Rand Paul (Ron Paul’s son – not named after Ayn as far as I know) just announced his – well, not his candidacy, exactly, but his exploratory committee-hood-ness, on Rachel Maddow’s show.
I took a look at his website to see whether there were any issues where he disagreed significantly with his father, but I didn’t notice any. (But the website covers a fairly narrow range of issues; there’s nothing listed, for example, on drugs, immigration, abortion, or gay rights. I reckon he’s trying to avoid alienating either libertarians or conservatives.) My overall reaction to the website was … well, boredom. Still, I wish him well in his combat with modal Republicans.
I’m 100% sure his position on all four issues you mentioned is that the feds have nothing to say about any of it, which is the correct position.
Well, the federal government, as long as there is one, has to take some stand on whether it will let immigrants across the nation’s borders, or whether it will allow gays to serve in the u.s. military — those are both federal matters.
I’m sure Rand Paul isn’t for completely open borders but I can’t see him or his daddy voting for storm troopers or walls.
I’m trying to imagine why anyone should care about the second issue. You mentioned alienating conservatives and libertarians. Neither should be unhappy with gays being kept out of the military. From my perspective, everyone should be legally barred from being in the military.
I can’t see him or his daddy voting for storm troopers or walls
It’s never been clear to me how Paul planned to enforce his immigration policy.
From my perspective, everyone should be legally barred from being in the military.
a) Okay, but of course that’s not the reason that conservatives oppose gays in the military.
b) If the govt. decreed that only white people should be allowed to vote, or to work for the post office, or to teach in public school, would you think that was fine, since there shouldn’t be voting or govt. post offices or public schools anyway?
c) There’s also been controversy about Paul’s purported opposition to adoption by same-sex couples. Paul’s defenders say he didn’t vote to ban it, he just voted to de-fund it, and libertarians surely don’t favour tax-funded adoptions whether by same-sex couples or not. Paul’s critics say he devoted a special effort to opposing this bill, suggesting he had some reason other than just the usual libertarian on for opposing it. I don’t know enough about the facts of the case to render a judgment. But it does seem to me that as long as adoptions are being tax-funded, making gays eligible for that money could be justified by much the same reasoning as that Paul himself used to justify earmarks. I mean, allowing same-sex couples to adopt doesn’t increase the number of children who need adopting, it just redirects the funds.
Brandon:
Ron Paul already voted for a border wall twice — in 2005 he voted for H.R. 4437 (the Sensenbrenner omnibus anti-immigrant bill, which ultimately failed to become law) and in 2006 he voted for H.R. 6061 (which broke out the border wall provisions of the Sensenbrenner bill in order to get parts of it passed piecemeal; this bill “Directs the Secretary of Homeland Security, within 18 months of enactment of this Act, to take appropriate actions to achieve operational control over U.S. international land and maritime borders, including: (1) systematic border surveillance through more effective use of personnel and technology, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-based sensors, satellites, radar coverage, and cameras; and (2) physical infrastructure enhancements to prevent unlawful border entry and facilitate border access by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, such as additional checkpoints, all weather access roads, and vehicle barriers.”)
As for stormtroopers, I’m not sure what you’re thinking of. Do you imagine that storm-troopers would be something new in immigration policies? In fact, ICE and the Border Patrol already have plenty of stormtroopers in their employ, staging paramilitary raids on homes and workplaces, and maintaining regular armed patrols and “Ihre papiere, bitte” government checkpoints, both on the border itself and on highways well inside the U.S. in the southwestern states. Ron Paul supports the ICE storm-troopers; and if he opposed their paramilitary raids then I haven’t been able to find him saying so anywhere; everything I can find with him talking about immigration has insisted on the need for numerically more and more intensive enforcement. I do know that he supports, and has repeatedly voted for, increasing the number of paramilitary Border Patrol agents on armed patrol and at checkpoints along the border.
As for Rand, well, who knows? But if he votes like his Daddy, then he’ll be voting for a more extensive, better-funded, and more intensely-enforced immigration police state.
See http://aaeblog.com/2007/12/07/to-paul-or-not-to-paul/ for my semi-defense of Ron Paul on immigration. From one of my comments there: “Ron Paul’s position is to end the welfare state and then make legal immigration easy.” There’s more detail towards the bottom.
I am not defending his complete stance, then or now; I’m just saying it’s easy to miss that part of it.
“b) If the govt. decreed that only white people should be allowed to vote, or to work for the post office, or to teach in public school, would you think that was fine, since there shouldn’t be voting or govt. post offices or public schools anyway?”
This isn’t exactly a parallel. There shouldn’t be post offices or public schools, but there is nothing inherently rights-violating about delivering mail or teaching children, just they way they’re funded. Joining the government’s murder brigade is effectively signing up to violate the rights of others.
Roderick, I’m not at all interested in “As long as we have it, it might as well be fair” arguments. No, I’d rather it be even more unfair and objectionable. So as for points ‘a’ and ‘b’, fuggedaboutit.
What does point ‘c’ have to do with gays in the military? If we got the damned state out of the adoption business, that point wouldn’t matter.
Radgeek: I’m not saying there aren’t storm troopers now, but I doubt Paul would vote for increasing them, since they’d have to be paid out of federal moneys. He might favour them at the state level, but that’s a different issue. And there is a libertarian argument for closed borders. I don’t care for it, but Rothbard did.
Mike D.:
This isn’t exactly a parallel. There shouldn’t be post offices or public schools, but there is nothing inherently rights-violating about delivering mail or teaching children, just they way they’re funded. Joining the government’s murder brigade is effectively signing up to violate the rights of others.
