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McCain's Ron Paul Problem

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:19:00 EDT

That's what I talked about in Part VII of my eight-segment interview with L.A. Times political blogger Andrew Malcolm (note: this was recorded before Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party nomination). Part VI was a discussion of the role of religion in McCain's life and politics. Parts I-V are linked to and described here.

Speaking of Malcolm, he has a shrewd take here (and not only because he quotes me!) about how McCain's underdog mentality has placed him right where he wants to be, at least psychologically − hopelessly behind.

Same rEVOLution, Different Day

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On June 12, one year and three months after launching his presidential campaign on an episode of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Ron Paul took the stage at a late night Texas rally, outside of the state party’s convention, and called it quits.

It was greeted, by the media, with a paper-and-pixel yawn. The Houston Chronicle reported that Paul “officially unplugged his dormant Republican presidential campaign” and pointed out that he was late to the speech. “Ron Paul ends his campaign—for real this time,” snickered a blogger at The Washington Post.

Paul had an an easy answer to this: Ignore it. "We are miles ahead of anything I ever dreamed of in this movement!" Paul told a cheering crowd. He said, for the umpteenth time, that he'd never even expected this campaign to catch on. He wanted to educate people. "If you’re going to have a revolution," he said, "people need to be educated to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The rest is all"—he waved his arm as if warding off a malaria-carrying insect—"fluff."

If "the rest" is fluff, it would be a break for Paul. By the traditional measures of a presidential campaign, Paul blew it. He raised $35 million, of which all but $4.7 million was spent by campaign's end. For this he got 1.2 million votes and as few as 35 delegates to the Republican convention. Paul, being honest, had never expected to win. Rarely did he sound as awkward as he did as when George Stephanopolous prodded him to admit that he wouldn't be the nominee. "You'd bet every cent in your pocket?" asked Paul. "Yes," said the ABC anchor. "Oh," said Paul. "OK."

Now that the campaign's over, Paul feels a little more free to tell the truth. "This is actually a racheting up of what were doing before," Paul said in a Thursday phone conversation. "There are more people who believe in the freedom agenda than voted for us in the primaries. I’ve been saying the same thing since 1974, you know, but something... happened this year. I can’t explain what it was, but the young people understand these issues better than anyone thought, and they are not going away."

The "second phase" of the rEVOLution is the Campaign for Liberty, a more explicitly political organization (a 501c3) than many people believed Paul would launch. It is not, as was speculated, a paleolibertarian publishing house. It is not yet, as feared, a donation or employment plan for Paul's friends and family; the only confirmed transfer from Ron Paul 2008 to the Campaign for Liberty is communications director and (as of Sunday) Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton. "Together, we will educate our fellow Americans in freedom, sound money, non-interventionism, and free markets," Paul wrote in an inaugural message to supporters. "We will write commentaries and broadcast videos on the news of the day. And I'll work with friends whom I respect to design materials for homeschoolers."

The Campaign, then, is the kind of thing Paul's more strategy-minded die-hards have clamored for since Super Tuesday. That was when it became clear, thanks to the GOP's winner-take-all primary rules and the exits of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, that Paul could not enough accrue enough delegates to become a convention kingmaker.

"The presidential bid went on a little too long," said Trevor Lyman, the P.R. whiz who pushed and popularized the various moneybombs that netted Paul nearly $12 million. "It gave a lot of people false hope; I'm not talking about me, but about people who honestly thought if Ron stayed in the race he could beat McCain. There was a lot of wasted energy there. Of course, the people in those final primary states got together and got organized, so maybe even that could end up being for the good." The day after we spoke, Lyman joined the Campaign for Liberty blog team.

According to Paul, staying in the race so long was a way to get the base politically activated. "We have something like 22,000 precinct captains now!" Paul said on Thursday. Jesse Benton doubled his exuberance: "If we had 100,000 precinct captains, we could take over the country."

So is it an educational effort? Is a political effort? The tug-of-war between those concepts illustrates the problem Paul's movement encountered all along. His supporters could elucidate the reasons why they loved their candidate better, probably, than any group of supporters in 2008's twisty political history. The education stuck; in some cases, it was hardly needed. It translated only to enough votes to turn Paul into a national figure and rattle Republicans, however briefly, about the fidelity of their libertarian wing. What Paul's supporters proved adept at, in the end, was filling the cobwebbed ballrooms of GOP caucuses and conventions and matching or overwhelming the party regulars to win platform fights and delegates. If the Campaign for Liberty trains people to do that, in between readings of Murray Rothbard, it could terrify Paul's party in the best way.

Or it could fall flat. Occasional reason contributer Jim Henley pointed out in a blog post that, apart from the numbers of supporters and precinct campaigns the Campaign wants to reel in, "all the elements of the 'Mission' of CFL are kept prudently nebulous. That means there never needs to come the awkward time when donors and observers point out that CFL has inarguably failed to meet some goal."

The Campaign is, still, less than Paul's army expected from this campaign when they flooded his coffers. On Thursday, I put the question to the candidate: Were those tens of millions of dollars that went to Ron Paul 2008 put to good use? "I hope so," he said. "They trusted me. We did our very best. And I'd say that in the category of spending, we were the best campaign, as far being the stewards' of peoples' money." Trevor Lyman agreed. "The moneybombs were worth it for the coverage alone," he said. "The Ron Paul Blimp was nearly as good on that count; I've seen serious estimates that it was $2 million in exposure and earned media."

The fundraising numbers and the ambition of the Campaign for Liberty raises another question. In January, Paul took a public relations hit when controversial sections of his old Ron Paul Political Reports were reprinted by The New Republic. Those same passages had dogged Paul in his 1996 congressional comeback. What had Paul learned from the experiences of Ron Paul and Associates that would guide him in his new venture. "I’m only responsible for what I do and what I say," he said. "I've been saying the same thing since 1974, and I've gotten a bit better at it." That was all he'd say on the matter.

The question running through all of this was how intimately Paul would be involved, or wanted to be involved, in the future of his movement. He's striking a difficult balance on this, too. Paul clearly wants to retain the notoriety he's gained as a spokesman for libertarianism. "A lot of those Meet-Up groups have turned into book clubs," he said on Thursday, with a grin I could detect even across two bad cell phone connections. When it comes to raw politics, Paul, rather passively, is hoping his followers don't just cling to his name. He rejected the idea of writing in his name on the November ballot, a concept that's stayed popular with many Paul voters despite the Libertarian Party and Constitution Party's pitches for their votes.

"I don’t think that’s very productive," Paul said of a write-in campaign. "They could do it, of course, but in most of the states it won’t count. If they can change the rules in a primary and not count all the votes, imagine what they could do with write-in votes!"

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Bob Barr's Competition

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:05:00 EDT

While Chuck Baldwin issues his appeals to the right wing of the Ron Paul movement, another presidential candidate is pitching himself to the Ron Paul left. On Friday, Ralph Nader released a response to Paul's withdrawal from the presidential race. Here's an excerpt:

Now that Dr. Paul has formally withdrawn his candidacy for the G.O.P. nomination and is no longer seeking the Presidency, there is a clear choice for those who want to support a candidate who will stand up against the war and stand up for personal liberties and privacy that have been trampled by the notorious, misnamed, PATRIOT Act.

Bonus link: Way back in 1962, Nader wrote an article for the libertarian magazine The Freeman. It was reprinted in reason about a decade later, making Nader -- now that Paul is out -- the one reason contributor in the running. Make of that what you will.

Permanent rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Amit Singh is 33 years old. If you were tending a bar when he walked in, you’d probably card him. Before his April speech to a slowly filling restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, he ambles around the room, grabbing shoulders, shaking hands, smiling sheepishly. Friends who have shown up to support the unassuming defense industry engineer sit nearby, bemused.

“When he first showed me his website,” says Orrin McNamara, one of Singh’s neighbors, “I said: ‘Is this a joke? Amit for Congress?’ Seriously, I thought it might have been a joke.” He ponders for a moment. “I don’t know what the joke would have been.”

A bit after 7 p.m., Singh walks to the podium and sounds like what he is: a Republican congressional candidate. He talks about a “new vision for a brighter future.” Boilerplate, candidate-from-a-kit stuff. Singh smiles and darts his eyes down when he draws applause and laughs nervously when he takes a swipe at his Democratic incumbent. He doesn’t sound comfortable—until the speech shifts.

“We’ve seen how the politics of fear chip away at freedom at home,” he declares, sounding suddenly sure of himself. “Where are the defenders of freedom today? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons? Where are our Barry Goldwaters? There are a few defenders of freedom, but they are outnumbered, and they need our help.”

Singh has one particular defender of freedom in mind: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). It was Paul’s libertarian-minded presidential campaign that got Singh into politics, first as a donor, then as a Virginia volunteer, and now as a candidate for Congress. A month after watching Paul score 4.5 percent of the vote in the Virginia primary, Singh threw his hat into the ring for the 8th District congressional seat.

