His answers in debates always receive thunderous rounds of applause, he is the most popular candidate among the GOP youth and he is a fervent libertarian. He’s not Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, nor Rick Santorum. He is Ron Paul.
Why the big hullabaloo over Rep. Paul? According to Harvard’s Institute for Politics, out of all of the candidates in the GOP field, Paul is the most popular among my generation.
I cannot find such a statistic more troubling.
Paul’s administration is the one that would benefit my peers the least. Why? The answer is that he is a libertarian. His rhetoric, which praises a lesser influence of government over corporations and businesses, is attractive to the anti-establishment, idealist tendencies of the youth. However, what I truly believe makes Paul so popular is our generation’s lack of understanding of the true nature of libertarianism.
Paul is a libertarian running under the Republican name. According to Paul, he is doing so because running under a third party label would not give him a viable chance to attain the presidency. So, what is libertarianism? Here’s a little political philosophy 101.
Someone who is a libertarian adheres to a strain of political philosophy called libertarianism. Libertarians believe in a school of thought that creeds an absolutely limited government whose function it is to solely facilitate the honoring of contracts, protect man’s unalienable rights and maintain a sense of law. According to libertarians, everything else should be a private function.
This school of thought is attractive to those who have money due to its lack of any sense of social welfare. Entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be scrapped in such a government. Under libertarianism, where there is no form of government regulation on any entity whatsoever, the rich would be able spend their money (the form of influence in a libertarian society), and grow the amount they have, in whatever way they choose.
As for the poor? Well, for lack of a better expression; they are screwed. Public education does not exist in a libertarian society, nor does the concept of subsidized housing, minimum wage standards or union bargaining rights. Basically, if you’re rich, you’re going to stay rich, and if you’re poor, you’re going to stay poor.
Ideally, a libertarian might tell you, a poor person could accumulate wealth by successfully navigating the market. By successfully holding a job, he or she could receive a salary that is based off the standards of the market.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
An example would be the 2008 financial crisis. By no means was the U.S. government operating under a libertarian system, but in essence, Wall Street was. Investing companies enjoyed a regulation-free system in which they could handle their funds in any way they chose, so long as investors saw positive returns. The rest was history. Companies bought tens of thousands of sub-prime mortgages that made vast amounts of money in the short-run, only to fall flat in the long run.
And now my generation is telling me that they want a president who will attempt to deregulate America’s financial system? Does history not repeat itself? Give me a break.
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Hayek > Keynes • Jan 19, 2012 at 3:20 am
Interesting article. There are several issues I have with your argument.
I don’t blame you for these positions, or the lack of understanding of how government corrupts free markets as the ideas you have are what we grow up with in America and in many other nations because government feeds off of and promotes Keynesian economic theory, after John Maynard Keynes. This is because it allows politicians to keep spending on new programs which gets them votes and it allows the government to grow as it has for about one hundred years at least. We don’t have a TRUE capitalist system. At extremes, these government interventions can easily be seen by everyone: Communism illustrates this very clearly. Why should your money be taken away, change hands through several bureaucrats (whose salaries are paid by you), and be given to someone else, or put in some failing program/industry, or used to bomb other nations without a declaration of war by Congress, or given to another foreign country in the hopes that it actually reaches the starving children of that nation?
If you understood free market economics, you would see how government programs take money from some to give to others which corrupts the allocation of resources to their most useful purposes, creating deadweight loss while overpaid bureaucrats sit there creating red tape or processing paperwork all on taxpayer money. The entitlement programs you speak of are obviously a source of discussion because they’re broken systems. Subsidized housing destroys communities as do rent controls; in several instances one can’t tell the difference between a bombed city and one under rent controls. Minimum wage kills jobs; if a business is ready to hire 500 workers at 5 dollars per hour but the minimum wage is 7.25, how many workers can they now afford to hire? Is their growth not hindered by not being able to hire the perfect number of workers?
Then we get to the financial crisis. You can’t simplify such a complex problem into being solely due to lack of regulation. Yes, this was a contributing factor. The problem wasn’t the people who made these bad decisions (they should have lost all their money in the collapse) but rather the government and its influence on the market. Greenspan held interest lates low through the Federal reserve operations (another abhorrent institution created by the government, but separate from the government in its dealings, but I digress). Fannie and Freddie secured home mortgages from default and took them off the hands of banks who created them, allowing people to borrow/lend way more than people could afford. (Look up NINJA loans.) This government sponsored push for home ownership and the wall street investors’ utilization of this opportunity created the housing bubble. It wouldn’t have been created without gov’t intervention because most people wouldn’t take such risk without government backing, and if they did, theyd fail, without gov’t support. Then they dealt with it by handing out bailouts to those who made bad bets, who should have failed if the market was free, making way for new players to join the game who might make smarter investments, knowing what could happen if they didn’t. Instead, these banks got free money (loans without interest that can be lent out for interest count as free money) and much of their leadership stayed in place. (look up Freddie execs getting BONUSES after getting bailed out)
Most of the world didn’t see this housing bubble coming! Ben Bernanke- a Keynesian is seen multiple times saying that the economy is sound leading up to this collapse (my opinion is that he at least knew but lied to delay the effects and satisfy his interests). Peter Schiff- a free market economist was warning of it as early as 2005 (he wrote a book that was COMPLETED in mid 2007 on the subject) as was Ron Paul, as early as 2002.
