P.T. Barnum is supposed to have said “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” In the case of Rich Lowry’s smearing of Ron Paul, Thomas DiLorenzo and LewRockwell.com, I agree with P.T. Better to be noticed and gain attention than to be ignored. Clearly, Paul, DiLorenzo and Rockwell are doing something right to get under Lowry’s skin.
Lowry’s smear is in the tradition of any snide and malevolent remark or accusation. Lowry uses this rhetorical attack because he has no other to use. That is to say, he has no argument. When your conservative intellect cannot come to grips with the arguments of your libertarian opponents, then pronounce them guilty of favoring slavery. Talk about absurd! Libertarians favor slavery because they hate federal power? Lies seldom are more grotesque, because libertarian theory begins with the very opposite idea, namely, the postulate that you own yourself and your body. Is this kind of total misreading of a major libertarian idea the best that Lowry can come up with? If he has this wrong, and he does, why should we listen to anything else he has to say about Lincoln?
Lowry writes of “a species of libertarians — ‘people-owning libertarians,’ as one of my colleagues archly calls them — who apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery.” Totally asinine and totally wrong. I have to inform the analytically-challenged Lowry that federal power and slavery are not necessarily opposites. One can be against both federal power and slavery, when both violate rights and self-ownership. Slavery is not something either that necessarily has to be eliminated by the exercise of federal power or a national power or by a terrible civil war or by gross violations of rights or by destroying a Constitution. Other nations ended slavery without these necessarily happening.