By the end of the 2008 elections, as many as 40 self-proclaimed Ron Paul Republicans will have run for national office. The reception they are getting from their state parties ranges from warm embraces to Terminator-like efforts to destroy them. After a year of supporting a presidential candidate the party’s gatekeepers treated like a radioactive performance artist, the Paulites are used to ridicule. They want to carve out a permanent place in Republican politics, regardless of whether the party wants them to be there.

The Ron Paul Republicans come in two breeds. The first and largest category—about half the candidates collected on the aggregating site PaulCongress.com—are utter long-shots. They live either in districts where Democrats could hold fundraisers for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and still win by landslides or those held comfortably by old-line Republican incumbents. David Wasserman, the House race editor for the Cook Political Report, says these candidates shouldn’t get their hopes up. “You can argue that it says something about the state of our democracy, the nature of the way districts are drawn, or the nature of incumbency,” Wasserman says. “We shut out a lot of viable people in these safe seats.”

Maryland’s Peter James lives in one of those districts of doom, a snaky, overwhelmingly Democratic gerrymander in the black suburbs of Washington, D.C. In the run-up to the February 12 primary elections there, James did the grunt work of organizing the Montgomery County Ron Paul Meetup group while hitting the pavement to win the Republican nomination for Congress. He spent $6,000 and all the free time a computer consultant can wrangle to win a primary against two other candidates—one of them another Ron Paul Republican.

“We had some Libertarian Party activists, some conservative Republicans, and about a third of the people we had were liberal Democrats who didn’t like their party’s candidates,” James says. “I’d go up to someone and tell them I was running for Congress. They’d ask the party. I’d say, ‘Republican.’ They’d say, ‘I can’t vote for you.’ Then I’d say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh! Well, I like him.’ ”

Maryland is ground zero for Ron Paul Republican candidates. Six of the state’s eight congressional districts are held by Democrats; four of the six Republicans running to challenge them were volunteers for Ron Paul. The Maryland Republican Party, which was kicked to the curb in the 2006 midterms, is happy to have them. “We welcome everyone to the Republican Party,” says state party Executive Director John Flynn. “We’re in the minority! Two years ago we didn’t even field candidates for two of these races, so the Ron Paul Republicans are really adding something.”

Like the man who inspired them, Paul’s flock deviates far from the Bush-era GOP’s platform and organizing tactics. When I ask Peter James what he has done to coordinate with the other three Maryland Ron Paul Republicans, he says they’ve talked about launching a viral video or a newspaper. One of James’ “main issues” is “providing an alternative currency,” not exactly a mainline Republican talking point. Flynn doesn’t mind; he shrugs that it’s “one of Peter’s issues.”

Other state parties are less welcoming. John Wallace is a 64-year-old New York real estate broker who started working for Paul, in part, because “he was the only one talking about the North American Union,” an alleged plot to merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. Wallace jumped into a primary for a suburban seat that Republicans lost in 2006; the party was backing the millionaire former party chairman Sandy Treadwell to try to seize it back. “I’ll go to one of these county meetings,” Wallace says, “and people will say to me: ‘My God! You’re right on the money. That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Then they’ll head back to the table and vote for Treadwell.”

Ron Paul himself has endorsed just four of his followers-turned-candidates, and one of them, Jim Forsythe, dropped out of his New Hampshire congressional race in April because he lacked funds and name recognition. The others—including New Jersey’s Murray Sabrin and North Carolina’s B.J. Lawson—have drawn opposition from local Republicans unwilling to take the Paul plunge. (Paul has also endorsed Peter James.)

Paul’s reticence stems from not wanting to see his name attached to some candidate with whom he might not agree. “If you have some name recognition and some money, you have to be careful,” he says. “To say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican,’ and to expect some money and an endorsement from me—I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The other breed of Ron Paul Republican is neither tolerated as a sacrificial lamb nor pushed away as a nuisance. He is the candidate with a fighting chance for a seat the Republicans genuinely hope to contest. Amit Singh isn’t counting on a Paul endorsement as much as he’s trying to create a local version of the Ron Paul revolution. Mark Ellmore, the Republican candidate who lost the 8th District nomination in 2006 and has been running for it ever since, warns that Singh will “have trouble securing the Republican base,” but that’s as far as the insults go. “Ron Paul supporters are absolutely great for the Republican Party,” Ellmore says.

So while national Republicans never took Ron Paul seriously, Virginia Republicans are sizing up Singh with interest. An internal poll shows him in striking distance of a primary win. Statewide Republican leaders, warm to the idea of an Indian-American candidate, are considering official endorsements.

Ellmore’s hail-fellow-well-met attitude is something new for Ron Paul Republicans. They have spent a year being mocked while posting campaign signs, hustling into straw polls, and Googlebombing the Internet. If they had dissolved after the GOP nomination was locked up, that’s where their legacy might have ended. Instead they’re putting together the first outlines of a political bloc, one that’s increasingly independent from the activities of Paul himself. Even if none of them wins this November, they’re beginning to force the party to take them seriously at last.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Thursday Morning Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:15:00 EDT

* Cato embraces micro radio.

* The Nation discovers the Ron Paul Republicans.

* A socialist reads Hayek.

* Debbie Nathan reads Comstock.

* A child of a commune peers at the children of the FLDS.

Tucker Pulls a Sherman!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:29:00 EDT

Contrary to yesterday's rumors, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson will not run for the Libertarian Party presidential nod. Not only that, he was never thinking about it. And if elected, he wouldn't serve (well, that's an extrapolation). Reports ABC's Jake Tapper:

Carlson tells me he was never running.
He's right now with his family in Maine rather than in Denver with the Marijuana Policy Project and the like.
"I probably should have done it," Tucker emails me." Imagine the bus trip."
Shoot.
Oh, well.

More here.

Carlson wrote the second-best on-the-trail-with-Ron-Paul story of the GOP primary season. Read it here. And then read the best one, by reason's Brian Doherty, here.

All about Shermanesque political statements here.

You Won't Fool the Children of the rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Before there was Ron Paul the New York Times best-selling author—go on, keep rolling that around on your tongue—there was Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made floor statements in the House of Representatives when no one was listening. Before that there was Ron Paul, the roving libertarian politico and the publisher of countless monthly newsletters written in a voice curiously wittier than his own. And before that there was Ron Paul, founder of the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, table-pounding advocate for the gold standard, a lecturer to anyone who would listen.

Paul is 72 years old. He has been reading libertarian philosophy for close to 50 years and writing it for more than 30. That his labors should finally bear fruit now, at the end of a presidential bid where he succeeded beyond a fool's dream by simply reiterating all those decades' worth of opinions, carries a kind of irony. All of the quirks of his presidential bid make more sense. Why did he give the same dense, 40-minute speech at every stop? Why didn't he get into the muck with the rest of the GOP candidates, even when he started to out-fundraise them? Hey, he was trying to tell you people: He wasn't running for president; he was spreading a message.

It is impossible to imagine his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, selling in droves, or even being published at all, if Paul had not run his quixotic presidential race. We have proof. Sharing the shelves with Paul's book is another political tome that, if you based your judgments on the elite-media love machine, you'd assume would be racing up the charts. Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's policy sheaf-cum-memoir, America: Our Next Chapter, (with the additional and aggrandizing subtitle Tough Questions, Straight Answers) comes after three fat years of Sunday show bookings, warm profiles in magazines such as GQ, and unkillable rumors that he was about to announce a presidential bid. Released two months ago, the book is already forgotten.

Hagel was supposed to be the Republicans' anti-war presidential candidate. Failing that, he was supposed to be the natural vice-presidential candidate of a third party "unity" candidacy. The praise and hopes cascaded because Hagel, who voted for the 2002 Iraq resolution, was nonetheless the highest-profile and most-credible (by dint of his service in Vietnam) Republican critic of the war in Iraq.

High-profile does not necessarily mean high-minded. In an early, critical profile of Hagel, National Review's John J. Miller bitingly labeled the senator's attacks on Bush policy as "Hagelian dialect" and "declamations that may sound weighty when spoken but become insubstantial on the printed page." God only knows why Hagel decided to prove this by putting words on a page. There are two recurring motifs in America: Our Next Chapter, and both are devastating to Hagel's image as a deep political thinker.

The first is simple banality. There is enough corn in these pages to solve the world food crisis and forge ethanol with the leftovers. "I remember the first time that I had a real sense of the stakes in global power politics," Hagel writes. "I was in Mr. Sheridan's history class at St. Bonaventure High School, in Columbus, Nebraska." How does he view the Senate? "The floor...is a more majestic setting than a crab bucket, but the behavior of the inhabitants is quite similar."

The second Hagelian device is what I'd call the "outsight"—the opposite of an insight, already quite obvious to readers but thuddingly profound for him. Yes, Hagel was right about Iraq, but the way he writes about foreign policy starts you wondering if he just lucked out this time. "Like its rival India," he writes, "Pakistan is an enormous, sprawling, chaotic land." Albeit one-quarter the size of India and the victim of four successful military coups to India's none. When Hagel isn't thumbing a world almanac, he's recounting the meetings he's held with world leaders, diplomats—people who, in their wisdom, agree with him about most things.

