Liberty Maven

Ron Smith, Baltimore’s premier conservative/libertarian talk-show host had an especially poignant commentary regarding Senator Clinton and her recent comments:

But Hillary is a special kind of scary. Take for example what she said the other day while campaigning in Pennsylvania. She was asked what action she would take as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. Let’s forget for the moment what a nonsensical question that is, since Israel has the nuclear bombs and Iran does not, and just focus on what she said in response.

She promised to “obliterate” Iran in such an event. Obliterate is a strong word. In fact it is one of the strongest words available to the English speaking person. What she said was she would see to the destruction of the Iranian people, somewhere between sixty and seventy million human beings, all the mullahs, all their supporters, all their political opponents, all the women, all the children, an entire ancient nation.

I recommend you read the entire article.

For most, “politician” has become a dirty word. Calling someone a “politician” these days has negative connotations. One need not even use the modifier, “typical”, in front of the jab anymore to maintain its full effect. Ron Paul is hardly a politician, but he practices politics. He is the worst example of a politician. Today that is probably the nicest compliment one could give to one who practices politics. On the other end of the spectrum lies Hillary Clinton. She is a politician. She served as an apprentice under probably the greatest politician of recent years: Bill Clinton. That is no compliment.

Like many from the left, Hillary Clinton’s brand of politics panders to emotion. The truth is treated as a secondary unnecessary evil. Her willingness to lie and distort in order to gain favor is quickly becoming legendary. The writing is on the wall though. If she were to become our next President, there seems to be no doubt her legendary chronic lying will equal her husband’s grand lies. I’m not saying she will say the words, “I did not have sex with that woman…”, although that certainly would be interesting. I’m merely saying she comes from the same mold.

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The ideological Ron Paul math can be summed up with the following expression:

Ron Paul(Foreign Policy) + Ron Paul(Economy) = The Solution

Ron Paul’s position on foreign policy is consistent with his position on economics. He preaches non-intervention overseas and the deregulation of markets. His positions are interesting in that they steadfastly refuse to contradict each other. Likewise, He is pro-life and against the death penalty. Many other Republicans contradict their pro-life view by supporting the death penalty.

His is a true non-interventionist position. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have a faux non-interventionist position. They make the colossal mistake of thinking that pulling out of Iraq is enough non-intervention. Ron Paul correctly and consistently points out that Iraq is only part of the entire foreign policy portrait. Obama and Clinton do not preach non-interventionism because they don’t believe in the principle. They will not bring our troops home from Germany or Korea. They advocate repositioning troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. This is hardly any real “change” from George W. Bush. Chances are neither would even follow up on their promise to bring our troops home from Iraq. Certainly, some new excuse to keep troops there can be manufactured when the time comes.

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The buzzword “change” has been tossed about by candidates of both parties, but it has been mostly associated with Barack Obama and the Democrats. In fact it now seems like the Democrats are addicted to change so much that they vote against their own front runner out of habit rather than conviction. Early in the campaign Hillary was the anointed one. They didn’t like that much so Obama had his own messianic rise to the top.

Apparently that too wasn’t good enough for the blue team. With Hillary Clinton’s recent big victories in Texas and Ohio the race for the Democratic nomination changes yet again. Perhaps the voters are a whimsical bunch on the Democratic side. Perhaps some strategic minded Republicans put Hillary over the top in Texas, as some conservative talk show hosts have suggested. Whatever the reason, this most recent swing shows the Democrats may not only have an addiction, but an identity crisis as well.

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Today voters in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island go to the polls. The polls suggest a neck and neck race on the Democratic side. Originally I though Obama would probably win both due to his momentum we keep hearing about. Now he seems to have become the candidate with a bullseye on his back. The front runner backlash has taken him down a few notches. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him win both, but I have a feeling Hillary may eek out a few victories today. It really is too close to say for sure one way or another.