The Fed, created in 1913 (almost secretly) is a private bank, more or less. It is given the power to print money essentially and doesn’t have to disclose much of its dealings. We are probably on the third round of this so-called ‘”Quantitative Easing” they don’t have to tell you when they’re doing it. This means that the dollars in your pocket and in Grandma’s savings account lose value based on the decisions of a few men including Bernanke. The Government doesn’t ever have to default; what they can do is just print money to pay off what they owe but devaluing the dollar very quickly. If people stopped holding/accepting the dollar around the world, as the reserve currency of the world, this would have a massive impact raising the prices of goods like oil for Americans while lowering them for others. This is why anyone attempting to stop selling their oil in exchange for dollars is taken down (Saddam, Gaddafi).
Anyway, I don’t blame you for not understanding how the free market helps the economy run more smoothly while government’s best intentions lead to unintended consequences. There is very limited exposure to this in all Academia due to decades of Keynesian economists supporting governments and governments supporting Keynesian economists. Most of your teachers will not have had exposure to this side of the argument. Ron Paul’s message is only gaining foothold now in light of the economic failures of Governments around the world. I hope you will have the courage to challenge yourself and look at Ron Paul’s ideas objectively, without emotional feelings for poor people, old people, sick people who can be better off with free markets and competition as well as a small portion of charities, nonprofits, etc, NOT the Government.
Noah Fitzgerel • Jan 18, 2012 at 7:19 am
Thank you for your feedback. I have certainly read 1984, and am familiar with NDAA and the Patriot Act. However, this editorial was not commenting holistically on Paul’s campaign, but attempting to comment on Paul’s popularity.
Thus, I chose to focus on the economic aspect of libertarianism. However, you mention “our liberties are being threatened by the encroachment of big government (which you appear to advocate through your support of welfare programs).” It is important to note that a true libertarian would be opposed to entitlement programs. The concept of a social state, which entitlement programs are a component of, is not endorsed in libertarianism. Paul might endorse these programs, but just as a conservative Democrat might be opposed to raising taxes (which is not adhering to the party platform), such an endorsement does not reflect fundamental libertarian thinking.
Thank you.
Come at me • Jan 15, 2012 at 6:00 am
This editorial is a gross simplification of libertarianism (and a negative one at that). Choosing to concentrate on the economic aspects (which you did so poorly), you write that the 2008 financial crisis was brought about as a result of an adoption of libertarian economic policies.
Corporate welfare is one of the reasons the 2008 financial crisis occurred, with these large companies that you mention enjoying tax breaks and government subsidies. These companies were subsequently bailed out when their ventures went awry, with taxpayer money; this bailout is in opposition with the free-market principle that makes up a large part of the libertarian philosophy, as in a free market, entities that make bad decisions have to take responsibility for their actions, instead of passing it on to the government.
The regulations that you are lauding in your editorial, in many cases, serve to stifle small businesses’ ability to compete with larger corporations, the latter having the resources to comply with and influence these regulations.
The economic policies of libertarianism you touched upon in a cursory manner. You failed to mention the other big part of libertarianism, which is the advocation of individual liberty. Dr. Paul believes that one should be free to do as he or she pleases, so long as their actions do not bring about the harm of others. In today’s society, our liberties are being threatened by the encroachment of big government (which you appear to advocate through your support of welfare programs); had you bothered to do more research into Dr. Paul, you would have known that he opposes these encroachments. He has voted against the PATRIOT act and the NDAA in their many forms (read up more on these if you think that they do more good than harm, a smart kid like you will have read 1984 by this time).
By choosing to concentrate your critique on economic policies to generate a negative image of Ron Paul, you have failed to realize that another large part of his campaign is centered around military and foreign policies that advocate for peace. The American death toll post-9/11 from interventionist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere is around 8,800. Ron Paul voted against the military actions that led to these American deaths, Americans that like you and I, would have had a chance to improve our country here at home, instead of dying for a cause that, after a decade, appears muddled and unresolved at best.
This editorial’s criticism of Ron Paul is a fair one, as many fear the power of big business over an individual. The far greater tragedy is the power of big government over the individual.
K.L. Hoang • Jan 18, 2012 at 6:51 am
Wonderfully put, Come at me.
Paul is the only candidate that backs up his talk with his voting record. This is something to say in regard to the other “candidates” and current president we might listen to today.