Hagel writes like this because his ideas are not powerful enough to inspire much more. He is not a non-interventionist; his big insight about America's proper place in the world is that the world is changing. "Of course I want our country to ‘win,'" Hagel writes, "but we must ask precisely what does ‘winning' mean and we need to ask that question before the first shot is fired." But this is the only problem Hagel sees with intervention. He has nothing to say about the interventions of the 1990s, even though he voted against them after entering the Senate in 1997. Hagel is a big believer in soft power. But if pushed, he says, "We would mount preemptive strikes against our enemy." The problem with the Iraqi preemptive strike was that the enemy we should have been preempting was stateless. This isn't much of an ideology. It's John Kerry's 2004 platform.

By contrast, Ron Paul's The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul's arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. "I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner," Paul writes of his campaign. "Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers...these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other."

The Revolution is filled with long quotes from Paul's favored philosophers and economists. It is one giant annotation to his campaign speeches. It's also a correction to some parts of his campaign. The people who thought Paul's aggressive Tom Tancredo-esque push against illegal immigration was a mistake are proven right: There is almost nothing about immigration here. There is nothing you could call right-wing populism, and while this will probably become the most popular work of Murray Rothbard-inspired libertarianism, it rejects Rothbard's late-life strategizing about the benefits of resentment politics. The Revolution is as colorblind and class-blind as any Sesame Street script. The only people readers are told to resent are the politicians and the media bosses—whom Paul compares to Pravda editors—who tell Americans there is no alternative to fiat currency and American empire.

Hagel and Paul both confront readers who, like the rest of the country, have absolutely no confidence in their leaders and no trust in what they say. Hagel tells them to buck up: "The urgency of our unsettled times demands that America acts wisely, with resolve and a common purpose." Paul tells them that they're being lied to, and he's here to tell the truth. "Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is," Paul writes, referring to human lives as well as trillions of dollars. "The terrorists have played us like a fiddle." Americans are also misinformed about how our current health care system evolved, or why their dollar is worth less. They're being lied to about trade: "True free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders." Paul attacks the World Trade Organization because it "makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." In each case, a foreign or elite power is hoodwinking Americans into trading the system of the Founders for a system making them less free.

Paul never sounds as certain as when he gets to link this all to monetary policy. He's rarely less convincing. Paul sees a direct link between central banking, fiat currency, and the economic crises that he argues wreck the average American's prosperity and empower thugs. A financial collapse, he prophesies, "becomes more likely every day." He proposes legalizing precious metals as currency and killing sales and capital gains taxes on metals to stave off the crisis. It's all packaged as a monetary twist on Pascal's wager: "If we're wrong, then all we've done is eliminate some taxes on gold and silver. No harm done." This is awfully optimistic. The 19th century's booms and busts were far more damaging to livelihoods and to economic systems than anything in the fiat money era. They provided much steadier footing for radical movements. Paul's overheated worry about a Weimar Republic-style collapse kicks the legs out from underneath the argument.

That's what doesn't work. Paul's narrow-eyed certainty about the elites' concealment of the truth can be irritating, especially when he marshalls so many libertarian thinkers—Nozick, Hayek, Mises—to undergird an occasionally specious ideology. But it is an ideology. Paul has a grand unified theory to offer readers, knowing full well that he's opening minds, not programming them. Hagel offers his readers safe ideas and easy paeans to "leadership." Paul offers readers, first and foremost, the lesson that "leaders" and universally accepted concepts shouldn't be trusted. It is worried and informed neostructuralists who can change things, not historical "great men." If Ron Paul doesn't provide perfect solutions, he certainly provides a blueprint.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Cities on a Hill

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:17:00 EDT

Ron Paul won't be moving to Paulville, reports Politico:

The founders of Paulville recently announced the purchase of the first 50 acres in West Texas on which they plan to build one of their "gated communities containing 100 percent Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty."

One man who won't be moving there anytime soon: Ron Paul....

[D]ropping out and creating an isolated community isn't the answer, says Paul, a congressman from Texas. "You don't want the ideas to be centered in one place," he says. "But it shows how desperate people are for freedom."

Consistent with his beliefs in liberty, however, he doesn't outright oppose Paulville. "I don't see that as a solution, but it can't hurt anything either," he says.

My position on Paulville is the same as my position on every libertarian intentional community: I don't want to live in a town filled with ideologues, even (or especially) if they're ideologues I agree with. That said, better a thousand Paulvilles than a single McCain Nation.

It's not clear, incidentally, that Paulville will appear at all. From the same article:

On Monday, just days after the announcement of the land purchase, the Web site Paulville.org went out of existence. No contact information had been on the site when it was live; phone calls and e-mails to the site administrator over the last several days have gone unreturned.

Has the dream died already? Or, like Brigadoon flashing briefly in the mist, have they already gone off the grid?

Bonus exercise: Imagine life in Edwardsville, Bidentown, the Dodd District, Port Romney, Huckabee County, Tancredo Township, or any other community devoted to the principles espoused by a failed presidential candidate. (Except Giuliani City. We already know what that one looked like.)

[Hat tip: Dan Clore.]

Instapundit on Ron Paul's New Blockbuster Book

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:26:00 EDT

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a new book out titled The Revolution: A Manifesto (it's currently No. 8 on Amazon's bestsellers list).

Here's Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a the Instapundit, on it:

[The Revolution is] important because Ron Paul's candidacy has interested a lot of people in libertarian ideas who probably haven't read those other books, and because their exposure has come not in the context of academic dissatisfaction with the status quo, but in the context of political action. The book benefits from many of the Paul campaign's virtues, in the form of accessibility, clarity, and straightforwardness. On the other hand, it also suffers from some of the Paul campaign's vices, about which more later.
My biggest disagreement, and that of many libertarians with Paul, involves national security. Paul and I are both libertarians, but of different varieties. Paul is an old-fashioned Rothbardian. I'm more of a Heinleinian libertarian and we, like the Randian libertarians, tend to view national defense as more important than the Rothbardians do. Paul's view, essentially, is that if we quit sending troops abroad, other people and countries would quit wanting to kill us. I'm not particularly persuaded by this. First, even during the minimal-government era of Thomas Jefferson we wound up at war with the Barbary Pirates (in many ways, the spiritual antecedents of today's Islamic terrorists). And second, Paul is not an isolationist—he favors much more commercial and cultural engagement with foreign countries, something which, if experience is any guide, is as likely to anger Islamic fundamentalists and other varieties of terrorists and tyrants as is the establishment of foreign bases....
The main shortcoming in Paul's book, as with his candidacy, is in the follow through, the transition from critique to action. Although he does include a chapter entitled "The Revolution," about reducing the size of government, it's a pretty skimpy plan. Were we to see a Ron Paul Administration, with a House and Senate made up of, well, Ron Pauls, it might have a chance of succeeding, though even so he's a bit timid in places - proposing a freeze on the budgets of cabinet departments instead of their outright abolition, for example, despite noting that only State, Defense, and Justice have clear constitutional mandates. But given the unlikelihood of a Paul Administration, and the even greater unlikelihood of a Paul Congress, his policy prescriptions aren't likely to bear fruit. But those who want to see liberty progress right here and right now will look in vain for suggestions on what they might do, right here and right now, to make progress.
Rome didn't fall in a day, and today's monster government didn't spring up overnight. It was the result of incremental expansion. Given that we're not likely to see an opportunity to downsize the federal government overnight, or even in a single Presidential term, those of libertarian inclinations might well look to incremental approaches to reining in Big Government. They will be well advised, however, to look elsewhere than Revolution: A Manifesto. Still, if Fabian Libertarianism is to have a future, it will owe much to the consciousness-raising of the Paul campaign. Socialist candidate Eugene Debs, after all, never got elected President either, but within a few decades much of his platform was adopted by the Democratic Party. May Paul enjoy similar influence on the future of national politics.

Whole thing here.

reason on Ron Paul here.

The Battle of Minneapolis?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:02:00 EDT

L.A. Times political blogger Andrew Malcolm, one of the most active Ron Paul-watchers in the EmmEssEmm, sees a quiet revolution brewing on John McCain's libertarian flank:

[Q]uietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in St. Paul at the beginning of September. [...]
The last three months Paul's forces [...] [have] been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates. [...]
They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who's running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a longterm revolution for control of the Republican Party.

Whole thing here. McCain jokes here that he hopes his opponent come Novemeber is the good Dr. Congressman. Brian Doherty's "Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution" here.