On the Republican side McCain is set to lock up the nomination. If he wins just half of the delegates at stake today he would do so. I’m interested mostly in Ron Paul’s results in Texas and Vermont. Texas because he’s on the ballot twice. We get to see if he can win his own parties primary. He’s up against a neo-conservative warmonger named Chris Peden. Polling suggests Paul will win and win big. We’ll see if that remains true. As for his performance in the Presidential election I’m hoping for double digit percentages in at least 2 of the states tonight. McCain locking up the nomination may help with that since he is now a foregone conclusion.

I wish I was living in Ron Paul’s district at least for today. Why? If I lived there I could vote for him twice. The results tonight should be interesting.

Hillary Clinton announced a “child poverty plan” today. Her plan expands the government nanny state towards socialism. She’s merely playing politics here. It’s a last ditch effort to win votes from Obama. Sure, it’s nice to take care of “the children”, but why does the federal government have to do it?

She says she will pay for it by toughening enforcement to collect taxes currently owed but not paid. Uh-huh. So she’s going to use the IRS to terrorize people in to paying unconstitutional taxes so that the federal government can deliver “free” and “fresh” food to children living in poor areas.

I have a better idea to help with child poverty. Repeal the income tax to free up poor families to make more money to feed their own. Repeal the income tax so that people will be more likely to give their money away to charities and churches that always do a much better job at helping the poor than the federal government.

The federal government can’t even help people properly after a disaster like hurricane Katrina. Instead of putting free market measures in place to encourage charitable giving we get a a dose of Hugo Chavez-like socialism.

At some point we are going to have to change the term “land of the free” to “land of the coerced.”

Read about Hillary’s latest act of socialism here.

With all the talk of groups during this election cycle in the media and by the candidates I found this Op/Ed piece from the Aspen Times intriguing. On any given day, we hear things like “Will Hillary get the hispanic vote?” or “Will McCain take independents from Obama?” All the talk is about people in groups.

While I think the article’s sentiment is dead right, he probably should have used “Angry American” instead of “Angry White Man”. I can’t disagree too much though. It certainly helped the article’s interest level.

Read the piece at the Aspen Times.

Also, read some of the reactions to the piece here.

American voters will have a choice between the lesser of two evils yet again in the Presidential election of 2008.

It is the equivalent of choosing mint chocolate chip over strawberry ice cream. Sure they taste different, but the end result is the same. You will still get fat. Or in the case of the election you will still get evil. Like ice cream, evil comes in many flavors. This year your featured flavors are fascism and socialism.

On the Democratic side you have the choice of two flavors: light vanilla socialism or french vanilla socialism. On the Republican side your only choice is a single scoop of soft serve fascism. Unfortunately, the political reality is that an independent or third party flavor will likely melt away into non-relevance unless enough of us truly want change.

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Nick Bradley on the LewRockwell.com blog today posted some thoughts I found very interesting regarding Obama. In comparing Obama and Hillary I immediately gravitate towards Obama as a lesser evil. His post investigates it much further, and arrives at a similar conclusion.

After reading Koffler’s piece, I decided to look at Obama’s official platform. Looking at it, it appears thoroughly statist, calling for a hike in the payroll tax cap, new pro-union legislation, blocking insurance companies from denying coverage, a home foreclosure bailout fund, cap payday loan interest rates, carbon cap-and-trade, triple the size of AmeriCorps, double foreign aid contributions, and increase the size of the military by 92,000. On the other side of the coin, Obama does offer a few market-friendly programs, such as increased child care and education tax credits (which Paul also supports), exempt payroll taxes from the first $6,500 of earned income, exempt seniors making under $50,000 from income taxes, supports clean coal (most democrats despise hydrocarbon energy production in general), supports carbon sequestration (moreGenocide Intervention Network, which uses private money and nonstate social action to stymie genocide. market-friendly than carbon regulation), limits agricultural subsidies to farms earning under $250,000 a year, will reinstate PAYGO, has pledged to get all troops out of Iraq within 16 months, opposes war with Iran, and supports the

So, is Obama a left-libertarian? No; Obama’s platform is more akin to “Soft Paternalism“, a gentler, less threatening approach to controlling people’s lives (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Libertarian Paternalism).

Read more at LewRockwell.com