We’ll say it again: Ron Paul is a bogus “libertarian”!

Bill Weinberg

Could everybody just stop and think, please? Rand Paul won applause from basically freedom-loving folks when he was blocked from boarding a flight by the Transportation Security Administration last week in Nashville, after refusing to submit to a full body pat-down. Carl Gibson on Huffington Post points out a salient little irony to the situation: Paul was headed for Washington DC to participate in an anti-choice event, the “March for Life”! So much for personal freedom! This cuts to the heart of the bogus pseudo-libertarianism of Rand and his old man Ron Paul. Gibson astutely writes:

Ron and Rand Paul dislike big government regulation that forbids logging companies from destroying national forests, laws that forbid oil companies from drilling in the habitats of protected wildlife, or statutes that keep coal companies from dumping waste in a community drinking water supply. The small government the Paul family fantasizes about is one small enough to be incapable of regulating the private sector when it intrudes in the lives of private citizens. It’s a government so small that any corporate accountability would be left up to the people, in the courtrooms. And anyone suing for pollution of drinking water, deadly prescription drugs, tainted food, unsafe working conditions, wage theft or any other wrongdoing would lose every time against corporate giants in battles of attrition, using lawyers paid for with bottomless profits.

We’re glad somebody else gets it. But it is actually much worse than that. Ron and Rand do not merely share the blind spot of right-wing libertarians about oppression by private rather than governmental entities. They aren’t even as progressive as real right-wing libertarians on issues like abortion, immigration and basic constitutional rights. Really, they aren’t “libertarians” at all! Ron Paul, in a now-viral video clip, embraced the Confederate cause and spoke to a neo-Confederate confab before the symbol of slavery, the Confederate battle flag! This casts his notorious opposition to the Civil Rights Act (on the long-discredited grounds of “states’ rights”) in a very sinister light—as well as his opposition to birthright citizenship, enshrined in the post-Civil War 14th Amendment.

Even the Libertarian Party, with its reactionary economic prescriptions, has enough consistent principles to hold basically progressive positions on abortion and immigration. Ron Paul, in contrast, wants to constrict fundamental rights for wide swaths of the American populace—namely, women and undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants—and (sickeningly) their native-born children.

We had to call him out on this in our latest YouTube rant. Ron Paul is a dangerous enemy of freedom who has no business calling himself a “libertarian”! He is sullying the proud legacy of the word. Share this with all your friends who are rooting for Ron Paul!

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  1. Pay-to-play policy for Ron Paul posts
    We know from bitter empirical experience that if we allow the comments in a post about Ron Paul to be a free-for-all, it will quickly become a forum for pro-Confederacy revisionism and other such noxious propaganda. Because we have no desire to loan these vile voices any more of a soapbox than they already have, we are charging a minimum of $5 per comment—only on posts about Ron Paul. As you Paulistas should understand, this website is our private property and we therefore have the perfect right to do this. You may use the PayPal button below. Please make sure you post under the same name that you use for the PayPal payment so we can keep track. This will also be a measure of the quality of the comments: The price will go up as the comments get more asinine, or (less likely) drop as they get more intelligent. Our Posting Policy still applies, so please read it first.

    OK, fire at will…

  2. Ron Paul and Choice or Freedom
    See if your truly Libertarian, you would understand that once conception occurs, a unique human being is genetically created, everything is there, eye color, intelligence, heart disease, everything. So that unique individual has every right to exist at that point. If you don’t have freedom to exist, what kind of freedoms do you have.

    Its completely consistent, otherwise wear a rubber.

    1. An example of why we have a pay-to-play policy
      1. Condoms break.

      2. If you support state control over a woman’s reproductive system, don’t call yourself a “libertarian.” You do not believe in personal freedom. You are opposed to it.

      3. The platform of the Libertarian Party states:

      Abortion
      Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.

      Apart from the bad grammar, this is a legitimately libertarian position. Yours is not.

      4. You owe me five dollars. Pay up.

  4. Seven comments deleted
    Referring to Ron Paul as “he-who-must-not-be-mentioned” is a transparent subterfuge. To say anything in this item, you must pay. Get it?

    Nobody rides for free in items with Ron Paul-related content.

    Pay up or take a hike.

    And you better do it soon before the price goes up, because those comments were pretty damn dumb.

  5. Libertarians are pro-choice
    More skinflints are posting bogus comments asserting that the “pro-life” position is “libertarian,” which is bunk.

    Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say—they are a good gauge of conventional wisdom, if nothing else. This from their “Libertarian perspectives on abortion” page:

    Libertarians promote individual liberty and seek to minimize the role of the state. The majority of libertarians consider a right to abortion as part of their general support for individual rights, especially in regard to what they consider to be a woman’s right to control her body. Religious right and intellectual conservatives have attacked such libertarians for supporting abortion rights… Other libertarians oppose abortion, and claim libertarian principles such as the non-aggression principle apply to human beings from conception.

    Under “Pro-choice positions,” Wikipedia (in addition to making note of the Libertarian Party platform plank quoted above) states:

    Objectivist Ayn Rand, whose writings helped to inspire the modern libertarian movement, called the idea that a fetus should have a right to life “vicious nonsense” and also flatly stated, “An embryo has no rights…a child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.”

    Influential libertarian writer Murray Rothbard wrote that “no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body” and that therefore the woman is entitled to eject the fetus from her body at any time…

    In “The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense,” the Association of Libertarian Feminists has created what they call a “systematic philosophical defense of the moral case for abortion from a libertarian perspective.” It concludes: “To sacrifice existing persons for the sake of future generations, whether in slave labor camps for the utopian nightmares of Marxists or fascists, or in unwanted pregnancies, compulsory childbearing, and furtive coat hanger abortions for the edification of fetus-worshippers, is to establish hell on earth.”

    The Objectivist-influenced Capitalism Magazine also supports the pro-choice position, writing: “A fetus does not have a right to be in the womb of any woman, but is there by her permission. This permission may be revoked by the woman at any time, because her womb is part of her body… There is no such thing as the right to live inside the body of another, i.e. there is no right to enslave… a woman is not a breeding pig owned by the state (or church). Even if a fetus were developed to the point of surviving as an independent being outside the pregnant woman’s womb, the fetus would still not have the right to be inside the woman’s womb.”

    The Pro-Choice Libertarians group lists the following reasons they oppose government involvement in the abortion issue: “The fetus is not a human being with rights until it is born (based on a number of rationales) and/or only the mother confers rights on the fetus; even if the fetus has rights, and abortion is murder, the rights of the mother to evict trespassers – for whatever reasons – through abortion are greater (based on a number of rationales); the government is the problem, not the solution, including in this issue; it’s my body and the government should keep its laws off it; people can decide this issue in their private, contractual communities; only voluntary means of convincing a woman to have a child are libertarian; the decision on whether it is murder is based on political power and adult women have more power; it is wrong to force a deformed baby or unwanted child to come into the world.”

    All pretty well said, apart from the gratuitous diss of Marxism (as if the capital-L Libertarians don’t suffer from their own “utopian nightmares”). There is also a much smaller section that makes note of “Pro-life positions”—basically, Ron and Rand and a confused bunch calling themselves “Libertarians for Life,” who seem to be as oxymoronic as Jews for Jesus. (Shamefully, the page makes no reference to the left-libertarian position, which is of course forthrightly pro-choice.)

    So if you Paulistas want to keep your fetus fetish, you had better be prepared to repudiate your icons Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.

    Five bucks to reply.