Ron Paul Un-endorses White Supremacist

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:57:00 EDT

Bill Johnson, who is running for Superior Court judge in Los Angeles (with the help of campaign manager Holly Clearman, who is a California coordinator for Paul's presidential campaign), was the author of the 1980s Pace Amendment to the Constitution, which read in part:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

"Thought-tormented Ron Paul fan" Tim Cavanaugh extracts a statement from Paul chief of staff Tom Lizardo:

Over the past several weeks, I have also been involved in assisting Dr Paul with the consideration of candidates who are seeking his endorsement for their campaigns. We have gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements. During that period, we have also received and reviewed requests from dozens of candidates.
Although Bill Johnson's name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process. In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.

Cavanaugh spars with angry Paul supporters here; Paul supporters argue amongst themselves here; other coverage of Johnson by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise and the L.A. Times' Opinion L.A. blog.

Dave Weigel has been all over the ongoing Ron Paul Republicans story, including a forthcoming column in the July issue.

Philly Mayors Says Cops Were Wrong in Beating

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:22:00 EDT

The actions of a throng of [Philadelphia] police officers shown on a videotape kicking and punching three shooting suspects during a traffic stop were inappropriate, Mayor Michael Nutter said Thursday.
A sergeant and five officers have been removed from street duty as authorities investigated the footage. More than a dozen officers were involved, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said investigators were having the videotape enhanced to try to identify how many were actually striking the suspects. Information will be sent to prosecutors, who will determine whether to press charges.
"It absolutely shows inappropriate behavior," Nutter said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "There is a way to take people into custody ... and there (are) not acceptable ways of taking people into custody."

More here. The police commissioner has said something similar, and it's refreshing to see authorities not working overtime to defend beserker cops.

Watch the video of the beating and decide for yourself.

And then check out Paulville.org, whose goal is to establish "gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty." (To be honest, I don't know if that means that such police beatings would be totally illegal or an everyday occurence, especially if neighborhood associations embraced the early '90s ideas of Paul advisers/ghostwriters Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell [whose takeaway from the police beating of Rodney King was fear of videocameras].)

The Coming Recession

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:05:00 EDT

As this issue of reason goes to press, the dollar is at a record low against the euro, oil is more than $100 a barrel, consumer prices are up 4 percent from a year ago, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is cutting interest rates so often that the guys at the office have taken to calling him Edward Scissorhands. The subprime mortgage fallout has yet to finish wreaking its havoc, Bear Stearns is holding on by the skin of its teeth, and the government’s bucket may not be big enough for all the bailouts under way. Gloomy faces dominate CNBC and the Fox Business Channel, muttering long-forgotten terms like inflation and recession.

President George W. Bush, by contrast, is relatively cheery, conceding that we are in “challenging times” but arguing that “our financial institutions are strong” and the capital markets “functioning efficiently and effectively.” “In the long run,” Bush said in a March 17 White House address, “our economy is going to be fine.” And some statistics back up the sunny view: Unemployment is still at a low 5.1 percent, and productivity remains high.

Presidential hopefuls are offering a variety of explanations and possible solutions for what 42 percent of voters say is the most important issue to them, according to a recent CNN poll. At a March 20 rally, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) suggested the problem was a combination of “special interests” and war: “At a time when we’re on the brink of recession, when neighborhoods have ‘For Sale’ signs outside every home, and working families are struggling to keep up with rising costs, ordinary Americans are paying a price for this war.” Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) took a different tack: The “economic crisis is, at its core, a housing crisis,” she said in a major Philadelphia address on March 24, but she cited other factors as well, including Bush’s “brain dead energy policy.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won the Republican nomination without really talking much about the economy.

How will we know when it’s fair to speak the dreaded r-word? In general, a recession is defined as a decline in a country’s gross domestic product for two or more successive quarters. In the United States, an official pronouncement is required from the professional doom diagnosticians on the business-cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, who often take other aspects of an ailing economy into account. GDP growth slowed dramatically at the end of 2007 and is projected to be zero in the second quarter of 2008, so we look to be well on our way.

As oil prices continued to climb and housing prices continued to slide, Reason assembled a panel of economists and other market watchers to help make sense of the headlines, point some fingers, figure out how we got where we are, and offer advice about how to get out with our wallets intact.

Blame the Fed
Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr.
The U.S. economy is in the midst of an old-style credit crunch brought on by a combination of bad policies and incredibly lax underwriting standards at financial institutions. The biggest policy failure was the decision by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve to hold interest rates too low for too long. That led to a tsunami of credit that inundated the economy with cheap money. Mortgage lenders in particular were flush with funds and searched for deals wherever they could be found. Heretofore unqualified borrowers suddenly “qualified” as underwriting standards relaxed and then disappeared.

Egged on by statements from Chairman Greenspan, market participants came to believe the era of low interest rates would last indefinitely. But the era did come to an end as the Fed was forced to begin raising interest rates. Faced with the prospect of paying higher rates on their mortgages in the future, borrowers began defaulting. First home prices stopped rising, and then home prices began dropping—precipitously in some overheated housing markets. Now we are approximately six months into a new cycle of lower interest rates, but with no end in sight to the crunch.

At least two other factors stoked the crisis. First, many exotic financial products were issued whose value was tied in one way or another to home prices and the value of the securities into which home mortgages were bundled, such as collateralized mortgage obligations. The pricing of these financial products was the product of complex economic models, not the outcome of market transactions. As the value of the underlying homes and mortgages declined, pricing of the financial exotica became nearly impossible. As we learned in the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, these pricing models fail precisely when their accuracy is most important—in times of financial turbulence. The inability to price the financial products has exacerbated losses among the firms holding them.

There is a wonderful parallel here to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued almost 100 years ago, central planning inevitably fails because there are no market prices to allocate resources. Market prices can only be the outcome of actual market transactions among buyers and sellers. Planners used mathematical formulas to value resources, especially capital. Now Wall Street wizards have imported Soviet thinking to allocate financial capital. Is it any wonder that it failed?

The second factor contributing to the housing market collapse was the federal government’s commitment to “affordable housing.” Lenders, especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were pressured into promoting housing to low-income groups that could not qualify for normal loans. That policy is predicated on the belief that there is an underserved group of people who, but for economic discrimination or some other market failure, would be homeowners. That social goal and the credit-driven desire for more deals merged into mortgages made without adequate collateral.

We learned two lessons from the drive to make home ownership available to the heretofore underserved. First, many of these were not homeowners because they could not afford a home. Only under the temporary “hothouse” conditions in mortgage markets did they seem to qualify. Second, people who have no equity in their homes cannot meaningfully be said to be owners. When times turn tough, they will walk away. They were effectively renters, not homeowners.

The crisis will end when housing markets hit bottom and the prices of mortgage securities stabilize. Banks also need to unwind their positions in exotic financial derivatives.

The Fed needs to understand it is facing a capital crisis, not a liquidity crisis. The very low interest rates on safe assets show there is ample liquidity in financial markets. The Fed should not supply capital. That is the job of markets, and they are doing it.

Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr., formerly a vice president and economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

No Hoofing to Hooverville
Megan McArdle
Just one thing puzzles me about the race to the White House: Why would anyone want to get there? I know that being crowned prettiest girl at the prom is the great lasting rejoinder to everyone who made fun of you in middle school, but given the economic condition of the country, the next four years seem like a rotten time to reign.

Ignore the econopundits making comparisons to the 1930s. While the parallels are striking, we are missing the key ingredient in the onset of the Great Depression: tight Fed policy that caused the money supply to shrink by 25 percent. You can put away that bindle and push the apple cart back in the garage.

But if we’re not exactly hoofing it to Hooverville, we nonetheless face one hell of a rough patch. Record high oil prices, surpassing even the momentous spikes of the 1970s, have brought with them another piece of ’70s memorabilia: stagflation. Federal Reserve bankers are faced with an extremely unpalatable choice. They can tighten up the money supply to combat inflation, at the cost of making the probable recession even deeper. Or they can hang loose and watch inflation march upward while the economy does God knows what. With the credit markets broken, the Fed may end up losing its hard-won credibility as an inflation fighter while producing only marginal benefits to growth.

The president has no control over any of this, but that won’t stop people from blaming him anyway. He will also almost certainly have to come up with some regulatory scheme for increasing transparency and accountability in the vast new financial markets that have been created by the securitization of loans during the last 30 years. It will be a tough order to give investors better information without strangling valuable financial innovation.

But by far his biggest quandary will be the budget. Obama (who I assume will be the Democratic nominee) wants a big new health care entitlement; John McCain wants even more tax cuts. Both will be frustrated by adverse budget math. The economic slowdown is going to cut into tax revenues, and most economists agree that a recession is not a good time to raise taxes—nay, not even on “the rich.” Meanwhile, the baby boomers are about to start retiring, turning Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid into the sucking chest wound of the federal budget. Assurances that the trust fund won’t run out until 2042 notwithstanding, the president will have to start coping with Medicare deficits as soon as next year, and a falling Social Security surplus soon thereafter. All this will be compounded by the slowdown in GDP growth made inevitable by declining labor force participation and service-intensive elder care.

