Libertarians weigh in on Paul
I have a soft spot for Reason editor Nick Gillespie, so when he calls Ron Paul’s younger supporters “too stupid to realize” that Paul’s plainspoken approach won’t work, I think Gillespie’s right, but could’ve used a nicer word. Maybe “naive” would’ve been a better choice.
The point is not that Paul is going to win anything. There’s nothing to win. The point is that Paul gives people who care about liberty a focal point for the next short while, which is about the best that anyone can do at this point in American history.
I decidedly don’t have a soft spot for Brink Lindsey, who I regard as just the kind of beltway-libertarian who has made movement libertarianism a bit player in the grand conservative coalition of hawks, evangelicals, and supply-side tax cutters. (Lindsey’s big innovation is to build a grand coalition on the left, but who does he reach out to? The New Republic, whose sanctimonious Joe Lieberman gives Christian conservatives a run for their money and whose love of war is unbounded.)
What’s more, I’m not willing to forgive someone who while holding so senior a post at the Cato Institute had such a wrong-headed public position on the war and whose day-late-dollar-short renunciation of that position was so half-hearted.
So when Lindsey says:
“[Ron Paul’s] sort of an old-style, old-right libertarian candidate” [who] departs from younger libertarians with his opposition to abortion rights and free trade agreements, for example.
I respond: who gives a fuck what you say.