Monday, November 5, 2012

Ron Paul and Gary Johnson

Ron Paul has refused to endorse Gary Johnson for President, and that refusal is not surprising.  Despite their similar views on many subjects, there are deep-seated differences between the two that make them incompatible.  All their differences, it should be added, favor Johnson and make the decision whether to vote for him more difficult than the decision whether to vote for Paul.

For one thing, as many people have commented, Ron Paul's followers are kind of scary.  They have an almost cult-like devotion to their leader and the gold standard and turn out in droves whenever he is criticized.  During the Republican primary, they were noted for manipulating the process, infiltrating caucuses to push through their candidate despite the wishes of the majority, and other unsettling behavior.  Paul may be a libertarian, but his followers show disturbingly authoritarian tendencies.  When a politician attracts a very authoritarian following, regardless of his nominal ideology, this is strong evidence that his followers see some sort of a kindred spirit.  Johnson shows no such authoritarian followers.  During his governorship of New Mexico, he did start out with a CEO-like tendency to disregard the separation of powers and certain checks and balances.  But he learned and improved with time.  Certainly I see no threat to democratic norms from Johnson.  Paul makes me uneasy.

Next and most obvious -- the newsletters.  Although the newsletters are really just a symptom of what Ron Paul was up to at the time.  He had cast his lot with a faction of the libertarian movement that had decided to move in the direction of right-wing populism. This amounted to seeking an alliance with Pat Buchanan, the John Birch Society, neo-confederates, white supremacists, anti-government militias, vigilantes, Holocaust deniers, and anyone else who would back a gold standard.  The newsletters simply pandered to their worst instincts.  Johnson has no such distasteful baggage.

Nor can the newsletters be dismissed as a not-so-youthful indiscretion.  For one thing, they completely give the lie to Paul's claims that other politicians pander, but he is a fearless truth-teller who is not afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear.  The letters were a shameless act of pandering to some very disturbing people.  Paul’s attempts to disclaim them and deny any association with what went out under his name show that he is as willing to lie as any other politician.  Johnson, by contrast, is remarkably candid in admitting mistakes he made in the past and things he has changed his mind about.*


For another thing, the newsletters reflect a very dangerous psychology.  As wise observer put it, they are not really anti-state, but anti-other masquerading as anti-state.  The newsletters appealed to a wide range of xenophobes – racists, anti-semites, isolationists, and people who simply fear all change.  This is, of course, exactly the same psychology that underlies fears that any practice of Islam in the U.S. is a creeping shariah takeover, or that is terrified of releasing any terrorism suspects, even if proven innocent beyond reasonable doubt, or favors torture of terrorism suspects, just to be on the safe side.  The scapegoats have changed, but not the desire for scapegoats.  And if Ron Paul is the scapegoat seeking type, what is to stop him from seeking some new ones.

Finally, there is at least some evidence that Ron Paul has not left his anti-other past altogether behind.  

This Venn diagram illustrates not only how libertarians defy conventional left-right dichotomies, but how Ron Paul differs from conventional libertarians.  His three main differences from more conventional libertarians are that he opposes abortion, immigration, and NAFTA (and perhaps other free trade agreements), while conventional libertarians (including Johnson) favor them.

His opposition to abortion is the most defensible.  If you believe that life begins at conception (and there is no way to disprove it, after all), then abortion is truly morally indistinguishable from infanticide, and being a libertarian would no more mean condoning abortion than infanticide.  So I think his opposition to abortion does not disqualify Ron Paul from begin a libertarian.  It might also reflect his experiences as an obstetrician, delivering babies and doing his best to save a pregnancy in danger.  But at the very least, it also suggests that Paul is casting his lot with religious conservatives who are not notably libertarian.  (Gary Johnson favors repealing Roe v. Wade and returning the issue of abortion to the states.  But he opposes legislation against abortion before viability).

Opposition to immigration is harder to defend in libertarian terms.  Labor, after all, follows the same free market rules as everything else – it tends to migrate from areas of lower price to areas of higher price, and so to equal out prices over the long run.  And, as in other cases where government tries to block the workings of the free market, immigration restrictions lead to evasions and increasing repressive policies.  Paul wants to "do whatever it takes" to secure our borders, track and deport anyone who overstays a visa, and end birthright citizenship.  None of this sounds very libertarian.  In fact, it sounds like extremely intrusive and meddlesome government.  Once again, this is more anti-other than anti-state.  Johnson, by contrast, favors enlarging and streamlining the work visa system to bring supply and demand more or less in to balance and give people currently here illegally two years to obtain such a visa.  He would allow exclusions of immigrants for health or safety reasons, but not much else.

But then again, very few libertarians would go so far as to allow a total free market in immigration.  I thus find Ron Paul’s opposition to immigration less alarming than his opposition to NAFTA.  Why should that seemingly abstract issue be more alarming than something concrete like abortion or immigration?  Because all mainstream, right-thinking conservatives and libertarians favor free trade.  Gary Johnson, for instance, says that he favors free trade, period, and believes that any currency manipulations and so forth are minor matters compared to the benefits free trade offers.  People on the left may oppose free trade out of concern for saving U.S. jobs, or poor working conditions in Third World countries.  But on the right, opposition to free trade is found only in the made fever swamps that Ron Paul inhabited in the 1980’s and ‘90’s.  The people on the right who oppose NAFTA are ones who oppose any sort of international cooperation at all as a threat to our sovereignty, who think it is a prelude to turning North America into something like the European Union, with the United States annexed to Canada and Mexico and the amero replacing the dollar.  Rand Paul is one who holds such views.  It makes one wonder about his father.

And, of course, Paul is a goldbug and Johnson is not.  Johnson favors tighter monetary policy and may favor ending the Fed, but his real focus is on fiscal policy and balancing the budget.   Reading Johnson’s website, one gets the impression he does not know much about monetary policy, is not much interested in it, and treats it as little more than an adjunct of fiscal policy.  Ron Paul wants a gold standard.   It seems to be his primary obsession.  A gold standard would be even more disastrous economically than Johnson’s fiscal and monetary tightening.  Johnson appears to be a flexible, non-ideological kind of libertarian who is willing to admit when he is wrong and change his mind.   Paul is a rigid ideologue.  Furthermore, although I know of no logical reason that support for the gold standard should correlate strongly with support for the John Birch Society, the Confederacy, Glenn Beck, and other forms of right wing madness.  But as an empirical matter, these views do, in fact, appear to correlate.

All of these are absolute deal breakers for me with Ron Paul.  None of them apply to Johnson.  And besides, Johnson is a likeable sort of guy who can win people over with his sunny personality.  Paul is not.  My only real problem with Johnson is that I think his economic policies would throw us into a major tailspin.  Given that he has not chance of winning, should this be a deal breaker?  That is what I will get to in my third post.

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*Most notably, he was once a strong advocate of capital punishment who even mused aloud about lowering the age of executions to 14!  He has since decided that execution is the ultimate state intrusion on liberty and therefore something libertarians should oppose.

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