Any future president should be panicking. That doesn’t mean the rest of us should. At the end of the day, America has the most flexible and resilient economy in the world. We’ll pull through somehow, although a lot of us won’t be very happy in the process. But least happy of all will be the president—the bum we get to throw out when things don’t go our way.

Megan McArdle blogs about economics at The Atlantic.

First, Do No (More) Harm
Ron Paul
This nation is facing an economic crisis the likes of which have not been seen in several generations. It is crucial that we take to heart the lesson that should have been learned after the Great Depression, which is that the central bank should do nothing.

I have been writing and speaking for years about the dangers of the Federal Reserve, but the importance of the actions of the Fed in laying the groundwork for the downturn in the business cycle pales in comparison to the damage done by actions the Fed takes once the downturn arrives. At the first sign of crisis, even with growing inflation, the Fed began to further inflate, lowering interest rates, stepping up open market operations, and injecting liquidity. World markets, already jittery, see these steps as affirmations of their worst fears and react accordingly by selling assets denominated in smoke-and-mirrors fiat currency and fleeing to the solid value of gold, oil, and commodities.

Every action the Fed takes sends a signal that the U.S. dollar will continue to be inflated and therefore debased, which is why the correct action is no action at all. Lower interest rates and liquidity injections are viewed with alarm by foreign markets, while higher interest rates and money tightening are anathema to many domestic investors. The Fed is between a rock and a hard place, and its insistence on inflating the money supply to manage the brittle economy will likely be our undoing.

Until we realize that the Federal Reserve system itself is flawed, and until we recognize that no one economic maestro or committee of economic experts can set prices and plan the economy, this nation will continue to flounder about in an economic malaise. Ending that may take a much more serious downturn than anything we’ve seen yet. It is beyond doubt that our economy is in recession, and the only rational response is for the government to allow malinvested resources to liquidate so that we can return to a stable economy.

While the Fed should take a hands-off approach, Congress should aggressively cut taxes and spending and repeal regulations that stifle economic growth, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This country has enormous economic potential, an industrious work force, and an enviable history of innovation and entrepreneurship. If the government would learn from its past mistakes and abstain from further interference, we could get back on a solid footing and grow to our full potential.

My fear is that the Fed will continue with its policy of inflation and Congress will be pressured to continue to stimulate the economy with government spending, probably extending to even more outright taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial institutions, subprime mortgages, and government-sponsored enterprises that are “too big to fail.” These debt-funded efforts reward the recklessness of some institutions at the expense of the productive sectors of our economy. Until the federal government acts to extricate itself from intervention in the markets, economic activity will be hindered and true recovery will not take place.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is a nine-term congressman and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

The Vicious Ethanol Cycle
Robert Bryce
I see three big dangers to the global economy: the ongoing fallout from the mortgage mess, rising energy prices, and rising food prices. That last item is the most maddening, because surging food prices are largely the result of the ethanol scam.

As U.S. ethanol distilleries vacuum up ever increasing quantities of corn, and corn takes up an ever larger percentage of arable land, prices for all types of food are skyrocketing. During the last two years, corn prices have more than doubled and soybean prices have nearly tripled. In 2007 food prices in the U.S. increased by nearly 5 percent. Bill Lapp, of the Omaha-based research firm Advanced Economic Solutions, told The Boston Globe in March that he expects food prices to increase at an annual rate of 7.5 percent for the next five years.

Because of mandates requiring gasoline producers to mix ethanol with their fuel, 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop in 2006—about 2.1 billion bushels—was diverted into ethanol production. By 2009, according to the National Corn Growers Association, about one-third of the expected crop—some 4 billion bushels—will be used to make motor fuel. And those projections were made in April 2007, eight months before Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which requires the consumption of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2020, a fivefold increase over current levels.

The far-reaching economic impact of ethanol mandates is already being felt. In early 2007, tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of Mexico City to protest the rising cost of tortillas, an increase that Mexico’s secretary of economy, Eduardo Sojo, blamed on American corn ethanol production. In March of this year, Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s largest poultry processor, shuttered a plant in Siler City, North Carolina, and fired 1,100 workers. Company CEO Clint Rivers laid the blame squarely on the ethanol mandates, predicting that “there is much more to come” in the way of food price increases. “We’re spending our tax dollars to raise the price of our food to subsidize the ethanol industry,” he said.

Congressional meddling in the energy market has created what Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute, calls an “epic competition” between “the world’s supermarkets and its service stations.” Therein lies the perversity of ethanol mandates: As the global economy heads for rougher times, food prices are soaring. And those prices will increase anxiety among consumers, who will further reduce their discretionary spending. Congress has created a negative feedback loop that will reverberate for years to come.

Robert Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune. His latest book is Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (PublicAffairs).

War Is the Health of the Civilian State
Robert Higgs
Adam Smith famously observed that there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation”—that is, nations can take a lot of abuse. Let’s hope he was right, because the George W. Bush administration has taken a great many actions during the past seven years that contribute to economic ruin.

Much of the White House’s faulty economic policy can be traced to its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter because it has been larger, costlier, and more diverting. I use the word diverting deliberately to emphasize that the government’s military adventures in southwest Asia have served to draw the public’s attention away from economic measures that otherwise would have attracted more notice and hence more resistance.

One reason war is always associated with especially rapid growth in the size, scope, and power of the state is that it focuses people’s attention on what is seen as the most urgent matter, so they simply don’t notice what the government is doing in other areas. Another reason is that during wartime many people increase their broad support for the government and are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing to do with the war.

Hardly anyone was surprised that real military spending (measured in accordance with the government’s own narrow definition) increased by almost 60 percent between 2000 and 2007, compared to real GDP growth of 18 percent during that time. Note, however, that the government’s real nondefense outlays increased concurrently by more than 24 percent—an increase one-third greater than that of GDP. When people let down their guard in “supporting the troops,” they permit the government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge spending in a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature.

The administration has partially concealed the burden of its spending binge by resorting to deficit finance. Federal debt held by the public increased by 49 percent between the end of fiscal 2000 and the end of fiscal 2007—a 24 percent increase after adjusting for inflation. To facilitate this surge in public borrowing, the Federal Reserve engineered a 40 percent increase in the monetary base, easing credit conditions in the commercial banking sector. The real estate bubble (now bursting) and the substantial depreciation of the dollar’s international exchange value are but two of the consequences of these reckless, war-spawned fiscal and monetary policies.

In view of the plunging stock market, my guess is that the current recession—in which many of the easy-credit-induced malinvestments of the past seven years are being liquidated by means of write-offs, loan defaults, bankruptcies, and other asset forfeitures—has much further to run. If you like the present worsening economic situation, write the president and your congressional representatives a letter and thank them for their war and their related economic spoliation.

Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, is author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (Oxford University Press) and many other books.

Stagflation or Depression?
Robert E. Wright
The current U.S. economic outlook is as bleak as it was in 1974 or even 1930. Will the economy wither? Or will it just wilt a little before blossoming in a bath of Fed-supplied liquidity? Nobody knows for sure, but I fear the former. Here’s why:

Our educational system does a poor job of teaching people how to think independently. It always has, but until recently that wasn’t a big problem. Today’s globalized economy, however, demands ever larger numbers of engineers, doctors, scientists, and sundry creative types. We probably won’t create enough independent thinkers until we have school choice at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.

Thankfully, entrepreneurs abound. They’ve pulled us out of the economic fire in the past and could do so again. But they are more hamstrung than ever with high, uncertain, and often capricious taxes and regulations that do not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Something stinks in our financial system. Six different mortgage securitization schemes blew up between the Civil War and World War II for exactly the same reason that subprime mortgages tanked last year: very poorly designed incentives for mortgage originators. Why don’t financiers and their regulators pay more attention to America’s rich financial heritage? Their modeling is more sophisticated than ever, but their economic reasoning is not.

The national debt is so high ($9.4 trillion, or almost $31,000 per person) that the government must largely rely on monetary stimulus rather than more salubrious fiscal measures, such as permanently cutting taxes. Too much easing by the Fed could lead to 1970s-like inflation and further financial havoc.

Urged on in part by the example set by their profligate leaders, Americans wallow in a huge pile of private debt as well. A high level of individual leverage has become a permanent fixture of the nation’s landscape. Americans owe so much that to keep growing, financial institutions have to push the margin of safety by making loans on ever thinner collateral and ever weaker covenants. If the economy slows significantly, many more poor-quality loans will hit the proverbial fan. The ensuing mess will stink and take a long time to clean up.

Even if the Federal Reserve manages to save the economy this time, these problems may continue to fester, breeding the next economic catastrophe. Perhaps, though, even greater levels of incompetence in other countries will break our fall.

Robert E. Wright is the author of One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson and the History of What We Owe (McGraw-Hill) and a curator for the Museum of American Finance. He teaches business, economic, and financial history at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear-Driven Government ‘Control’
Donald J. Boudreaux
New York Times columnist Gail Collins was underwhelmed by the president’s folksy course-things-ain’t-great-now-but-we-Americans-with-our-rebate-checks-and-incessant-complaining-about-congressional-earmarks-are-gonna-be-just-fine address to the Economic Club of New York on March 14. She complained that “in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control.”

