Okay, I realize I am not saying anything very original here, but I see three main categories, with various sub-categories, of why those nasty newsletters went out under Ron Paul's name.
1. He didn't know about them. This breaks down into two sub-categories.
1A. Ron Paul was the least competent editor of all time. I've seen pdf's of the letters. They aren't exactly slick publications. They are typically about 8 pages. The older ones appear to have been banged out on somebody's typewriter. With improvements in word processing and printers, they look better, but there just isn't that much to them. The research would not have taken much more than leafing through current newspapers (admittedly more work in pre-internet days). Reason, researching the issue, determined that Ron Paul, who was out of Congress and practicing medicine at the time, had a whopping five people working at his office -- his wife, his daughter, a staffer, and a campaign manager who also ran a print company that printed the letters -- and Lew Rockwell.* So one of the five had to have written the letters, and general consensus in libertarian circles is that they sound just like Rockwell. The inflammatory material (not always racist, but always fearmongering, paranoid, and calculated to appeal nut cases) was a regular feature. So we are supposed to believe that over a period of five years or so, he never exercised minimal oversight over a staff of five, never read the letters going out in his name, never heard any rumors about what was in the letters, and never cared to check? Um, and now he wants to be chief executive of the U.S. government? I'm all for shrinking the imperial presidency, but really!
1B. Ron Paul has Waldheimer's disease. Simply put, even if Ron Paul is the world's least competent executive, the excuse that he didn't know just doesn't fly. Non-libertarians can be excused for never having heard of Lew Rockwell, but in libertarian circles he was a Very Important Person. Rockwell was founder of the Mises Institute and the Rockwell-Rothbard Report (now LewRockwell.com He was the one who first advocated the "paleolibartarian" approach. In short, every libertarian knew that Rockwell headed the lunatic fringe of their party. Ron Paul chose to hire him. And besides, there are too many clips from the era of Ron Paul addressing the John Birch Society and spouting nutty conspiracy theories about the United Nations and the Trilateral Commission (though not about race) for any theory that he was duped to pass the laugh test. His only hope is to plead Waldheimer's disease, named in dishonor of Kurt Waldheim, a former Secretary General of the United Nations and President of Austria who "forgot" about several years of service in the Nazi army in Yugoslavia. It can be used to refer to any politician suffering highly selective memory lapses about several embarrassing years of their past.
2. He didn't mean it, he was just telling expedient lies. Okay claims not to know won't fly. Claims that he was lying break three ways.
2A. He was telling politically expedient lies. After all, being anti-other sells better than being anti-state. Or, as George Wallace said, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." Still, despicable as Wallace was, let us at least say one thing in his favor. At least his politically expedient lies were actually politically expedient. They won elections. Paul and Rockwell's lies merely served to isolate them by associating libertarians with "repellent cultural norms."
2B. He was telling financially expedient lies. If you believed that Ron Paul was simply lying to bilk money from the gullible, you could find evidence to support that view. For one thing, he put great emphasis on selling his investment letter. "Trouble is coming, and you must be prepared. Surviving the New Money, the Ron Paul Investment Letter and the Ron Paul Political Report will be your individual survival kit, and if you act now, you can get this $224 value for just $99 -- 55% off!" The donations apparently added up -- to the tune of $940,000 in one year. An estranged staffer reported, "the wilder they got, the more bombastic they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from that period." So it's really hard to dismiss financial gain altogether as a motive.
2C. He was telling lies to build a coalition for the gold standard. At the same time, I don't think bilking the gullible was Ron Paul's sole motive. He may not have believed all those racist, paranoid, conspiratorial things in the letters. But his investment habits say he really did mean what he said about imminent financial collapse -- aside from cash and land, his investments are entirely in gold and silver mines.** In fact, all evidence is that the gold standard is his overwhelming priority. This commentator seeks to explain the newsletters by saying,
1. He didn't know about them. This breaks down into two sub-categories.
1A. Ron Paul was the least competent editor of all time. I've seen pdf's of the letters. They aren't exactly slick publications. They are typically about 8 pages. The older ones appear to have been banged out on somebody's typewriter. With improvements in word processing and printers, they look better, but there just isn't that much to them. The research would not have taken much more than leafing through current newspapers (admittedly more work in pre-internet days). Reason, researching the issue, determined that Ron Paul, who was out of Congress and practicing medicine at the time, had a whopping five people working at his office -- his wife, his daughter, a staffer, and a campaign manager who also ran a print company that printed the letters -- and Lew Rockwell.* So one of the five had to have written the letters, and general consensus in libertarian circles is that they sound just like Rockwell. The inflammatory material (not always racist, but always fearmongering, paranoid, and calculated to appeal nut cases) was a regular feature. So we are supposed to believe that over a period of five years or so, he never exercised minimal oversight over a staff of five, never read the letters going out in his name, never heard any rumors about what was in the letters, and never cared to check? Um, and now he wants to be chief executive of the U.S. government? I'm all for shrinking the imperial presidency, but really!
