Ron Paul: Background to the News Letters

OK, the story behind the Ron Paul and the newsletters is by now old news to anyone who has been following Ron Paul and the newsletters, but I want to go over it anyhow by way of background.

By way of background, libertarians are anything but unitary; they are split up into numerous factions. (David Friedman, son of Milton, is said to have said that there might be two libertarians who agree with each other, but he wasn’t one of them). As a non-libertarian myself, I am not familiar with all their ins and outs, but they roughly group into two major factions – mainstream libertarians (or, as their opponents sneer, Washington libertarians) and the von Mises Institute libertarians.

Mainstream libertarians regard our current government and institutions as not what a libertarian would ideally have chosen, but unlikely to go away anytime soon. Mainstream libertarians therefore seek to reform, rather than abolish, our current system. Von Mises Institute libertarians are not so constrained. Mainstream libertarians range from mainstream individuals who are economically conservative and socially liberal and would prefer a home in one of the two parties to people who favor quite a radical overhaul and diminution of our government. Members (living and dead) include people associated with the Cato Institute, people associated with Reason Magazine, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economists, the Koch brothers, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, and many others I have neglected to mention.

Lew Rockwell
The von Mises Institute, founded by devotees of Austrian School economics, also tends to attract John Birch Society conspiracists, extreme isolationists (as in opposing U.S. participation in WWII), xenophobes (to the point of opposing free trade agreements) and neo-Confederates, with a smattering of white supremacists, Patriot militias and other such cranks. Its most prominent members have been Lew Rockwell, the late Murray N. Rothbard – and Ron Paul. * If there were a single defining issue that separates mainstream libertarians from the von Mises crowd, it would be Austrian economics, particularly the gold standard.** Mainstream libertarians accept fiat money, central banks, fractional reserve banking, and the modern finance system, not merely as inescapable evils, but necessary in any modern economy. The von Mises crowd wants to abolish fiat money and central banks in favor of a gold standard.

Why should support for a gold standard correlate with support for the Confederacy, secession, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and bigotry? No reason, so far as I can tell, but there it is. One possible explanation is that the John Birch Society favors a gold standard, so paranoid Birchers tended to flock to and other gold standard group. Another is that some people just tend to support crank theories, and if they’ll support one, why not another.

The official break apparently took place in January, 1990, when Rockwell submitted an article to Liberty Magazine advocating "paleolibertarianism." The article laments that libertarians remain a marginalized movement, far outside the mainstream and attributes this to their "Woodstockian flavor" and rejection of accepted cultural norms. Libertarians should not oppose authority, he argues, but only the authority of the state. Hence he argues that libertarians should uphold the authority of family, church, employer and community (though not, of course, unions) because, not being governments, these are inherently non-coercive. Christianity should be upheld as the basis of all libertarian values. Medicare, Social Security and public schools should be attacked as threats to the authority of the family. Degeneracy in culture and the arts should be opposed, as should any government action on behalf of racial or ethnic equality. Environmentalism should be opposed as anti-human, animals, plants and nature in general dismissed as of no moral worth. But the state is not the only threat to liberty. Private criminal actors are also such a threat. He therefore appears to defend vigilantism and even the Mafia as effective at crime fighting. He ends with the clarion call, warning that "If the American people continue to connect libertarianism with repellent cultural norms, we will fail."

Taken by itself, it is hard to know what to make of this. Certainly libertarians (Ayn Rand, say) who equate freedom with atomization are mistaken; people really do need the structure, protection, and guidance of family, church, employment and community. But anyone who thinks none of these institutions can oppress simply because they are not governments is sorely mistaken. Crime is a threat to freedom and fighting it is government's most essential core function. Crime rates were much higher at the time this was written, and many black youth had embraced a sort of cult of nihilistic violence worship as black authenticity. But then again, we also have little niceties called due process of law imposed on government precisely because government is dangerous. And vigilantes are no less dangerous simply because they are not government. And it is hard to tell whether Rockwell is condemning merely the excesses of environmentalism (an easy target) or denying that any environmental concerns were legitimate. So it is not easy simply by reading the article to tell what Rockwell is getting at.

What he had in mind soon became apparent in Rockwell and Rothbard's writings. They worked constantly to stoke fears of black crime, and to encourage vigilante response. If they opposed all government services, they were all for stepping up its essential core functions of hurting and punishing people who are not like us.

"Cops must be unleashed," Rothbard wrote, "and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error." While they're at it, they should "clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?"

Rockwell, in turn applauded the Rodney King beating, regretted the decline in police brutality, and only thought it unfortunate that the police were caught. He also supported Pat Buchanan for President, eagerly looking forward to the day when the only alternative was David Duke.

Lew Rockwell worked for Ron Paul at this time and is widely understood in libertarian circles to have been the real author of the newsletters.*** They took the same nasty tone, warning of a coming race war, calling black people "animals," urging readers to stockpile arms, applauding the anti-government militia movement, and so forth.

Links to an extended series of such letters are here and here. The contents as well as the dates are significant. These were not just a handful of stray remarks. The nastiness continued quite consistently roughly from 1989 to 1993, with occasional stray articles for several more years.

Rockwell's words proved more prophetic than he could have imagined. As long as the American people associated libertarians with "repellent cultural norms," they did, indeed fail.

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*Where does Ayn Rand, probably the most notorious of American libertarians, fit in this taxonomy? Well, it is my understanding she died before the split, so we will never know.
**Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, was probably the best-known Austrian economist in the U.S., but appears to have belonged to the mainstream faction and believes there might sometimes be some legitimate role for government services.
***People outside libertarian circles don't know Rockwell from Rothbard and assume that either could have written the letters. But given that Rockwell worked for Paul and Rothbard didn't, it seems a good bet that it was Rockwell.