Reason to Ron Paul: Drop Dead

Bill, my favorite line in that dumb-guy hit piece is this: “His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades.”  So a libertarian is evidently supposed to think like this: since the establishment tells us it’s just swell to have a monopoly central bank, and that to think otherwise would place one outside the mainstream (and we can’t have that; surely we don’t want to be outside that glorious continuum from Mitch McConnell to Hillary Clinton), the matter is thus “long decided” and closed for discussion.  The establishment has spoken; the matter is closed.

This, of course, would mean Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, and other free-market economists — that is, the kind we libertarians tend to like — were all stupidheads.  Didn’t they know these issues are “long decided”?  Curse you, David Harsanyi, for not having been born sooner, that you might have urged the crazy men who developed (and won the Nobel Prize for) Austrian business cycle theory to quit wasting their time.  Central banking causes no discoordination after all, the Denver Post columnist would have us believe.  Next time, Dave, it might be better to make an argument.  Some of us may need something more substantial than your ex cathedra pronouncement.

The “isolationism” remark, straight out of traditional commie agitprop, is too stupid to reply to.  I’d point out that Ron Paul is adapting to the present day the traditional classical liberal foreign policy of Richard Cobden, but I suspect Harsanyi’s exhaustive studies have yielded him no acquaintance with Cobden.

Invariably, the comments section to such an article criticizes Ron Paul supporters on the grounds that they unthinkingly support him and cannot brook criticism.  The truth is that we can’t stand idiotic, dumb-guy criticism, from a supposedly libertarian source, that condemns Dr. Paul for holding what are traditional, long-standing libertarian views.

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1:59 pm on February 24, 2010