That sounds like a double standard to me. When you evaluate mail delivery and education, you focus just on the existence of the service and not how it’s done; but when you evaluate organised armed defense you focus on how it’s done. Shouldn’t the same standard apply to all three? Considered just as services, mail delivery, education, and armed defense are all legitimate. When we focus on how the government does them, the armed defense is done wickedly, but so are the other two; it’s not as though their wrongness is limited to being tax-funded! (Actually the post office isn’t even tax-funded, it reaps monopoly rents instead, but that’s just a quibble.) Government post offices are empowered to snoop through your mail (the extent to which they can do this de facto is of course greater than the extent to which they can de jure), and public schools teach statist propaganda, deaden the mind, strip-search little kids, and force students to attend.
Now I will grant that the bad things the armed forces do are generally much, much worse than the bad things the post office and the public schools do. But I don’t see how that affects the question.
Brandon:
I’m not at all interested in “As long as we have it, it might as well be fair” arguments. No, I’d rather it be even more unfair and objectionable.
Then by that logic you should support the u.s. military invading more countries, since the more it invades, the more unfair and objectionable it is.
Brandon:
Again, Ron Paul has already voted for bills to increase the number of Border Patrol storm-troopers. As he himself has said,
Brandon:
There are some arguments for closed borders which are advanced by people who happen to be libertarians. But I deny that the arguments are libertarian arguments.
Ron Paul’s own favorite arguments on the topics are barefaced appeals to legal positivism, belligerent nationalism, and utilitarian arguments about the allegedly disastrous results of combining welfare statism and freedom of immigration. The kind of Hoppean argument that Rothbard favored is, I think, dead wrong, and obviously so, but it does at least attempt to justify exclusionary immigration policies in terms of individual liberty rights (generally, the right to exclude from either private or common property); the kind of arguments Ron Paul has been pushing, on the other hand, simply stomp all over libertarian principle in the name of desiderata (like uncritical deference to standing law, nationalistic strength-through-unity, sacrificing the moral rights of the minority in the alleged interests of the majority, etc.) which are, if anything, the exact opposite of genuine libertarian goals.
Being unsure as to whether you’re throwing those out there as complete hypotheticals, or as issues on which you hold a strong set of beliefs, I’ll assume the latter (leaving it to you to correct me if I’m wrong), and ask: Why would there be a ‘libertarian’ position on gays in the federal government’s military?
I mean, the position a consistent libertarian takes is to take the military (and everything else) out of the hands of government. But given a federal government with a military that isn’t going away anytime soon, why shouldn’t (from a libertarian — even a left-libertarian — standpoint) the federal government be able to prohibit gays (or women) from joining? I reiterate: obviously the whole issue is muddled because this occurs in the ‘public’ sphere; private defense agencies opting not to hire gays or women would of course be totally fine. But given what is, do you qua left-libertarian take a stand on the issue? If so, what sort of stand and why?
private defense agencies opting not to hire gays or women would of course be totally fine
It wouldn’t be a violation of rights, but I certainly don’t think it would be “totally fine.” So it’s not totally fine when the government does it either.
The interesting question is whether it’s a violation of rights when the govt. does it. Certainly it would be if the government really were what it claims to be, the representative of the people as a whole; in that case it would be wrong for it to discriminate, just as it would be wrong fro me to take on the job of trustee for Jack and Jill and then act to foster only Jill’s interests and not Jack’s.
Of course the govt. isn’t really our representative, and the military as it stands is an unjust institution whether it discriminates or not. Still, it seems to me that when it discriminates it adds further injustice to the original injustice. After all, suppose the govt. monopolised the bakery business. And suppose they further decreed that no Irish could be govt. bakers. Wouldn’t the latter be an additional injustice on top of the first one?
Um. Saying the Republican Party has lost its mojo was not the best way to start the interview. I think that’s a Michael Steele talking point. But other than that, I thought he did very well. He’s the first libertarian I’ve heard clearly articulate the appeal to left and right wingers, young and old members. That was impressive.
Oh, and no way the name ‘Rand’ is a coincidence.
Sure enough, turns out it’s not a coincidence. I’d assumed that Rand was his given name, and I didn’t think Ron Paul would name his son after Rand. But it turns out it’s a nickname the son deliberately chose to invoke the Aynster — at least according to Wikipedia, though it offers no citation.
Saying the Republican Party has lost its mojo was not the best way to start the interview. I think that’s a Michael Steele talking point.
Wouldn’t that be mojizzle?
He’s the first libertarian I’ve heard clearly articulate the appeal to left and right wingers, young and old members.
I like Ruwart better.
Do you have to give yourself an agorist demerit now?
Nope, because her campaign is over. 🙂
He called himself Rand over the years. His father didn’t mind.
Well during Ron Paul’s talk at the Google campus he did state that he had changed his mind on DADT. After talking with some people who had been kicked out for being gay, he reversed his earlier position and came out for allowing gays in the military. I actually found that quite admirable. Unfortunately he got worse on immigration over the years, though he was the only candidate from either party to point out how immigrants are too often scapegoated (small comfort for a bad policy position.) As for Rand Paul, I know very little about him, I just hope he doesn’t try to pander to Right Wing populists. Deep down I think Ron Paul knew better than to play to that group, but a bad campaign staff really failed to recognize that a libertarian message is best not marketed to xenophobes. For all the good that his campaign did for libertarianism (however imperfect it was) it could have done exponentially more.
You also definitely get bonus points for using the phrase “modal republicans”. 🙂