Ron Paul & the Administrative State

Mr. Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost critiques Ron Paul’s libertarian message as adolescent and not even worth engaging. Joe essentially assumes that the modern administrative state is here to stay no matter what, and to seek to dismantle it in any way is lunacy.

Matt Robison of New Liberty Creation gives an excellent response here. Here’s my response:

Dear Mr. Carter,
In 1980, Justice Rehnquist cited John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government in his concerns about OSHA as an administrative agency:

“the power of the legislative, being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transger authority of making laws and place it in other hands.”

This principle of nondelegation is one which is enumerated in the Constitution and one fervently supported by Ron Paul. Only twice was this principle applied by the Supreme Court, which found New Deal interventions to be unconstitutional. FDR’s court packing took care of such a situation.

Which leads to my question, have conservatives, libertarians, rightwingers, conceded that the New Dealers were correct? So conservatives are now saying the leftists were right about the monstrous Dept of Education? Is FEMA nannying during a crisis an appropriate national response as opposed to self help, community, church and charitable involvement?

Whatever happen to the notions of devolving power back to the states, local communities, and the people? Doesn’t sound utopian to me. Centralizing is Utopian, not decentralizing. That’s all Ron Paul is seeking. It was only 10 years ago under the Clinton regime that conservatives and the right used to speak about these things that Ron Paul does now.

The impetus behind all the administrative agencies and international warmaking you defend, have their roots in the intellectual left. Ron Paul has on his intellectual side Washington (nonintervention), Jefferson, Daniel Webster (anti-draft), the Tafts (nonintervention, gold standard), Eisenhower (contra military industrial complex), Goldwater (contra-administrative state), and so on. All you defend comes from Wilson (WWI, income tax), William Jennings Bryant (inflationism) , FDR (WWII, New Deal), LBJ (Vietnam, Great Society) and so on. Could this be why you are afraid to engage Paul’s arguments? You don’t want it to be shown that the ideas you defend are leftist utopianism?

CK

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12:15 pm on September 15, 2007