Liberty Maven

After yesterday’s big media day I think it is an appropriate time to announce my own “official” endorsement of Bob Barr for President. Considering all of the pro-Barr sentiments made by me over the course of the past several months this will not come as a shock to anyone who reads Liberty Maven regularly.

I lobbied for Bob Barr to get in the race once Ron Paul officially dropped out. I’ve been critical of both Paul and Barr where I felt criticism was due. Clearing away all of the minutiae and focusing on the two all encompassing campaign questions I consider for each candidate, Bob Barr is the last one eliminated.

Those questions are: Do you have a mathematical chance of winning? Do you support individual liberty? The first weeds out the riff-raff and the second usually weeds out the rest. The last candidate to be eliminated wins my vote, therefore I fully and officially endorse Bob Barr for President of the United States.

Bob Barr is not perfect. No candidate is. For my money Harry Browne came pretty close back in 1996 and 2000. But this is 2008 and Barr is the best of the better candidates on liberty. He is better than McCain and Obama on civil liberties, foreign policy, and a whole host of other issues. He is better than Chuck Baldwin because he is not a protectionist on trade. He is better than Ralph Nader because he is not anti-business.

That which makes Bob Barr imperfect for some makes him perfect for others. The fact is that Barr has an anti-libertarian voting record and that eliminates him in the eyes of some. I view his voting record as a scarlet letter. He can’t hide his record, but he can repudiate it and express regret and remorse as he has done.

It is high time my fellow liberty seekers join me in saying the following to Bob Barr:

I forgive you Bob Barr. I believe in redemption. There is no better man to kill the beast than the man who has lived in the beast’s belly. I will vote for you on November 4th and support you for as long as we both fight for maximizing individual liberty and minimizing government control in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.

[NOTE: This is my individual endorsement and may not reflect the views of other authors at Liberty Maven]

Famous and well liked Republican Colin Powell has endorsed liberal Democrat Barack Obama, or do I repeat myself? My “lefty” father was excited and quick to tell me the news yesterday. In return I retorted, “So now that Colin Powell is on your side he can be forgiven for pounding the Iraq war drum to the world five years ago?” Or perhaps I was off base. Maybe this endorsement tells us more about Obama than it does Powell.

There should be no question now about the nature of Obama’s foreign policy. He’s an interventionist. He always was an interventionist, but for some reason he was labeled the “peace” candidate. The only disagreement between McCain and Obama on foreign policy is which far off land gets a visit by the American military first.

In the endorsement Powell called Obama “a transformational” figure. It seems he forgot to put the word “fake” in there. Then again, the truth was never something Colin Powell worried too much about. If he wanted to endorse a truly “transformational” candidate he would have endorsed Ron Paul in the primaries and Bob Barr today. Obama is no more transformational than… well.. John McCain.

Suddenly it becomes a bit more difficult for the Obama camp to attack McCain with their “Bush twin” argument. It wouldn’t shock me to hear McCain use the Powell endorsement to help refute that argument. As in, “My friends, here is a little straight talk for ya, Obama likes to compare me to Bush, but I’m not the one who received the endorsement from Bush’s former Secretary of State! No, my friends, I’m a real maverick”. This tactic by McCain backfires easily if anyone looks at the list of his own endorsements. The McCain camp may not care though. After all McCain actually called himself a “federalist” during the last debate. I waited for the laugh track that never came.

At this point it looks like McCain may be an afterthought come January 20th, 2009. Powell’s endorsement may or may not have something to do with that future. I’ll leave talk of the effect of the endorsement to the pundits.

I view it as just further confirmation that we live in a country ruled by one party with two names.

Vern McKinley, at Cato.org, suggests that all the so called “tools” in the recently passed bailout legislation have implications all liberty seeking free marketeers should be concerned about. He steps through some of the more talked about provisions in the rescue legislation and examines what their implications are in the real world.

…a primary source for depositor fears has been their effort to acquire a number of what they have called “tools” to address the crisis, including the power to make up to $700 billion of asset purchases. The tools that Paulson and Bernanke have sought have had one characteristic in common: a lack of confidence in markets to resolve the imbalances caused by government policy in the financial markets. In overpromising the soothing effects of one tool, Paulson and Bernanke have then moved on to securing the next tool.

McKinley looks at the implications of other tools such as raising the FDIC insurance limit, the allowance for the FDIC to borrow unlimited funds from the Treasury, and Treasury injecting capital into the banks. He concludes with what we’ve learned from the bailout fiasco.

The big lesson here is that making major legislative changes in times of crisis leads to bad policy (recent examples in the financial sector are the Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley). These “tools” are a euphemism for extraordinary powers that would not be considered in a calm market. They are largely preemptive, and aimed at avoiding bank failures.

