In the next installment of our Ron Paul Paul-O-Meter effort to rate the Presidential candidates we hold John McCain to the Ron Paul liberty fire. Previously, we rated Barack Obama. For details about the Paul-O-Meter see the description.
Bob Barr appeared on ABC’s national news show “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” today. There were no glaring Ron Paul style snide comments from George, but Barr held his own, as usual and focused on delivering the message that there truly is a viable alternative to the two party duopoly. If I have one critique is that he jumped into using the third person again a couple times. When he does that he sounds a bit like an infomercial voice over. Still, it was more great exposure to the libertarian party and it’s message. Watch it below.
[This article was written for the new freedom oriented political activist website for candidates and voters: freeople.com, I encourage everyone to register and start participating over there. It really is an excellent site and tool. - Marc]
Defining freedom is simple to do with words, but words forever fall short. Freedom is living your life the way you wish to live it. They are simple words but they do not illustrate the varying degrees involved. They do not account for culture and perception. Freedom to a Cuban is likely different from freedom to an American. H.L. Mencken once stated, “The average man doesn’t want to be free, he wants to be safe.” Judging from the 2008 primary election results, Mencken looks like a genius.
In 1759 Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither…”. Keeping alive the give-and-take battle between freedom and safety alive is essential in a truly free society. Ignoring the argument suggests the importance of one over the other.
Today we rarely hear any politician broach the subject. This is dangerous territory in an age where the Patriot Act, the Protect America Act, and the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Protection Act are being pushed into law. It’s almost as if feeling safe has usurped the Bill of Rights. This is a travesty.
Today we begin rating the Presidential candidates with our rating for Barack Obama. The Paul-O-Meter will give us a total score on 20 criteria. The closer a candidate gets to 100 points the more that candidate is like Ron Paul. For each criteria we will give the score and a short justification for that score. Read the results for Barack Obama below.
Bob Barr spoke with Newsmax’s Ashley Martella about his campaign and several issues in a YouTube video released by Newsmax today. Barr gets in all of his usual liberty minded talking points here. Good stuff.
Bob Barr sat down for a rather lengthy grilling from GQ magazine’s Wil S. Hilton. Hilton approached the interview with an obvious sarcastic bias and attacked Barr with some of his questions. They even argued a bit, but Barr held his own, as usual. Here is a particularly argumentative excerpt:
Why shouldn’t the government interfere in the market and rein in corporations?
Is that the job of the federal government? I would say absolutely not. The government is not there to guarantee that the market is going to operate in a certain way.
Isn’t the government there to do whatever the people want? Isn’t that the whole idea of a democracy?
In a pure democracy, yes. But we don’t have a pure democracy. We have certain principles on which the nation is founded. The basic philosophy—the reason the government was set up the way it is—is to keep the government out of those areas. In our system, it’s not the job of the federal government to do those things. It is the job of the government to ensure free commerce.
Do you actually believe free commerce will cap pollution and keep the water pure and the air clean?
It may or may not.
Don’t you think the public has a right to keep its water clean?
I wouldn’t equate public concern with the appropriate role of government. The public, by and large, would like government to do all sorts of things.
And this is a democracy, and the government should do what they want.
It’s not a democracy. We have certain principles. The government exists to provide very limited functions—for example, free commerce.
The government exists to do whatever people want it to do.
Part of the problem is that we no longer have a truly educated public. The Founding Fathers lived in a very different world. They lived in a world where people understood and cared about the written word. They had a much more educated citizenry.
The reason the “citizenry” was more educated was because the “citizenry” excluded everybody who wasn’t a white male landowner.
Abigail Adams was one of the brightest people around back then.
But she couldn’t vote, and neither could slaves, or anybody who didn’t own land.
But Abigail Adams still influenced public policy through her interchanges with her husband. Part of the problem today is that we don’t have an educated citizenry like that. The citizenry may clamor for the government to do all sorts of things. That does not provide an appropriate basis for the government to do it.
Who else is going to decide what the government should do, if not the citizenry?
We don’t live in a democracy! This was not intended to be a country where the citizenry decides what they want government to do! We have a structure of government that is based on principles, independent of the vagaries of public opinion.
I’m not sure that’s true at all. The citizens can elect representatives to do whatever they want. If the citizens want to take away their own right to free speech, they can do it.
They could.
They can make government come to their doors every morning with a newspaper and donuts if they want.
Well, we’re almost at that point.
And so it goes. One wonders if they would treat Obama and McCain to the same line of opinionated questions, sarcasm, and assumptions. Read the full interview here at GQ.
Who needs a Ron Paul endorsement when you have the Paul-O-Meter?
Everyone knows the perfection of Ron Paul. He is already a living legend. All future candidates are damaged goods simply because they are not Ron Paul. There is only one Ron Paul. So to see how other candidates measure up to his perfection we are introducing the “Paul-O-Meter”.
The Paul-O-Meter ranks candidates on a scale from 0 to 100 depending on how closely they are in agreement with Ron Paul on chosen criteria. Since no candidate can possibly equal Ron Paul, the highest score on the Paul-O-Meter attainable for candidates other than Ron Paul is 99. To simplify the ranking, each candidate will be graded from 1 to 5 on each of the 20 criteria. The 20 criteria are listed below, along with a short description for each.
NEW: Now you can submit your own ratings using our new Paul-O-Meter web polling service. Check it out here.
The Bob Barr campaign blog posted the video from today’s interview by Mark Preston on CNN. Barr continues to get main stream media appearances increasing his reach in spreading the limited government libertarian message. Barr is asked about Ron Paul supporters and Ron Paul himself in this interview.
Here is Bob Barr talking to Jane Hamsher on Blogginheads.tv about the recent FISA debate. I enjoyed the question and answer about McCain and Obama “wanting to keep the power for themselves.” Good job Bob. FISA is a great area where those on the left see eye to eye with the libertarians.
Here is some rhetoric from the past, as in before today. Who said it?
The currently favored instrument of collectivization is the Welfare State. The collectivists have not abandoned their ultimate goal– to subordinate the individual to the State– but their strategy has changed. They have learned that Socialism can be achieved through Welfarism quite as well as through Nationalization. They understand that private property can be confiscated as effectively by taxation as by expropriating it. They understand that the individual can be put at the mercy of the State– not only by making the State his employer– but by divesting him of the means to provide for his personal needs and by giving the State the responsibility of caring for those needs from cradle to grave. Moreover, they have discovered– and here is the critical point– that Welfarism is much more compatible with the political processes of a democratic society. Nationalization ran into popular opposition, but the collectivists feel sure the Welfare State can be erected by the simple expedient of buying votes with promises of “free” hospitalization, “free” retirement pay and so on….
I do not welcome this shift of strategy. Socialism-through-Welfarism poses a far greater danger to freedom than Socialism-through-Nationalization precisely because it is more difficult to combat. The evils of Nationalization are self-evident and immediate. Those of Welfarism are veiled and tend to be postponed.
No it’s not Ron Paul. It was Barry Goldwater from his 1960 classic, “The Conscience Of A Conservative”.
Liberty Maven
In the next installment of our Ron Paul Paul-O-Meter effort to rate the Presidential candidates we hold John McCain to the Ron Paul liberty fire. Previously, we rated Barack Obama. For details about the Paul-O-Meter see the description.
