Tag: Ron Paul

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political challengers

Send in the Clones

As scientists spend grant money attempting to bring into modern times the extinct Woolly Mammoth, conscientious citizens should be concerned about a more pressing matter: cloning our few good leaders before they go extinct. Ron Paul in particular.

The mammoth is a hard thing to clone: DNA breaks down over time.

Leadership requires candidates of good character combined with the right ideas.

The ideas are the DNA. Ron Paul’s have been nicely identified by Nassim Taleb as “The Big Four”: opposition to (1) deficits and metastatic government, (2) Federal Reserve flirting with hyperinflation, (3) self-feeding militarism, and (4) bailouts that undermine economic resilience (“what is fragile should break early and not too late”).Ron Paul's Revolution

Such notions have been available to Americans since the Founding.

But folks with the right character?

That’s more difficult, because each of us is embedded in the institutions we grow up in, and accepting those institutions is natural. This isn’t a problem for leadership to maintain the current system. It is, however, a bit of a snag for producing leaders to help greatly alter the system. The rewards for bucking the system are less immediate than for supporting it.

Ron Paul has been running for the presidency largely to promote real, substantial change. His son, Rand Paul, has taken his ideas and added some successful and politic twists.

There are other, younger leaders emerging in the Ron Paul mode. A few are discussed in the current book, Ron Paul’s Revolution, by Brian Doherty.

But consider: Maybe we don’t want to “send in the clones” — maybe you want to take up the mission. Don’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

Or laugh in a friend’s face if he or she indicates interest, a calling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Competition in Currency

Monopoly control of money is at the root of all kinds of evil.

As the Euro faces collapse, and the dollar’s value becomes increasingly unsteady, central bankers the world over worry about what to do next.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Last Thursday I mentioned monetary experimentation, including Ron Paul’s support for F.A. Hayek’s idea of competing currencies. In my Townhall column this weekend, I noted that Rep. Paul has done more than promote the idea “that government policy should allow all currencies to float, favoring none. . . . Last year he introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act, as Hayekian a piece of legislation as you could imagine.”Monopoly Money

Paul’s proposal is not merely a sign of the times, it is a sign of intellectual seriousness — in a politician, no less. In the early 1980s he had introduced a measure to return the United States to the gold standard. But now he is willing to let “the market decide” which monies should circulate.

We may know a lot more about money than we used to, but one of the things we’ve learned is that no one knows for sure how to manage an entire monetary system, the whole kit and kaboodle.

So, just as we don’t need a grocery czar or an “industrial policy” to micromanage either technological production or R&D, centrally managed money is just too hard for any one set of persons . . . to manage.

Competition in money and banking (sans today’s progressivist doctrine of “too big to fail”) would not only work, it would keep politicians from the extremity of irresponsibility.

For yes, today’s politicians rely upon the Federal Reserve. They need to keep the “printing presses” running to supply that special, hidden tax that funds their deficits: inflation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets links

Townhall: The Next Thing in Money

More about Ziggy?

This weekend’s Townhall column takes off on a subject broached here at This Is Common Sense last week. But there’s a lot more to it, so check it out. And come back here if you want a complete, easy-to-access full list of the column’s links:

For further reading, please consider:

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free trade & free markets too much government

Ziggy Stardust Bucks

Josiah Warren Time Store note for Three Hours Labor

When times get tough, the tough . . . switch currencies.

A fascinating report in The Atlantic tells of the upswing in “local currencies.” In the United Kingdom, the Brixton Pound is being floated, engraved on its paper notes the likes of “David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era.” Pegged to the British pound, it serves mainly as a scheme to promote local business and trade, though maybe it’s a tad more than mere boosterism.

Bavarians are also “enthusiastically using the local currency as a protest” — the local currency being the Chiemgauer. And “similar currencies have popped up around the world,” including in Canada and the United States.

The Atlantic story also mentions the idea of a “time bank,” a one-step-up-from-barter method based on labor hours and (in some cases) accounting for a variety of skill levels. Such “systems are in use all over the world . . . though the organizers are careful to make sure that the time is never given a specific value in a hard currency, which would open the door to taxation from governments.”

That caveat shows how barter and labor time exchanges might seem the more “revolutionary,” from, say, an establishment point of view. It’s worth noting that the idea’s greatest early proponent was Josiah Warren, America’s genius utopian experimenter and theoretician of “individual sovereignty.”

Less of a radical, Rep. Ron Paul echoes eminent monetary economist and Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek by promoting the “denationalization of money,” arguing that government policy should allow all currencies to float, getting rid of all taxation on trade amongst currencies as well as repealing all legal tender laws.

For my part, I would greatly enjoy spending a Ziggy Stardust banknote.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political challengers

Ron Paul Switches Gears

The day before the official debut of Brian Doherty’s Ron Paul’s Revolution — the new book on the man, his crusade and his many enthusiastic supporters — Ron Paul slipped his 2012 presidential campaign into neutral:

Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process. We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.

Moving forward, however, we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted.

Ron Paul Revolution
The BBC puts Ron Paul’s delegate count at 104, with frontrunner Mitt Romney 178 short of a lock on the nomination — but that’s at present, before the upcoming primaries. As the BBC concisely summarized Dr. Paul’s campaign, he had some successes in “several contests, in states such as Maine and Nevada,” gaining “some delegates and sometimes a significant portion of the popular vote. But he was viewed by the Republican establishment as a candidate outside party orthodoxy, and he did not manage to win a single primary election.”

Talk to a Ron Paul organizer, and you can hear harrowing tales of how the Republican establishment treated Paul’s supporters as outsiders. Despite such ill treatment, chronicler Brian Doherty compares Ron Paul’s future influence on the party to that of the past influence of Barry Goldwater. “His fans understand that Ron Paul is not just out to win an election.”

Dr. Paul’s near-term influence, though, is less obvious. In his 2008 outing he was shut out, and held his own very successful parallel rally. What he hopes to accomplish at the upcoming nominating convention remains to be seen. He concludes his letter with promise of further elaboration of his campaign’s delegate strategy. But his main thrust, in this letter and elsewhere, has been to build a long-lasting movement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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video

Video: Ron Paul started the Tea Party movement

Brian Doherty, author of a new book on Ron Paul, talks about Ron Paul’s transpartisan political movement:

A very concise and yet broad view of what the congressman from Texas has been up to, what he believes, and his significance in contemporary political debate.