A Response to Jonah's Goldberg's Take on Ron Paul's Rothbard-Ism.

Jonah Goldberg wants all conservatives to engage Ron Paul's Rothbard-ism on the merits. Here's my my response. Sorry it isn't very formal, it was supposed to go in the comment section. His article is here http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The%20tradition%20of%20Ron%20Paul:%20defeated%20in%20the%20Cold%20War,%20it%20is%20back%20in...-a0172050916

This is a response to Jonah Goldberg's article on Ron Paul's Rothbard-ism

Right. Mike Huckabee should engage Ron Paul about Rothbard. I'd like to see him charisma-tize his way through that.

I think you're parsing things that you ought not. For instance, I don't think that Ron Paul's fusion of Constituionally-mandated war is inherently distinct from his brand of Rothbardian and Jeffersonian non-interventionism. I think it was obvious to Jefferson that only a small swath of the curve of American politicians were going to be endowed with the theoretical insight to hash these problems out as they come. That's the price of living in a Democracy instead of Plato's Republic. War-by-congressional mandate was placed in the Constitution because creates a buffer to temper the hysteria consequent to the inevitable mishaps in geopolitical involvement. That way, it approximates something closer to non-interventionism than the whims and wills of overzealous politicians can. Paul recognizes this and so he cleaves to the enumerations in the Constitution, rather giving us a genuine historical analysis at every debate, because it serves as a just-war measuring-stick that everyone from farmers to baristas can read.

In the same vein, I think that Paul also understands, as Jefferson understood, that foreign involvement doesn't necessarily have to stymie civil liberties. Yet they both understand that in practice it usually does. Americans don't always dwell in their cerebral cortex as you might. They get hysterical over words like 'communism' and 'terrorism' and they say thing like "take my rights, please". The Constitution is full of subtle nods to this unfortunate fact. It serves to protect us from ourselves.

At the same time, I think that your rebuttal of his assertions about the necessaary abridgement of civil liberties by an interventionist nation is disingenuous. This is the kind of historical citing professors shoot over the heads of their students to make unfair points:

-The Corn Laws were more about free trade than humanitarianism and they did little to help the Irish in the end, which was their primary justification. Moreover, Parliament kicked Prime Minister Peel out for doing it and the Irish were left to starve anyway.

-The Civil Rights Act is generally understood to be an effort to expand civil liberties and I have no doubt that the government had honorable intentions in mind. But citing them as an example of a liberty-in-time-of-war movement puts the cart before the horse and eschews the contribution of the civil rights leaders who originated that movement. Martin Luther King and the NAACP brought Montgomery, Alabama to its knees through civil disobedience and non-violent movements well before Viet Nam. Paul hails these movements, not the federal reactions to them, as the genuine lynchpins of civil liberty.

I am sure King welcomed the help of the federal government, but what he got was a false promise. By passing the Civil Rights Act, the government promised to take the burden off his hands, but it couldn't deliver. It never can because the Federal Government is polluted by natural political adversity and unnatural special interests. As a consequence, the Civil Rights Act arguably infringes on civil liberties today and we have altogether given up civil disobedience for political lobbying.

The rest of your examples are even less-charitable stretches. I hate to be nit-picky, but come on. Paul isn't talking about Reagan's defense spending, WWI's aftermath, or contrasts between random nicknames for Truman and his integration of the Army. He is talking about clear, drawn-out entanglements with foreign nations which lead to overall net losses in domestic civil rights. I suspect you know that. I suspect you also know that marginal steps toward civil rights which happen to coincide with "defense spending" don't rebut that. You can keep your reinvigoration of the government if I can keep my children from getting their heads blown off pursuant to a military draft. You can't cloud the fact that the first civil rights violation in war is the death of the Americans who fight it. "Oh and for the record": Paul doesn't have a problem with military spending, he has a problem with military intervention.

I've been following Paul pretty closely for quite a while now and I haven't come to this conclusion, so I'm surprised you have: "Also, he is a foreign-policy moralist who doesn't want blood on his hands". Where do you get that aside from your intuition?

Also, "This is an honorable if mistaken objection to non-isolationist foreign policy, which must ultimately lead to the death of someone, more or less at our hands" --How so? I'll take "less", by the way.

Also, "Why should foreign policy be different? One answer might be: because it is different. The international arena simply isn't a liberal polity where concepts such as contracts and property rights apply as they do in, say, Cleveland" --That's an assertion without an argument. The world does recognize contracts in largely the same way that the United States and Great Britain do. Under Paul's regime, all you need the world to do is recognize transactions. And they do.

Finally, saying that maintaining global trade and stability worked to Great Britain's advantage and ours misses the point. Building a bridge out of straw works to your advantage for while, but eventually it breaks. Paul's point is that it's breaking now, during our generation. He's saying that we can try to rebuild it out of something better, but some of his opponents say that we can trample across it one more time. Other opponents, who probably wouldn't even understand the metaphor, say we can cross it indefinitely. That's what the British said. But when the British Empire fell, it had its young, vibrant offspring America to help back up. Who's going to be our America?

Finally-finally, you say the Rothbard-Paul vision was rightly defeated during the cold war. If you mean 'ignored', then I guess I agree to some degree (see my discussion of mainstream hysteria, above). But you've missed another important distinction. In some ways, we played the cold war smartly: Building a strong armament, waiting them out, and sending a back-slapping actor-turned-president to charm them into friendship when they were hurt. That's exactly how Paul would have played them. In other ways, we played it really stupid: Domino theory, McCarthy-ism, and general paranoia about infiltration. These are exactly what Paul rails against. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that the cold war got overblown on those levels. I can't speak intelligently about what Rothbard would have done. I can about Paul. Incidently, I have a picture of David Hume on my wall, but I still use logical induction.

So back to my point about Huckabee; the problem isn't that Paul is right and everyone else is wrong. It's that there's no one left in the political sphere to engage Paul on para-political theory as you reccommend. My vote goes to the only presidential candidates who can actually understand this discussion.

You said that conservatives should debate Paul on the merits. There's my take.

-Greg Albert

-Brother Griz