Big Rob wrote:
I think he gets plaudits from a lot of liberals because he at least attempts to be consistent. Unlike the likes of the other shithead hypocritical sacks of shit who are involved in the Grand Old Party mularkey....
Ron Paul's anti-war rhetoric is seductive to a lot of disillusioned Democrats, but his ideology - that government is the problem, that it can never be applied to positive ends - is pernicious, dogmatic and wrong. He gets plaudits for being outspoken, but he can afford to be since his crankier ideas (e.g. getting rid of the Federal Reserve) are never going to make headway with the US political system the way it is. Even if all his rival contestants for the GOP nomination were to be struck by lightning and he somehow fluked a win over Obama in the GE, he'd still struggle to get anything past what would almost certainly be a hostile Congress. In fact, he'd probably get less done than Obama has managed.
But then, I find libertarianism in general to be completely ludicrous. It's a very middle-class affectation and I've certainly never met a working-class libertarian (although tbf I've not met many libertarians, they seem to exist mostly on the internet). The impression I get is that most libertarians like the idea of a world without government because they're sufficiently well-off not to be affected, and their own privilege would be perpetuated. Bob Black had it right in
The Libertarian as Conservative when he said that libertarians generally don't oppose the core activities of the state, they just want to see them hived off to the private sector - which for me, really exposes their pro-liberty posturing as a sham.
Quote:
To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who’d abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else. But this incestuous family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps call for partial or complete privatization of state functions but neither questions the functions themselves. They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism.
What's also interesting is they can't seem to reach any sort of consensus on abortion - so they're apparently all for 'liberty', but when someone does something they don't like, some libertarians (including Paul) still want to clamp down on them as much as any other social conservative.
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