This is the attitude that scares me. I worry not a whit that the subprime crisis or falling share prices will cause long-term economic woe. As unnerving as the current downturn might be today, people in competitive markets always find ways of regaining their economic footing tomorrow. Investors recalibrate their expectations and entrepreneurs redirect their energies to take better advantage of the changing economic landscape. Workers’ pay and consumers’ standard of living, after blipping briefly downward, resume their upward trend.

“Nonsense!” a chorus yells. “What about the Great Depression? Or the 1970s?” The experiences of these decades are indeed relevant. They are, however, precisely why the clamor for putting someone “in control” of this crisis is so frightening.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, whose strength of empirical support rivals that for the flat-earth hypothesis (“It seems so obvious!”), the massive move toward centralized control of the economy during the administrations of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt did not “rescue” Americans from economic hardship. All that FDR’s soaring rhetoric and army of officials manning newly created alphabet-soup agencies managed to do was to prolong an economic downturn into America’s deepest and longest depression—one that showed no reliable signs of ending until after Roosevelt met his maker. As the economic historian Robert Higgs documents in his 2006 book Depression, War, and Cold War, investors were terrified by the very real risk during the 1930s that government would extend its control over the economy even beyond what it achieved with its New Deal programs.

The 1970s weren’t as bad as the 1930s. Most important, there was no serious talk during the ’70s of nationalizing industries or socializing investment decisions. International trade was expanding rather than being suffocated by a disco-era Smoot-Hawley tariff. Still, wage and price controls were in vogue (and in effect), Congress and Richard Nixon were keen on command-and-control regulations, and Fed chairmen Arthur Burns’ and G. William Miller’s control over the money supply was injuriously inflationary. Shot through with so many interventions giving government more “control,” the economy slipped into an infamous malaise.

My only fear, therefore, is fear itself—fear that deludes people into believing that giving government greater control is the key to earthly salvation. As I write these words, the Fed’s aggressive moves to bail out Bear Stearns and prevent other necessary market corrections—along with increasing public support for protectionism, anti-immigrant nativism, and environmental hysteria—send shivers down my spine. The threat of a long-term crisis is only as real as is the likelihood that government will try to exert more control.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Who's Going to Get Your Wasted Vote?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The polls have closed in the East and John McCain is winning the presidency. Florida goes red. Ohio goes red. Iowa flips to Barack Obama, but McCain needs only to lock up 16 electoral votes for victory.

And then things start going pear-shaped. McCain is down by 10,000 votes in New Hampshire with only 5,000 left to be counted—the Libertarians scored 15,000—and the networks call it for Obama. Those sparse Republican New Mexico counties start rolling in, and McCain is falling short of those Bush 2004 margins as the Libertarians rack up 2 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent vote totals. Obama wins the state. It's the same story in Nevada, and McCain can't quite make up the Obama margin out of Las Vegas. The pattern becomes clear as the sun comes up on Wednesday: Just enough Republicans have ditched their party to hand the election over to the Democrats.

When former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) announced he was exploring a run for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, Republicans who'd sent "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader experienced their first flashes of this nightmare. "Sure, it will hurt," said South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson. "We'll just have to see how much." Republicans haven't forgotten how John McCain won his nomination over a splintered and pathetic field, and how the talk radio right's failure to settle on an anti-McCain gave them a candidate who more than a quarter of the base still refuses to vote for.

Of course, the LP hasn't ever actually swung a presidential election, and right-wing worries that they would in 2004 proved to be overheated. "I'm an LP person," says Libertarian Party chairman Bill Redpath. "Election night is my least favorite night of the year." Yet even Redpath thinks the ground has shifted since 2004. "I don't see how libertarians could vote for John McCain, and I see lot of conservatives who simply won't."

Throughout 2007, the LP watched Ron Paul vaccuum up libertarian money and siphon energy from the low-key field. Gambling guru Wayne Allyn Root, a former Republican, entered the race claiming that he had name recognition no candidate could beat. At the time, he was right. Physics professor George Phillies, a frequent local candidate in Massachusetts and national organizer for the 2004 Michael Badnarik campaign, claimed that he had more electoral experience than anyone else in the race. That was right, too. Party leaders, nervous about the strength of their field, offered the nomination to Ron Paul if he wanted it, a divisive decision lambasted by the candidates in the ring and by the more radical elements of the party. But when Paul spoke at the Free State Project's Liberty Forum, days before the New Hampshire primary, he drew a crowd that dwarfed the turnout for an LP candidates' debate.

As Paul's surprising bid for the GOP nomination winds down, it's clear that it was a boon for the LP after all. Paul's fundraising and gadfly debate performances got national pundits talking about the libertarian vote. "I'm amazed at how often I hear that word in the mainstream media now," says 2004 LP nominee Michael Badnarik. "Four years ago it was a curse word." Paul indirectly drew three high-profile candidates into the race. Bob Barr, an LP leader since 2006, introduced Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a rousing speech that ramped up the movement to draft him. Mary Ruwart, a left-libertarian author as renowned in LP circles as she is obscure outside of them, re-engaged in electoral politics to support Paul, then jumped into the race as Paul withdrew. Mike Gravel, the biggest-name convert to the party since, well, Barr, made the leap in part because Paul was so successful at raising money.

The result of all this manuevering is a wild, unpredictable, and possibly disastrous battle for the LP nod. Every faction of the party is represented in the race, and the 702 delegates and 146 alternates slated to go to the national nominating convention over Memorial Day weekend are up for grabs. They will vote until one candidate scores an absolute majority. Here is a current, rough ranking of the highly fluid race, based on conversations with multiple delegates and campaigns.

1. Bob Barr. Age: 59. Experience: U.S. Attorney 1986-1990, U.S. Congressman from Georgia 1995-2003, author of The Meaning of Is.

The drive-by media view of the LP race—that Barr is all but certain to win—isn't quite wrong. If the delegates convened today, Bob Barr would win most of their votes. But he would not win a majority. While Barr’s entry into the race was greeted with a rush of support, his allies count on a bit less than 30 percent support on the first ballot.

A first-ballot victory isn't much of a prize in the LP. In 2004, Aaron Russo won the first round of balloting, only to watch third-place finisher Gary Nolan endorse Michael Badnarik for the win. Russo, like Barr, faced an intractable bloc of delegates who considered him heretical. The comparison doesn't go far, however, as Barr has spent two years in party leadership and carefully apologized for the stances that offend Libertarians most, like his pro-drug war votes and his initial support of the PATRIOT Act.

It's good enough for a lot of Libertarians, who are desparate for a candidate who can capture some of the Ron Paul mojo and avoid the fringey appearence of the Badnarik campaign. "We need to get back to basics," said Alabama delegate Dr. Jimmy Blake, "rather than discussing mineral rights on Mars and all of that crap." Washington, D.C. delegate Rob Kampia—better known as the head of the Marijuana Policy Project—is planning on voting for Barr, a sign of how much he's been forgiven. The question is how willing Barr's opponents are to accept him, and whether the party risks a fight along the lines of the razor-thin Ron Paul–Russell Means race 20 years ago. "If you nominated a Barr," said a rival candidate, "you’d lose the entire, very large, neo-pagan and non-traditional religious people. You'd lose the entire gay and lesbian groups. It would be a very big problem."

2. Mary Ruwart. Age: 59. Experience: Candidate for multiple local offices, author of Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression and other books.

Like Barr, Ruwart was pushed into the race by Libertarians who were unsatisfied by their choices. Like Barr, she didn’t need to be pushed very hard. Twenty-four years ago, Ruwart, then a scientific researcher and first-time LP delegate, threw her hat into the presidential nomination race and came in third. From there she mounted a series of unsuccessful (but often credible) bids for local offices, supplemented by reams and reams of freelance writing about nonaggression, philosophy, and left-libertarian ideas.

Ruwart's supporters see her as a singular spokesman for Libertarians, a likeable and eloquent activist who'll stay faithful to the party's message. Ruwart's opponents see her as a fringe candidate who'll do nothing to attract wayward conservatives. ”I don’t see us getting anywhere if Ruwart is the nominee,” said delegate Stewart Flood. [ed--This quote was originally misattributed to Aaron Starr.] “She’d be completely ignored by the media, or if she wasn’t ignored their view would be, ‘Boy, she’s got some strange ideas on things.’”

Proving this "strangeness" to delegates has proven tricky. Ruwart's oeuvre has been parsed for controversial statements, and a doozy from Short Answers to the Tough Questions made it sound as if the candidate favored the legalization of child pornography. It shook the campaign, and Ruwart responded, days later, with a tough statement denouncing "divisiveness" in the party. The pro-Ruwart and anti-Ruwart forces saw exactly what they wanted to see. "Mary is family," said a consultant for a rival campaign. "This isn't the Democrats or the Republicans, who'll pile on each other. If you're expecting a reaction against her from this, you're mistaken."

