Libertarian Think Tank

Megan McArdle astutely explains why Clinton’s plan for the housing market is a very bad idea:

This is, of course, very nice for the people who bought more house than they can afford. It will not be so nice for anyone who wants to get a subprime mortgage in the future, since this move will probably destroy that market for at least a decade or so to come. It will, of course, be very bad for anyone who happens to be a mortgage lender–aka the people the rest of us want to borrow money from in order to buy houses. This move will leave them with a lot less money to loan out to anyone else, so hello, higher mortgage rates. Higher mortgage rates, for those following along at home, generally mean lower house prices, which means that the problem of negative equity will get worse.

In other words, Senator Clinton would like to destroy the mortgage market in order to save it.

Possible responses:

Democrats: ”You mean screwing with the market can screw up the market?”

Republicans: “Can I keep my job in Congress if I do this?”

Liberals: “McArdle doesn’t care about people!”

Conservatives: “What does it matter? We don’t exist anymore!”

The Market: “Really, I can breathe without a respirator”

The Washington State GOP stopped counting caucus results after only 87% of the counties reported in, just as John McCain edged past Mike Huckabee. Bradblog reports that this decision was made unilaterally by Washington State GOP chairman Luke Esser, or as Brad of Bradblog.com calls him, “Esser the Suppressor”. Brad also claimed that Luke Esser has a history of devising measures to suppress votes. He cites a UW Daily article written by Esser in 1986:

Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.

That’s nothing. When I signed up to be a Precinct Committee Officer for my precinct in Seattle, I received a barrage of strange calls. Two of them came from the GOP district chair. In the first call, he asked how committed I was to the Republican Party. I truthfully said that I grew up in a Reagan household, served in the military, supported Rossi for Governor in 2004, and have voted only for Republican presidential nominees.

This loosened him up enough to talk some smack about Ron Paul. He said the problem with Paul is that he makes great, impassioned speeches in Congress, but refuses to “get anyone to go along with his ideas”. Whatever. “By the way”, he asked, “are you supporting anyone?” I said that I liked the whole field but I want to keep my preferences to myself. He said that was no problem.

After his first call, I got a call from another district chair. She outright asked me if I was a Paul supporter. I said the same thing. She shilled for Huckabee’s morality for some minutes before I told her that I was more interested in economic issues. “Yeah, but you don’t support gay marriage and those things do you?” I explained that, really, I don’t care.

She talked a little about being a PCO. She told me that I would run the precinct’s caucus, but “if a bunch of Paul supporters show up, you could loose the vote” I couldn’t understand what that meant. Anything but Paul is a win? Fortunately, my district chair called back to explain.

He said that he was encouraged by all of the new PCO applications, but that he would have to deny any applications from people who weren’t forthright about being Ron Paul supporters. He said that he had found us on a Ron Paul meetup group and that our PCO applications were denied. He didn’t say whether he did this with other candidates’ supporters.

I reminded him that I never lied to him. He acted like that mattered, “Oh. I didn’t really think about that. Most people just lied to me, but I guess you didn’t”. He promised to think about it and get back to me the next day. He did not. Nor did he return the email that I sent the following week. Rather than take a dangerous chance on a homeowner/law student/father of two, like me, our precinct went without a PCO.

So what the heck is going on that the Washington GOP’s representatives distinguish between Paul and a Republican win? A couple of months ago a Washington GOP official was quoted in a fury stating that he did not want a big turnout of Paul supporters because Paul is not even a real Republican (I think it was the Everett Herald, but I couldn’t find the article again after a 2 hour search) Apparently, strict Constitutionalists are personae non gratae around these ‘real’ Republicans.

So there you have it. If the Party stopped the vote after only 87%, my instinct tells me it’s not Huckabee that they’re worried about. Paul came in right behind those two with 21% of the vote, plus the vote stopped in Everett. But I suppose that invoking wrongdoing against Paul makes it a conspiracy theory.

Those “uncommitted” delegates might go for Paul too, considering that a large chunk of Paul supporters ran as incognito delegates, for precisely these reasons. This isn’t much of a secret, so this may be someone’s attempt to mitigate that effect. After all, Esser denied trying to get over on Huckabee, “I would have done the same for Gov. Huckabee if he had the same margin and the same underlying dynamics as Sen. McCain.” I believe that. Would he do it for Paul?

Incidentally, that district chair is a delegate for McCain now. He ran the caucus, so I approached him to make nice afterward. I told him it was a good thing that so many young voters were interested in politics. I also told him I became a delegate for Paul. Flustered, he said that we have only one candidate who can beat the Democrats and that we should be united.

Of course, I disagree. First, predicting McCain’s viability before he runs a national campaign is like calling Giuliani a front-runner before he looses to Ron Paul in the primaries. More importantly, I think that we will have the most statist, authoritarian Republican nominee since Nixon. I think we should send him a message to remind him where he came from.

Credits to Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel, Bradblog.com, and Goldy at Horsesass.org.

DIGG THIS

Several weeks ago, I posted an article on AmericanChronicle.com that recounted David Shuster’s insults regarding Ron Paul. He called Paul a “kook” and baited Paul supporters to call in to Morning Joe, but Paul called in himself. Turns out that Shuster couldn’t explain his disagreement with Paul and he failed to defend the “kook” charge. Since then, Shuster also called Paul supporters the “Al Quieda” wing of the Republican Party.