1B. Ron Paul has Waldheimer's disease. Simply put, even if Ron Paul is the world's least competent executive, the excuse that he didn't know just doesn't fly. Non-libertarians can be excused for never having heard of Lew Rockwell, but in libertarian circles he was a Very Important Person. Rockwell was founder of the Mises Institute and the Rockwell-Rothbard Report (now LewRockwell.com He was the one who first advocated the "paleolibartarian" approach. In short, every libertarian knew that Rockwell headed the lunatic fringe of their party. Ron Paul chose to hire him. And besides, there are too many clips from the era of Ron Paul addressing the John Birch Society and spouting nutty conspiracy theories about the United Nations and the Trilateral Commission (though not about race) for any theory that he was duped to pass the laugh test. His only hope is to plead Waldheimer's disease, named in dishonor of Kurt Waldheim, a former Secretary General of the United Nations and President of Austria who "forgot" about several years of service in the Nazi army in Yugoslavia. It can be used to refer to any politician suffering highly selective memory lapses about several embarrassing years of their past.
2. He didn't mean it, he was just telling expedient lies. Okay claims not to know won't fly. Claims that he was lying break three ways.
2A. He was telling politically expedient lies. After all, being anti-other sells better than being anti-state. Or, as George Wallace said, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." Still, despicable as Wallace was, let us at least say one thing in his favor. At least his politically expedient lies were actually politically expedient. They won elections. Paul and Rockwell's lies merely served to isolate them by associating libertarians with "repellent cultural norms."
2B. He was telling financially expedient lies. If you believed that Ron Paul was simply lying to bilk money from the gullible, you could find evidence to support that view. For one thing, he put great emphasis on selling his investment letter. "Trouble is coming, and you must be prepared. Surviving the New Money, the Ron Paul Investment Letter and the Ron Paul Political Report will be your individual survival kit, and if you act now, you can get this $224 value for just $99 -- 55% off!" The donations apparently added up -- to the tune of $940,000 in one year. An estranged staffer reported, "the wilder they got, the more bombastic they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from that period." So it's really hard to dismiss financial gain altogether as a motive.
2C. He was telling lies to build a coalition for the gold standard. At the same time, I don't think bilking the gullible was Ron Paul's sole motive. He may not have believed all those racist, paranoid, conspiratorial things in the letters. But his investment habits say he really did mean what he said about imminent financial collapse -- aside from cash and land, his investments are entirely in gold and silver mines.** In fact, all evidence is that the gold standard is his overwhelming priority. This commentator seeks to explain the newsletters by saying,
[M]arginal causes attract marginal people. . . . There are two strategies for dealing with this problem. You purge your movement of cranks to preserve credibility and risk alienating a chunk of supporters. Or you let everyone in your movement fly their freak flag and live with the consequences. Ron Paul, being a libertarian, has always done the latter. . . . These newsletters were published before a decade of war that has exhausted many Americans, before the financial crisis, and before the Tea Party. All three made Ron Paul's ideas seem more relevant to our politics. They made anti-government libertarianism seem (to some) like a sensible corrective.But in the 1990s and 1980s, anti-government sentiment was much less mainstream. It seemed contained to the racist right-wing, people who supported militia movements, who obsessed over political correctness, who were suspicious of free-trade deals likeTo which I say, nonesense! Basic distrust of government has always been mainstream in American politics. The 1980's were the time Ronald Reagan loved assuring everyone that government was the problem and not the solution. The 1990's were the time Republicans discovered that the existence of a government made it possible for a Democrat to head it and reacted accordingly. This probably was true, however, with regard to the gold standard. Republicans were doing a lot of things to attack government at the time, but one thing they were not doing was making any attempt to return to the gold standard. Gold buggery was, indeed, a marginal cause, mostly limited to the John Birch Society and other such cranks. And it's pointless to say Paul was simply tolerating such cranks, he was actively courting them (and their money). He may have been trying to build a gold bloc, with a war chest, powerful enough to have actual political influence and believed that the best way to do so was to make it as large as possible by accepting all comers. Of course, the strategy failed. "Repellent cultural norms" and all that. But this is the motive that makes the most sense, at least from my perspective.
NAFTA.
3. He actually meant it. His followers all insist that could never be true. So far as I know, no evidence supports it.
So I am inclined to believe that the newsletters and fund raising letters were an attempt to build a coalition in favor of a gold standard. I am also confident that the gold standard remains Paul's biggest hobbyhorse to this day. And it is the gold standard, even apart from the letters, that make him utterly unacceptable to me as a candidate.
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