Liberty Maven

Ron Paul was interviewed via phone on FOX Business News yesterday. He spoke about capitalism, monetary policy, oil prices, foreign policy, Iran, income taxes, and our costly interventions overseas. Yes, he fit a lot into 5 minutes.

Thanks to George Dewey who sent along this review of Ron Paul’s book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto” from Mark Grattis in the Washington Times.

Most presidential campaign books come at the beginning of the campaign season. This gives even a bad campaign book undeserved relevance. But the increased relevance is generally offset by discernable reductions in candor and specificity, so as not to provide one’s opponent with too many inviting targets.

Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: A Manifesto” defies this convention. Writing at the end of his campaign, and therefore knowing he will not be the next president, Mr. Paul forcefully articulates our bedrock constitutional principles and energetically advances his argument that these principles can restore American greatness for years to come ,if we will only return to them now.

And although Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign is over, this is indeed a manifesto, not a memoir. These are political principles for our future, things Mr. Paul wants us to remember after he has left the rostrum.

Mr. Paul’s central thesis is that we have departed from the principles of our nation’s Founding in ways that systematically make us less free. Consequently, we now have a much larger, more powerful national government, one our Founders would not recognize - or might recognize as an empire doomed to the fate of all previous empires.

Such a thesis could easily become unbearably dark and tedious. But Mr. Paul, a medical doctor, makes his diagnosis in seven concise and lucid chapters that never lose the thread of hope for recovery.

Read the full article here.

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.

Read More »

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.

This was a good appearance by Bob Barr on this morning’s FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace. He reiterated saying he was wrong for voting for the Patriot Act, Iraq War Authorization, etc.. He also answers the recent criticism for not really holding any campaign or fund raising events thus far. The interview lasts about 9 minutes long.

The New York Times published an article about Bob Barr’s campaign and its potential spoiler role in the November election. The piece certainly has a negative slant to it. It suggests that Ron Paul supporters resent Bob Barr’s campaign. Certainly some of them do, but Barr’s official campaign is made up of Ron Paul supporters. The article, naturally doesn’t mention that though.

Some of the money problems might be solved if Mr. Paul’s libertarian supporters coalesce behind Mr. Barr. But Mr. Paul’s followers, many of whom were inspired by his passionate opposition to the war, might not be so quick to transfer their allegiance to a candidate who initially supported it.

Mr. Paul has pointedly declined to endorse his former Congressional colleague. Some of Mr. Paul’s former campaign staff members and other supporters have said privately that they resent Mr. Barr’s efforts to co-opt their constituency. Near the top of their list of complaints is Mr. Barr’s campaign Web site, BobBarr2008.com, which bears a strong resemblance to RonPaul2008.com, complete with bouncy graphics and a money clock at the top of the home page.

Like the Paul campaign, Mr. Barr is trying to build support on the Web. “Meetup, the Facebook, the YouTube,” said Mr. Verney, ticking off the Web sites where the campaign has established itself. “We have more Meetups than Hillary and McCain combined.”

Read the full article at the NYT.

Bob Barr will appear on FOX News Sunday with host Chris Wallace this Sunday, June 29th. The show airs on local FOX affiliates across the country and at 6pm on Sunday evening on the FOX News channel. To find out when it will be on in your area check the schedule here.

With this appearance and the already scheduled ABC “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” interview for July 6th I think it is now officially safe to say Bob Barr is getting more media exposure than any previous Libertarian Party candidate.

I wonder if he’ll be able to resist talking about himself in the third person in these interviews. He hasn’t been too successful in doing so thus far. Sometimes he sounds like Bob Dole did during his campaign in 1996. At least he’s speaking in the language of liberty instead of “neo-conish”.

Bob Barr was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly on his radio show today. The exchange was only a tad confrontational. O’Reilly used his usual tactic of telling his guest what he believes in and then asking a semi-related question so the guest doesn’t have a chance to refute the original charge. They discuss taxes and government spending among other things.

Listen/Download the interview audio here.