I couldn’t agree more. Vern McKinley lives in my district and ran against the incumbent big spending Congressman Frank Wolf in the GOP primary earlier this year. McKinley didn’t win, unfortunately. If he were representing me in Congress during the bailout debate I wouldn’t have had to send emails and make phone calls to him pleading to vote against it. I would have already known that his vote would be an emphatic “NO”, unlike my current so called representative.

Read McKinley’s wisdom in its entirety here at Cato.org.

Andrew Davis, on the Libertarian Party HQ website addresses why Barr will not attend the third party debate scheduled for Sunday evening.

…official invitations for the debate just went out this week — mere days before the event is to take place. Given that the proposed event is intended to take place less than 16 days before the election, it is a little absurd to assume that candidates, in the peak of a presidential campaign, have time to drop all pre-scheduled activities and run off to New York for a hastily planned event.

The Barr campaign, which has a very fast paced travel schedule, had already made campaign commitments in other parts of the nation that can’t, and won’t, be dropped for an event that another campaign put together at the last minute without prior coordination.  There is good reason why the Commission on Public Debates puts out their schedule well in advance; it gives the campaigns a chance to put it on their calendar.

Contrast that with the fact the invitations to this hastily conceived event are still in the mail.

All along, the Barr campaign has said it would be willing to debate any third-party candidate if the debate was going to be at the national level. Otherwise, the Barr campaign has a campaign plan and they are going to stick to it.

The Barr campaign blog follows this up with the following:

Please understand that we cannot help the events surrounding the organization of this debate. Bob will continue to do as he has been doing for the last few weeks, visiting battleground states and spreading the message of Liberty.

Looking at the comments to the blog entry from the Barr campaign, It looks like Barr is losing some formerly staunch supporters over this decision. Others are heartened by the decision and view the debate as an opportunity to preach to the choir rather than campaign for new votes.

I can see both sides but I must admit I lean on the side of wanting Barr to participate in the debate. Although this desire could be more selfish than practical because I think Barr could earn some votes by actually campaigning face to face.

This is equivalent in strategy to shunning your base while seeking new votes. That is a balancing act in any campaign, but I think for Barr it is a particularly dangerous strategy when a good portion of his base isn’t already completely devoted to him. In the end he could lose more votes from his brittle base than he gains from courting the undecided.

It’s is pretty sad when the world’s most famous socialist Hugo Chavez starts saying that the leader of the supposed free market U.S. is a leftist. What is more troubling is that his words are not quite that far from the truth.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez mocked George W. Bush as a “comrade” on Wednesday, saying the U.S. president was a hard-line leftist for his government’s intervention of major private banks in the U.S. financial crisis.

Chavez, who calls capitalism an evil and ex-Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor, ridiculed Bush for his plan for the federal government to take equity in American banks despite the U.S. right-wing’s criticism of Venezuelan nationalizations.

“Bush is to the left of me now,” Chavez told an audience of international intellectuals debating the benefits of socialism. “Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks.”

We’re all socialists now, apparently. McCain pays lip service to free markets then votes in the opposite direction. Obama is quite blatantly socialist leaning. Capitalism is breathing its last air.

The American nationalized ice cream truck is coming by your house ringing its anti-liberty bell… ding ding ding… what flavor of socialism would you like today?

For the Ron Paul supporter living in Louisiana or Montana you are somewhat lucky. Ron Paul will be on your ballot on November 4th so you can vote for him. For the rest of us who reject the write in of Ron Paul as truly a wasted effort the decision comes down to two candidates: Bob Barr or Chuck Baldwin. Anyone who reads Liberty Maven regularly knows I’m supporting Bob Barr, but my goal is to make this comparison unbiased. Continue reading to see if I’m successful.

First and foremost, if you believe in true liberty your only choices for President are Bob Barr or Chuck Baldwin. Ralph Nader is not a viable choice. He is far too anti-free market. Cynthia McKinney is also not a realistic choice. She is more socialist-leaning than Obama. I also reject the write in of Ron Paul because doing so is the equivalent of staying home on election day, writing ‘Ron Paul’ on a piece of paper, then throwing it in the trash. Of course, there is also a good argument to be made that voting for Barr or Baldwin will have little effect since neither is going to come close to winning, but unlike a write-in at least their vote totals will be registered no matter how minuscule they end up being.

Now that the choice is narrowed down to our two liberty candidates, which is the better choice? Let’s find out.

Read More »

Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty has put together countless resources for learning about the philosophy of liberty. There are recommended videos, essays, articles, and books all organized by subject matter. The high level subjects are: Economics, Sound Money, Foreign Policy, Constitution, and Civil Liberties.

