On Libertarianism

[Annie]

by the editor of The New Individualist:

Libertarianism may well find it's place. If the candidates sounded more like this, the philosophy might become more widespread. There can be found reasons for the middle of both major parties to move in the direction espoused by libertarians, that Ron Paul managed to attract the fringes of both parties along with some of the middle and many ill-informed college age students should be worrisome.

 

[Paulie]

Wow a blog...linking to the same crap you've already been posting about.

If you're going to continue in your obsession with RP, could you at least do us all a favor and post something NEW to discuss?

 

[Paulie]

Oh my god! Here's that vile creton Ron Paul meeting with some black folks at an elderly people's home years ago! They must have had a temporary truce so they could plot together as a team to fight off an even MORE hated group of colored people...the Aqua-Blue people!

 

[Annie]

Here's some 'new' from our friends at Reason. Surprise, surprise a couple of your favorite people make an appearance:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?

Libertarian movement veterans, and a Paul campaign staffer, say it was "paleolibertarian" strategist Lew Rockwell

Julian Sanchez and David Weigel | January 16, 2008

Ron Paul doesn't seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has "no idea" who might have written inflammatory comments such as "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks"—statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings....

Remember back when you said I was 'obsessing about the money?'

...The publishing operation was lucrative. A tax document from June 1993—wrapping up the year in which the Political Report had published the "welfare checks" comment on the L.A. riots—reported an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul & Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul's family and Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country. If Paul didn't know who was writing his newsletters, he knew they were a crucial source of income and a successful tool for building his fundraising base for a political comeback.

The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

Eric Dondero, Paul's estranged former volunteer and personal aide, worked for Paul on and off between 1987 and 2004 (back when he was named "Eric Rittberg"), and since the Iraq war has become one of the congressman's most vociferous and notorious critics. By Dondero's account, Paul's inner circle learned between his congressional stints that "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." Cato Institute President Ed Crane told reason he recalls a conversation from some time in the late 1980s in which Paul claimed that his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001.

The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition....

 

[Paulie]

Kathianne, you seem to be trying to take a back door approach at continuing RP/racism discussions in an inappropriate sub forum.

All the racism-related discussions are being put in "Race Relations" now, remember?

Do you have anything substantive to discuss about Libertarianism, as your thread which is titled "On Libertarianism" would indicate?

 

[Paulie]

And just for your information, I couldn't give 2 shits about Rockwell or Rothbard.

I follow RP because of his message. He could die tomorrow, and I'd be right there to support whoever was the next person to carry that message on.

And the funny thing is, so would probably just about every one of his supporters. It's not about a MAN. It never was.

 

[Paulie]

Rockwell must have snapped this photo just before Ron slit their throats with what must OBVIOUSLY be a knife behind his back in his right hand.

The photo was just a cover to show that it COULDN'T have been Ron, because he's smiling with the coloreds!

Rockwell's a ghost-photographer, too?!

 

[Annie]

Funny, my post had to do more with $$$, you were the one to turn it to race. You're fixation, not mine. My first post was ALL about libertarianism, not RP other than how he perverted for his own gain.

How are all you going to feel if he doesn't try to launch a 3rd party run? Lots of money there...

 

[Paulie]

Funny, my post had to do more with $$$, you were the one to turn it to race. You're fixation, not mine. My first post was ALL about libertarianism, not RP other than how he perverted for his own gain.

My fixation??? You haven't quit about this for 3 weeks! You can't mention the name Ron Paul in here without talking about racism!

You posted more articles about newsletters and ghost writers. It's getting old and boring. You couldn't just keep the racism thing out, or put it where it belongs? Everyone knows about it now. You don't have anything else?

How are all you going to feel if he doesn't try to launch a 3rd party run? Lots of money there...

I'll honestly be a little upset if he doesn't continue this campaign until the election day in one way or another, but I do think that if he runs 3rd party, he won't be able to run for his seat in Congress simultaneously.

I've gone back and forth about which I'd like to see more. Haven't yet came to a conclusion.