But I Thought Ron Paul Was the Candidate of Big Business

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
TomWoods.com

Recently by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: My Interview with The Primal Blueprint's Mark Sisson

All through the 2012 campaign, we had to listen to naive progressives who thought Ron Paul was the obvious choice for big business, since after all he favored competitive markets, lower taxes, etc. Somehow they missed that Dr. Paul opposed all bailouts, opposed all corporate welfare, and wanted to shut down Bailout Inc., the Federal Reserve. For reasons that to this day have not been made clear, this counted for nothing.

Also counting for nothing is the fact that virtually every Wall Street firm you can think of would, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, see the whole world burn down before they would accept a pure free market. They want a system that benefits them.

Here’s Michael Jones, CIO of Riverfront Investment Group, explaining on election eve, as the re-election of Obama is looking increasingly likely, why “the market” will be relieved that no sound-money person like a Ron Paul will be appointed to the Fed. (By “the market” he doesn’t mean the array of voluntary exchanges in society; he means the parasites that need non-market institutions like the Fed in order to survive.)

The one thing you’ve definitively and undeniably taken off the table, is whomever [sic] replaces Bernanke is 2014 will be every bit as committed to monetary accommodation as Bernanke is. So there’s no chance of a Jim Grant, Ron Paul, hard-money advocate at the Federal Reserve at the end of Bernanke’s term and that’s a tremendous reassurance to the market.

If Obama wins, which is looking likely, the fiscal cliff is on the table, hard money is off the table, and net-net, I think the market will say, ‘Well, we never were that scared about the fiscal cliff anyway, and isn’t it going to be great to have Bernanke at the Fed for the foreseeable future.’

(Thanks to Lynette Largent.)

Reprinted with permission from TomWoods.com.

November 12, 2012

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail; visit his website], a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the creator of Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom, a libertarian educational resource. He is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Meltdown (on the financial crisis; read Ron Paul’s foreword) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and most recently Nullification and Rollback.

Copyright © 2012 Thomas Woods

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