An Evening With Dr. Ron Paul
by Steven Yates
by Steven Yates
Samuel Adams once observed how "it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds." I don’t know how irate he is, but Dr. Ron Paul (R-Tx) is surely among the leaders of a tireless minority in our time. If liberty by some chance does return to American soil in our lifetimes, we will doubtless have Dr. Paul to thank for having laid part of the groundwork over the past couple of decades.
On April 2, Dr. Paul spoke to a crowded conference room at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbia, South Carolina. The event, entitled "An Evening With Ron Paul," was hosted by the South Carolina Libertarian Party. His talk ranged across topics from his enormous popularity in his own Texas district to the "foolishness and silliness and ruthlessness" of the drug war to the dangers of the Patriot Act and its successors.
In his district, he is practically unopposed. He noted how he had voted against 700 expansionist-government bills over his two most recent terms in office, and won by a larger margin the second election than he did the first. "People aren’t begging for more laws," he said. He added, "What we ought to have is a moratorium on all new legislation."
Dr. Paul threw cold water on so-called war on terrorism. Were we attacked on September 11, 2001 because we are "free and prosperous"? Switzerland is also "free and prosperous." Why weren’t the Swiss also attacked? Of course, Switzerland does not have an interventionist foreign policy. Its government has not spent the past 50 years attempting to dominate an entire region, against the wishes of most of those living there. Switzerland is not in the business of "nation building." It does not see its goal as establishing "global democracy." Dr. Paul noted that Al Qaida’s numbers are growing, not shrinking. The neocons’ foolish and misguided war against Saddam Hussein and subsequent occupation of Iraq hasn’t reduced the dangers of terrorism one iota. Dr. Paul wondered aloud, "Why don’t we work to make America a more perfect republic, and forget about using guns to spread democracy?"
As for the Patriot Act, Dr. Paul pointed out that it was really little more than the central government taking advantage of the American public’s fear of more terrorism following 9/11 to pass a great deal of legislation that had been desired by those in power for years. Calling it "an atrocious piece of legislation," he observed that nobody had read it in full. No one in Congress knew everything that was in it. It was passed, nevertheless, just days following the 9/11 attacks because "we needed to do something." With its federalization of such things as search warrants, it essentially gutted the Fourth Amendment. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 – dubbed "Patriot II" – would have been worse, with its original version expanding the central government’s wiretapping authority and allowing authorities to come onto your property without a warrant and without even informing you they had been there. The contents of Patriot II were leaked via the Internet, and its enormous unpopularity killed it, but again, what those in power want was sneaked into new bills such as the almost unknown Intelligence Authorization Agreement of 2004 (H.R. 2417). This new bill, originally introduced right around the time of the hoopla surrounding Saddam’s capture, allows the federal government to snoop around in citizens’ financial records, allegedly looking for evidence of involvement in terrorist activity. The central government of the post-9/11 world also wants to know what websites you have been looking at, what library books you’ve been reading, etc.
Dr. Paul suggested that as central government attempts to expand, spending money it does not have, the looming financial crisis will eventually force it to scale back both its overseas and domestic efforts. "One day we’re going to wake up, and have less warfare and less welfare … because we’re going broke!" He noted our skyrocketing national indebtedness. "Time is short, and we don’t know when the crisis is coming," but "[w]hen we run out of money, we will have to come home." Of course, the central government owns the printing presses and could just print more fiat money – but this is not a process that can continue indefinitely without bringing about an economically disastrous hyperinflationary spiral.
The bottom line, for Dr. Paul, is the U.S. Constitution. He refuses to vote for any piece of legislation that is not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, and his stinging critiques of much of the unconstitutional legislation coming out of Rome on the Potomac are well known to LewRockwell.com readers. Of course, Dr. Paul’s words often fall on deaf ears among his colleagues, many of whom doubtless share the view recently expressed by Henry Hyde (R-IL) during the hearing on H.J. Res. 114, "Authorization For Use of Military Force Against Iraq." Hyde was discussing Ron Paul’s motion, based on the Constitution, to issue a Congressional declaration of war before launching the invasion of Iraq. Here is what Hyde said:
"There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society. Why declare war if you don’t have to? We are saying to the President, use your judgment. So, to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death. You have got a hammerlock on this situation, and it is not called for. Inappropriate, anachronistic, it isn’t done anymore."