3. Wayne Allyn Root. Age: 47. Experience: sports handicapper, former sports talk show host, author of five books, including Millionaire Republican and The Joy of Failure!

Back in the long-ago, snow-swept days of February, Root was building a winning coalition with two groups of voters: right-leaning Libertarians and delegates who wanted a media-savvy nominee. They were willing to forgive Root’s heresies, such as his big-dollar donations to Republican candidates (and Joe Lieberman) and a shifting position on the Iraq War. Barr's entry into the race has changed that and bled some support from Root, with some of his supporters jumping ship entirely and some suggesting he'd merely make a good running mate. "He'd be a better candidate in four years if he got some seasoning under Bob Barr," one delegate said.

Root, a savvy and quick-witted speaker, hasn't adjusted too well to the new entries. One of his tongue-in-cheek slogans ("the WAR you can vote for") has occasionally cut against him, as he struggles to convince delegates that he's not an interventionist Republican in disguise. Some left-libertarians accuse him of playing dirty, calling on Mary Ruwart to leave the race after the "child sex" snippet of Short Answers spread through the blogosphere. Not all of them buy the argument that he'd be the most media-savvy candidate they could nominate, or that they'd even want him speaking for them. "The GOP launched a full court press to make sure Michael Badnarik was never on TV," rival candidate George Phillies said. "If you booked him, you wouldn’t get access to the good Repubican guests. This direct access to the mainstream media that Root and Barr talk about will crash to a halt if either one gets the nomination."

4. Mike Gravel. Age: 77. Experience: Alaska state representative 1963-1967, U.S. Senator from Alaska 1969-1981, author of Citizen Power.

Libertarians are largely happy, if somewhat skeptical, about a Democratic also-ran's embrace of their party. "Other than the fact that he's drinking the liberal Kool Aid on health care, he sounds like a libertarian," said delegate Stewart Flood. [ed--This quote was originally misattributed to Aaron Starr.] Two delegates called him blunt, and only one of them meant it as a compliment.

None of this, nor Gravel's late entry in the race, have prevented him from gaining steam. He's won delegates over by talking to them one on one, pumping his omnipresent National Initiative, and arguing for his own brand of left-libertarianism that focuses on human rights first and governing principles second. "I am not a Constitutionalist," Gravel said last week. "I'm a classical liberal."

When he entered the race, Gravel seemed unlikely to win enough delegate support to even enter the candidate debates at the Denver convention. That's changed: There's chatter that Gravel will win a berth even if he doesn't get 30 tokens, due to the media attention he'd draw. ”He’d make a great vice presidential nominee," one delegate said, for that reason. Unfortunately for that kind of delegate, Gravel has refused to consider the VP slot.

5. George Phillies. Age: 60. Experience: physics professor, 2004 Badnarik campaign organizer, editor of the newsetters Let Freedom Ring! and Libertarian Strategy Gazette, author of the e-book Stand Up for Liberty!

Before Barr and Gravel entered the race, George Phillies claimed he had the most electoral experience in the field. He's still saying that. "I have a working campaign organization," he says. "I'm in close contact with Libertarians all over the country. I'm the only candidate who's worked in a national Libertarian campaign on a Libertarian campaign budget. I have $100,000 in the bank, ready to go." But Phillies' support has remained low and steady while the newer candidates have hogged the spotlight. Nebbishy and nasal-voiced, trekking from event to event in his three-piece suit and prescription specs, Phillies has made himself credible. "He's improved a whole lot since I met him in 2004," said one delegate. ”I’d like to see him run for party chairman.”

That's the problem, though. It's easy to see Phillies in an organizing role, and considerably less easy to picture him holding the standard. "He doesn’t project 'candidate,'" said delegate Stewart Flood. "He projects 'college professor.'" For all of that, he might be the least offensive candidate to the largest number of delegates. No one is better set up to profit from a melee on the floor.

6. Steve Kubby. Age: 61. Experience: co-drafter of California's Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana in 1996, candidate for governor of California in 1998, author of The Politics of Consciousness and Why Marijuana Should Be Legal.

Kubby offers Libertarians much the same deal that Eugene Debs offered the vintage Socialists: real movement cred, battle scars from his fights with the state, and a crippling inability to campaign. Shortly after the 1998 gubernatorial election, Kubby’s home was raided and his bountiful marijuana garden was seized. A legal battle ensued that took him to Canada (for five years), to prison, and finally back to the West Coast, where his movement is limited. A candidate who nearly won the party’s vice presidential nomination in 2000 has been almost invisible on the trail, appearing at conventions via amateurish into-the-camera videos. "He’s not as clear-headed as he could be," one delegate said regretfully. Kubby has a good reason for that: adrenal cancer, the condition that turned him into a medical marijuana activist in the first place.

Kubby has tried to turn all of this to his advantage, with a little success. "I've gone to jail for freedom," he brags in one of his campaign videos. "I've gone to Canada for freedom. I've nearly died for freedom!" After Ruwart, he might be the best-liked candidate in the field, but concerns about his campaigning skills and his myopic focus on marijuana are keeping him out of the top tier. His second-place performance in his home state's (non-binding, low-turnout) presidential primary convinced some delegates that he's lost the notoreity that he had eight years ago.

7. Christine Smith. Age: 41. Experience: author of A Mountain in the Wind: An Exploration of the Spirituality of John Denver.

”I’m the leading candidate by all the ways that we can measure it,” Christine Smith claimed in a March radio interview. If that was ever true, it stopped being true when Mary Ruwart entered the race. But Smith is the most pugnacious representative of the libertarian left still in the running. "I believe the LP still has great potential in a nation whose people are disillusioned and disgusted with politics as usual," Smith writes in one of her campaign statements. "But that potential is destroyed if our party's 'leadership' continues to be weakened by people with major non-libertarian stances, ulterior motives, agendas and actions."

What's not clear is why Christine Smith is the candidate who can "save" the LP. "She hasn't been in the party that long," said Starchild, a California delegate. "I'd like to see her campaign for a lower office first." Other delegates are less forgiving, pointing out that for all her of her rhetoric about the LP, she offered to bolt the party if Ron Paul got the GOP nod and needed a running mate.

Smith's assertiveness cuts both ways. Several delegates told me they've been won over by her tough speeches, debate performances, or radio hits, or that a female nominee would be good for the party. But unless Mary Ruwart left the race, there aren't enough of these delegates to nominate Smith.

8. Michael Jingozian. Age: 46. Experience: founder of AngelVision Technologies.

A self-proclaimed "new age libertarian" whose 5-year plan assumes that he'll lose this election and win in 2012, Jingozian has funded a full-time staff and a busy travel schedule mostly through personal loans. He's become a presence in the race, but not one that the majority of likely delegates take seriously. ”I clearly got the impression he’s not lucid very often," one delegate said. "He didn’t seem...with it.”

One reason he turns off some delegates: Even though he's been a party member for years, Jingozian emphasizes the rottenness of the two-party system over the strengths of libertarianism. He's spoken at Green Party events to build cross-ideological support for his "Reset America" plan. He's waffled on policy questions in an attempt to seem more mainstream, telling one radio interviewer that the U.S. can't leave Iraq right away and a withdrawal would take six to nine months, sentiments utterly at odds with most LP voters.

9. The others. There is absolutely zero chance that John Finan, Barry Hess, Dave Hollist, Daniel Imperato, Alden Link, or Robert Milnes will get the Libertarian Party’s nomination. They are occasionally entertaining, and they are harmless. Imperato, in particular, has run a campaign worthy of Max Headroom, bidding (with no success) for the Constitution and Green Party nominations, claiming to run a multi-billion-dollar international organization, to speak seven languages, and to be descended from Emperor Nero. (If that actually was true, why would anyone admit it?) “He is the most ridiculous candidate I have ever seen,” says Starchild.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

The Show That Never Ends

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Ron Paul can move fast when he wants to. On Friday, March 11, at 10 a.m., reporters are supposed to meet him at the admissions building of his alma mater, Gettysburg College, and accompany him on a campus tour. At 10:03 a.m. a few reporters who couldn't pinpoint the location finally straggle up to it. Too late. "You can catch him," a campus apparatchik suggests. "Big group of guys in suits—shouldn't be too hard to find."

Sure enough, Paul and a small phalanx of flacks and handlers are leading a small group of journalists through the campus. Handsome undergrads smirk and take cell phone pictures. One of them compels her boyfriend to stop their Jeep so she can sprint out and take a picture from the front. They're lucky they've got the Jeep. Paul, whose crooked walk and snug black sneakers made it into many a snarky profile, is speedwalking across the green. Three reporters racing right next to him, holding their recorders in his face, are so out of breath they can't blurt out questions. Todd Kniffen, a tour guide who's drawn an awfully long straw, is having a more or less uninterrupted conversation with Paul.

