libertarians don’t do that for the most part. They figure they can figure out all acceptable policies by literally ‘computing’ them from first principles. Hence a question like unemployment insurance is not debated by asking does it do more good than harm? It’s debated by ‘computing’ the right answer from supposedly ‘objective’ first principles and then the real world doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if its a great help to those who loose their jobs while imposing a small cost on everyone else. In the libertarian universe if you violate a first principle the scale of the infraction doesn’t matter. There’s no difference between ‘stealing’ pennies out of people’s paychecks and Hitler throwing the Jews in the gas chambers.

It’s interesting to really ask libertarians what purpose they think democracy really serves or should serve. In a libertarian world, what would even be the purpose of an election? To figure out what the state bird should be? All really serious policies have already been deduced by the libertarian philosopher kings, after all! In fact, libertarians don’t really care about democracy at all. It’s just a means to an end and if some other means gets you to the promised land more efficiently, then ditch democracy and go with that. The crowning achievement of American thought was to recognize that ‘its the means stupid’. A rather trivial tax on tea is not the issue, a tax imposed without representation is. To the libertarian, though, there’s no difference between a tax imposed with representation and without. If it violates the derived absolute rights of tea drinkers, its tyranny. If not then its not.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that many libertarian thinkers are not American. People like Rand came from countries with long histories of absolute rulers who had to contend with what policies to implement. ‘Procedures’ were mere after thoughts which could be changed willy nilly. To the English and American mindset, though, it is the opposite way around. Whether there’s a tax on tea is a mere afterthought. We can always change the tax to be on whiskey, or hard cider, or imported goods. It’s a bigger deal, though, to decide that each state won’t get exactly two Senators no matter how big or small they are or to decide that the King may not propose a new tax unless Parliment is in session and approves it first!