The materials complement the recommended reading list included at the end of Ron Paul’s best selling book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto“. Many of the reading and viewing assignments are available online for free. Unless you consume books as quickly and easily as “my friends” rolls off of John McCain’s tongue it will take you a lifetime to read everything.

Additionally, I cannot recommend enough Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” series of videos on his website also available for free. While Ron Paul is never mentioned in the “Crash Course” the material is directly related to Ron Paul’s teachings. If you do nothing else, then watch Martenson’s videos. He outlines in very easily digestible pieces how money is created, why we are in the economic situation we are in, and what may be coming in the not too distant future. It is a must for any liberty loving Ron Paul supporter.

The tuition is cheap and the material is too important to overlook. Enroll in Ron Paul University today.

It’s getting lonely out here. With the United States embracing economic socialism from both Republicans and Democrats, the voices for capitalism and free unfettered markets are bouncing around in an echo chamber. Those of us who believe in the America of our founders have faith in only a handful of people to redirect the fear-induced socialist policies back to the freedom of our founding. One such person is Ron Paul, the much media-maligned Republican Congressman and former presidential candidate from Texas.

I say media-maligned in reference to his presidential campaign because in these days of bailouts and increasing central economic planning Ron Paul is a hot media ticket. Lately it seems that every time you turn the television to a national news channel he is there pounding the free market drum. While his words are welcomed they are never acted upon by those who have the power to do so.  Paul introduces his own legislation and it gets ignored. Paul discusses that we are doing the exact wrong things in our economy to prolong the agony rather than shorten its duration. He says we didn’t learn from the Great Depression because we are making the same mistakes today.

I fear it is too late. Too late for a true movement toward liberty. I fear the seeds of socialism have been planted. More and more socialism has become the perceived solution to our troubles. With few exceptions, like Ron Paul, not many seem to believe that socialist and regulatory policies are the reason for our troubles. Why is this misconception so prevalent?

It seems the reason could be that we have a culture of shallowness that seeks short term bandaids rather than long term therapy. We want what we want and we want it now now now. So we accept socialist solutions because over the short term they are just lovely. Unfortunately, over the long term they become unsustainable. Why are we implementing economic policies that helped push the Soviet Union toward collapse? In the end is that what we want for America? Does anyone even consider the Constitution any more?

In 1957, Ayn Rand penned “Atlas Shrugged”. It is full of passages that capture what we liberty lovers are fighting against. One such excerpt captures the essence of my fear about the state of our economy and what lies in our future.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.

We live in interesting times. I hope our worst fears aren’t realized.

When I heard William “BJ” Lawson speak for the first time in person I said to myself, “This is the Ron Paul Republican who can win”. Then I checked out his opponent David Price and immediately thought, “I know Lawson can win.” At first glance, the problem is the heavily Democratic North Carolina district he is in, but if you dig a bit deeper, Lawson is the perfect candidate for a district of this kind. He is not your normal present day Republican. Lawson has the ability to attract those on all sides of the political spectrum much like Ron Paul did during his own campaign.

Below you will discover the Liberty Maven rankings for BJ Lawson on the Paul-O-Meter, where candidates and current lawmakers can be rated on how closely they are in line with Dr. Ron Paul on the issues. To learn about the Paul-O-Meter methodology please see this article. You may also assign your own rankings or request a candidate be added to the system.

Continue reading to see if BJ Lawson truly deserves the moniker “Ron Paul Jr.”

Read More »

You laughed at him. You made fun of him. You called him extreme, a gadfly, a kook, and many other trite terms of marginalization. His only crime was the truth in stark contrast to every calculated, vacuous platitude uttered by his Republican opponents. Now I can’t help but imagine Ron Paul sitting in his easy chair surrounded by gold and silver bullion smiling knowingly saying, “Who’s laughing now, bitches?!”

No, that isn’t Ron Paul’s style, as we learned from the debate where Paul whispered, “Make, fun buddy”, under his breath in reaction to yet another moronic insult emanating from somewhere between Mitt Romney’s sculpted sideburns. Ron Paul is a man deserving of integrity and respect at work in the sea of extreme buffoonery that is Washington DC.

Nothing illustrates such an assertion better than the last few weeks of having to listen to every pundit and politico tell us why we all had to fall in line behind a bailout bill that no one wanted to pass and no one was sure would work.  But the sky was falling and the wolf was around the bend so pass it we must. America, our government didn’t listen to us. We have no representation anymore. The last vestige of capitalism is nearing death. We are on the road to economic slavery.

Read More »