First stop is The Bullet Hole, the face-feeding joint where Paul earned a living as a manager back in 1956. It's now part of a new-ish brick-and-schlock student center. It's unrecognizable. A handler asks Paul to stand next to the new logo and menu for a photo, so he does. He greets four sweatsuit-clad female undergrads who've been laughing and cheering for him since he walked in.

"Hello-o-o!" Paul says. They giggle. "Are you getting some coffee?" They're getting orange juice. Where is he speaking today? "It's going to be at the movie theater... the Majestic. Do you watch a lot of movies?"

Paul and the girls chat pleasantly while the press corps respirates and fills up its film cans. When the candidate walks on to see the new swimming pool, a few hacks stick around to get the girls' reactions. "Are you supporting him?"

"No," one says, looking a little sorry about it. "There are a lot of supporters on campus, though. I'm, like, I just woke up!"

There has always been something off, something inexplicable about Paul's connection to young voters. He is asked about it constantly, and he usually reheats the same answer: The young people like the message. Many months ago, the numbers of young voters he could draw to a speech seemed to suggest something more, something bigger, a mass movement bigger than anything any other Republican could muster. Paul talks with glee about those other Republicans. "You heard all this fuss about Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani when they entered the race," Paul says. "Oh, they're frontrunners! They're in the top tier!" He grins so wide that he squints. "We got more votes than either of them!"

The Ron Paul campaign of April 2008 is taking place in a universe next door to ours, overlapping only occasionally with the McCain-Obama-Clinton race we read about every day. Paul is still mobbed on campuses. Lines form 30 to 45 minutes before he speaks. Drive up the loping highways of the state and you see hundreds of Paul signs (220 just on the road from Philadelphia to the capital in Harrisburg), precious few for the Democrats, and none for John McCain. But try and get people outside of the movement to pay attention.

Paul's Keystone State college tour makes two stops—in Gettysburg and in State College (home of Penn State)—and his wide-open press availabilities draw less than a dozen reporters.

Still, Paul does not make our job easy. At times, he argues that he is (still) running to scare the establishment. "At the moment we are campaigning to get the maximum number of votes and to see what happens," he says at his Gettysburg press conference. But when I ask if Paul will stay in the race to the convention and refuse to release his delegates to John McCain, Paul punts. "That infers that this is not a non-conventional activity. I'm not going to hold onto anything! The delegates have their own minds... I don't hold them, say ‘do this, do that.'"

When he faces the crowd at the Majestic Theater (the place where those breakfast-eating girls don't watch movies), Paul pulls a Spiro Agnew and singles journalists out for belittling him, "The media ask me all the time, and of course, today they asked me two or three times: What are you doing this for?" he tells the crowd. Some of them boo. "They say, isn't everything locked up? Well...not quite." I look around at the rest of the press for some sign of umbrage, since he's clearly contradicting what he told us 20 minutes ago. No one looks too bothered. It doesn't show up in next day's stories.

In Pennsylvania there are four types of Paul supporters. There are the casuals, the kids who think it's cool that a presidential candidate is on campus, and who shout "I love you Ron Paul!" or dart out of their cars to snap iPhone photos of him and his entourage. There are the faithfuls, such as Harrison Brown of Lebanon County, who sits through Paul's Gettysburg speech with a sticker on his forehead. They've been waiting to vote for Paul for years. There are the converts who discovered Paul because they wanted a candidate who combined anti-war politics with a lack of slipperiness, and can't believe their luck in finding the Texas congressman.

Then there are the freaks. I don't use that word pejoratively. There is nothing too scary about "Lisa Marie" (no last name, thanks), who tells me that Paul is an "angel" who understands the threat posed by the Bilderbergs. Or Terry Cummings, a musician who tells me to go to BlackBoxVoting.org to see how these elections might be rigged. "There's supposed to a special tape on those voting machines," he says, "but anyone can rip the tape off and tamper with them. Watch the videos!" If they were the only people who showed up on Paul's Pennsylvania jaunt, it would be a problem. But they're only the leading edge of his fan base. They clarify why Paul is doing this and why he can still draw crowds. He is a counterculture figure now, and he doesn't know what to do about it. He knows only that he wants to speak on some campuses and bask in the applause.

At another short press conference in State College, after Paul's sampled butter pecan ice cream at the renowned Creamery, he acknowledges that there doesn't seem to be any ideological consistency to his flock. "The thing that brings them together," he offers, "whether they're from the left or the right, is that we really need to unify around the Constitution." He hasn't decided what to do yet with other candidates who are launching bids for office, agree part or all of his platform, and call themselves "Ron Paul Republicans."

"It's a difficult thing," Paul says, "because I know how politics works. If you have some name recognition and some money, you have to be careful. To say, 'I'm a Ron Paul Republican,' and to expect some money and an endorsement from me—I don't think that's a good idea." Of course, Paul, whose online fundraising in particular was nothing less than amazing, is sitting on a rumored $5 million of campaign cash. When his presidential bid officially ends, that dough, along with Paul's following, is going to go somewhere. When he sidesteps questions about his bankroll and his support, it makes you wonder if he'll actually make the decision on what to do with it, or if he'll let it be mismanaged.

That political question seems completely divorced from Paul's celebrity. At Penn State, organizers booked a hall for 700 people, then scrapped it because it was going to overflow. The new location is the basketball court of a daringly anonymous gym; when Paul's people start flooding in for the speech, the rest of the gym is still in use, and sweaty raquetball players wipe their brows and crane their necks at the crowd. Some of the people who saw Paul speak in Gettysburg have driven up here, a plodding two-and-a-half hour drive through progressively paler and emptier counties. The students who fill most of the room have mostly walked from their dorms. They expect a madcap encounter with a presidential candidate who's against the wars (on drugs and in Iraq) and for sticking it to both major parties.

The diehards get what they expected; the students, a little less so. Paul gives 80 or 90 percent of the speech he's given at every large venue, heavy on monetary policy ("and the dollar is falling, and this monetary system is broken, and if we don't do something it's going to collapse!") and Article I, Section 8. He's light on the drug war talk. As it goes on, a small portion of the crowd makes for the exit. The people who stay can be divided into those whose enthusiasm is starting to wane—the college kids—and those who are getting happier and happier the more Paul speaks. A bald Larry Kramer lookalike unfurls a red, white, and blue umbrella and starts twirling it as he dances in a little circle. Almost two dozen people are scribbling into notebooks. Some are taking notes on the speech. Some are actually doing homework.

Then it ends, and it looks like any presidential rally coming to an end. Paul's small entourage stands watch as more than 100 people line up to meet him. He signs pocket Constitutions, T-shirts, and placards, and he pauses for cell phone photos. Four shirtless undergrads who've stripped off their shirts and painted their chests with an R, O, N, and exclamation point wait patiently and groove along to the sound system, blasting "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister and "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. Not everyone was paying much attention to the speech. "I wish he was still in the race," says one student. When I tell him that Paul is still actually running, and that this is why he elliptically asked for votes, he challenges me. "I thought he was suspending his campaign. Why do you never hear about him?"

It's a fair question that no one will answer to the satisfaction of Paul's people. They've stumbled on a secret fellowship, and they've planted more yard signs and initiated more uncomfortable conversations about sound money and government lies than anyone will ever be able to count. On the way out of the Penn State speech I run into a thick-waisted man wearing a hat and a Bluetooth earpiece who I recognize from the Gettysburg rally. He tells me his name is Fritz Schram, and I ask why he decided to drive to both rallies.

"Why am I here?" He looks at me as if I'm asking why he'd dyed his skin plaid. "I'm here because I support Ron Paul."

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Dr. No Coverage

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:25:00 EDT

New Media grump Jon Friedman is busting campaign reporters for missing the story of Ron Paul.

[A]nyone who looked hard enough knew that there was more to Paul than an inability to amass delegates. Most of the media, turned off by his shrill libertarian leanings, missed the real news value of Paul's story -- namely, the Texas congressman's ability to connect intensely with voters. [...]
But the hard-core loyalty of his backers remains one of the most newsworthy, if unwritten, stories of this presidential campaign.

I will one-up Friedman, with whom I usually disagree: It was Paul's ability to connect intensely with voters despite not being a very charismatic politician, nor having a particularly effective campaign team, that suggested there's something going on here and ya don't know what it is, etc.

Brian Doherty's February cover story on the rEVOLution here. Nick Gillespie and I named the Paul campaign as the only one in this election cycle that even hints at 21^st century politics, in a Politics magazine story [pdf] from March. More reason Paul-ania here. (Friedman link via Romenesko.)

The rEVOLution Will Be Tattoized

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:28:00 EDT

Via Ernest Hancock, the man behind the Ron Paul rEVOLution signs (and much more in the way of libertarian activism), comes evidence of what he calls "a permanent revolution indeed." (For the unclear, that's not Hancock hisself in the pics.)

And via Ken Layne on Wonkette at AOL comes the best Ron Paul videos ever, including this rap about the congressman and...pizza:

Some of reason's Ron Paul coverage here.