Let’s reflect a moment on this. What he’s said is that the central government ought to be able to do as those running it please, without the authorization of any final encoded authority. This appears to be the prevailing view throughout much of the central government, and is the primary reason the central government continues getting larger, more intrusive, and more expensive.
The long and the short of it is, the suspicion of concentrations of power on which this country was founded is just about gone. Beginning one step at a time, first with Lincoln, then with the Progressive movement, the rise of the Federal Reserve banking system and the IRS, the first world war, and continuing into the Roosevelt era, more and more people have assumed that expansionist government is good, and not a menace to a free people. Expansionist government can create safety nets for everyone via programs redistributing wealth. It can create wealth out of nothing and micromanage the economy. It can solve the problem of poverty. It can stop the spread of drugs. It can eradicate discrimination. It can make people be good. It can make us healthy. It can make our children smarter with huge, expensive packages like No Child Left Behind. It can wage foreign wars against international terrorism. It can protect us if only we give it still more power.
Yet mounting evidence suggests that in every one of these areas (and more besides), expansionist government is simply in over its head. Social Security will eventually go broke. The flood of unbacked dollars may one day precipitate a currency collapse. The "war on poverty" only institutionalized poverty, creating a host of problems that hadn’t been there before (such as the break-up of the nuclear family). The "war on drugs" very probably is a fraud, and always was.* Affirmative action programs only reinstated discrimination, this time against white men, and has arguably just about wrecked higher education. Wherever we look, whatever the central government touches, it ruins. Regarding terrorism, Dr. Paul observed that had the airlines been permitted by the federal government to arm their pilots, no one would have been able to overwhelm planes using boxcutters.
Regarding trade issues, Dr. Paul championed having as much free trade as possible. Tariffs and protectionism amount to a tax. However, NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) aren’t really free trade agreements. They micromanage trade through international government expansion and the World Trade Organization, so that the primary beneficiaries are the politically well-connected elites. In the long run, such pseudo-free-trade agreements will diminish our standard of living and eventually cost us our national sovereignty.
Despite all this, Dr. Paul expressed optimism. Thinking again of the people in his own district and elsewhere out west, he said, "The people know and believe that the message of liberty is a positive message, and will vote for it." He noted that President Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill, and that a lot of conservatives are wondering what is going on. (Last year Dr. Paul wrote a major piece entered into the Congressional Record discussing the implications of the take-over of the Republican Party by neocons.)
Due to the Internet, a lot more people are aware of what is going on than otherwise would be, and are spreading the word – on Internet commentary sites such as this one, on message boards, on blogs, via email, and so on. There is a determined opposition to global-statism, and it is growing. "The real goal," he said, "has to be information, and education, and learning. Everybody has a responsibility, even if not everybody will do it the same way."
Moreover, the government school system continues to deteriorate: as he put it, "the public education system is on the verge of self-destruction," and this will leave education in the hands of home schoolers and those ready and willing to set up private schools. The primary mission here is educational. "It is in the interests of everybody to believe in liberty," Dr. Paul said. Liberty, he observed, creates a better environment for addressing social problems, be they caring for the poor, taking care of the elderly, taking care of the environment, or allowing the economy to create jobs. If a new, free system of schools can be developed, we might see a renaissance of liberty among a new citizenry with the ability to see alternatives to expansionist government.
I should note in closing that although "An Evening With Ron Paul" was well-publicized in the sense that press releases were sent out to all local media well in advance, not a single representative from any mainstream media outlet showed up. No one came from The State newspaper. There were no camera crews from any local television network. The mainstream media, of course, simply blacks out events such as this. There is, they must be aware, a grass-roots cauldron of discontent brewing, much of it focused on a central government perceived as out of control. So these events continue to be organized and well-attended regardless of whether the mainstream media participates or not. Those of us who were present can use resources such as the Internet to continue lighting those brush fires in people’s minds, so that someday we can have that new citizenry.**
*See Michael Levine, "Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills," in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Kristina Borjesson (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), pp. 257-93.
**I wish to thank Cheryl Bates, Events Coordinator of the South Carolina Libertarian Party for supplying the full Henry Hyde quotation and with certain other details of this article.
April 7, 2004
Steven Yates [send him mail] has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994). He is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His new book, In Defense of Logic, is almost completed. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and plans to launch his author’s website soon.
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