I suspected that Shuster was too arrogant to limit his oral volume to candidates who don’t fight back. I was right. Several days ago, Shuster said that the Clinton Campaign was “pimp[ing] out” Chelsea Clinton for celebrity endorsements and superdelegates.  But Clinton ain’t the sweetheart that Paul is. Her campaign has stated that they will not attand any more debates at MSNBC and that they will avoid dealing with the media outlet in the future. MSNBC has required that Shuster apologize twice and they have suspended him.

This is not Shuster’s first on-air apology. He had to apologize to Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee for demanding to know if she could name the last soldier from her district who died in Iraq. When she could not, he gave her a false name. Maybe he will grow up a little. Or maybe he has a long future of defensive, equivocating apologies.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ron+paul+fox&search_type=&search=Search] I originally wrote this for American Chronicle but it seems even more pertinent in light of Paul’s stellar performance at the CPAC conference.

I have no idea whether Ron Paul can win the GOP nomination, but if he asked me how to do it, this is what I would tell him:

Take Back the GOP

Ron Paul’s biggest problem with Republicans is that lay voters, who don’t understand abstract ideological terms like libertarianism and conservatism don’t see him as one of them. The press often mislabels Ron Paul as a Libertarian (capital “L”) when in fact he is a libertarian Republican who adheres to a conservative theory of governance. Libertarianism is the ideal. Conservatism is the method. By the press’ mislabeling, every famous conservative (including Goldwater) would be considered a libertarian today while conservatism itself suffers from association with constitutionally liberal agendas (social conservatism, free-spending neo-conservatism). This needs to end. As Reagan said, “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism”. Paul’s platform occupies the place where libertarianism and conservatism converge if are any genuine differences at all.

For that reason, I would tell Ron Paul to turn the Ron Paul Revolution into a full scale “Take Back-the-GOP” movement. This would achieve several things. First, it would prompt Republicans to investigate the history of their Party as well as the theoretical underpinnings of conservatism generally. History and conservative theory is where Paul has the upper hand. Second, it would encourage small-government Republicans, who have no other political outlet to return to the Party and end neoconservative influence. It would afford them an opportunity to remain loyal to the party and simultaneously loathe what George W. Bush has done to it. Third, it would remind voters, especially young voters, that the distasteful neoconservative brand of Republicanism is not the only kind. They need not identify “Republican” with socially conservative agendas and half-baked theories on the consequences of war. Finally, it would set the stage for historians to identify the current Republican Party as an aberration in the greater history of the Party, which is clearly is. This may not only help Paul, but other liberty-minded Republicans in the future.

Debates

Paul did an incredible job in the South Carolina Debate (Watch him handily combat offensive questions here?and this one was so embarrassing for Fox News/good for Paul that Fox cut it out of the rebroadcast altogether). That said, voters could use more of the calm, collected, and deliberate Paul from interviews like this and press conferences like this.

Ron Paul should never be defensive. After six debates where the best his opponents could muster were rhetorically empty terms like “absurd”, he knows he has the best argument onstage and a monopoly on conservative theory. He should enter the debates with this is mind.

Moreover, I would tell him to press his opponents in the debates. He could shut down their demagogy and tough-guy talk by simply pointing out that their ideas make no fiscal sense. By asking them to reconcile money spent on the war with efforts to save entitlements, he pulls them into the realm of economics, where Paul upstages the entire field. Their criticisms of Paul are mocking, so his should be sharp

-Take Back the GOP campaign. I would tell Ron Paul to spend every remaining dollar on three types of “Take Back the GOP” advertisements. The first would highlight the historical greatness of the Republican Party and contrast it with the current Party: “We can be great again if we stop pushing people around and start pushing the government around”.

The second advertisement would make a case for a “conservative withdrawal” from Iraq. There is no question that Paul wants to leave Iraq for fiscally conservative reasons and there is no question that we need to. Perhaps the problem is that so many Republicans want to remain in Iraq out of pride or a fear of terrorism. Ron Paul must give them the strength to finish what they started and to do it on conservative terms: “Other candidates would have you believe that we need protection from the dark forces of terrorism, but we don’t need the state’s ‘protection’ after all, we’re Republicans.”

The third advertisement would highlight Paul’s unwavering integrity and dedication to the Republican principle of Constitutionalism. What more could Republicans ask for in this painful episode in the Party’s history than a tested leader who can resist the temptations of power? “He will always run the country always with the taxpayer’s interests at heart”, the advertisements should state. This way he will rise above the petty squabbling of his opponents and advance the messages they overlook: liberty, honesty, and governmental transparency. On that note: most Paul supporters can trace their support back to a Youtube video with these several lines:

- Ron Paul has never voted to raise taxes.

- Ron Paul has never taken money from lobbyists

- Ron Paul has never voted to spend Social Security

- Ron Paul refuses to participate in the lucrative congressional pension plan so long your Social Security is owned by the Chinese (and even his wife wants him to give that up ).

Supporters

Supporters must concentrate on GOP appeal more than bipartisan appeal. They must be prepared to explain that the basic tenets of conservatism are constitutionalism and libertarianism. They must present Paul as the reason Republicans chose the GOP in the first place. They must remind voters that Paul overwhelmingly speaks for the troops (see the FEC data). Finally, they must explain how our economic projections could launch us into statism if they are not cured by a strict fiscal conservative.

“Ron Paul has been the most principled conservative of any of the candidates” Richard Viguerie.

That’s the key: Republican, Conservative, Ron Paul.

In case you missed it the first time, here is Paul’s best moment in the SC Debate, which Fox inexplicably removed from its rebroadcast.