Ron Paul: Progressive Utopian

I have been waiting for this.  Paul Rahe sets his sights on Ron Paul and finds his brand of libertarianism to be less than advertised.  In fact, Dr. Rahe finds Paul to be nothing more than a progressive utopian, which, in his estimation, is even worse than a managerial progressive because unlike Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Paul is simply irresponsible.

Here is Dr. Rahe on Paul's surprising mess of a budget (you would think this would be Paul's strong suit), which cuts the military budget by 40%:

Leave aside the obvious fact that if we cut 40% of the military budget and took that sum from the budget for personnel, weapons procurement, and weapons systems development, we would be inviting the Chinese to assert their hegemony in Asia and the Iranians to assert theirs over the Middle East; we would be leaving the Europeans entirely to their own devices (which is never wise); and we would be laying the groundwork for another world war -- one for which we would be almost entirely unprepared. Leave that small matter aside.

And Paul's plan for reining in entitlement spending?  He has none.  John McCormick at The Weekly Standard has more:

First of all, the entire annual defense budget, including war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, is less than $700 billion--not $1.4 trillion as Paul claims. More important, by 2025 Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt will consume all federal revenues. In other words, we could eliminate all defense spending and all other federal spending, and we'd still be running a deficit in a little over a decade.

So what's Ron Paul's plan to avert the oncoming fiscal catastrophe? He doesn't have one. Paul's "Plan to Restore America" doesn't deal with Medicare, which is on track to be the biggest driver of our debt. And Paul's plan doesn't deal with Social Security. But he does endorse block-granting Medicaid to the states.

Ok, so Paul's budget is confused to say the least.  But what about his laudable consistency to his political principles?

Rahe, in a separate post, peels back to layers of Ron Paul's political philosophy and finds it to be nothing more than an ideology closer akin to Marxism than anything remotely touching on the American Founding.  Dr. Rahe observes that

Human beings have a propensity for turning half-truths into overarching doctrines that purport to explain everything, and the academy is the natural locus for doctrinaire thinking of this sort. In this regard, today’s libertarianism is not unlike the old Marxism. It starts with an insight into the way the world works, and some of its adherents take the part for the whole. The old Marxists were right to think that transformations in the means of production have far-reaching consequences. They erred, however, when they jumped to the conclusion that these developments can be made to explain everything. Today’s libertarians are right when they argue that central planning cannot work, that the free market is a mechanism for collecting and distributing information, and that the pretense to “rational administration” is madness. When they assert that recessions are a natural and welcome consequence of the business cycle and that attempts to interfere with this process have a tendency to backfire and produce severe and prolonged downturns, they are on the mark.

When, however, they extend their theory of the spontaneous emergence of order from the economic sphere to foreign affairs, they make a mistake quite similar to the one that the old Marxists made. I have attended small academic conferences in which I have heard libertarians earnestly argue that we, not the Germans or the Japanese, are at fault for our involvement in World War I and World War II. I found these discussions, as I found my interchanges with the old Marxists, stimulating in the extreme. Those who make these arguments are often quite intelligent. They are also doctrinaire to the point of madness. When you are a hammer, everything that you encounter looks like a nail.

For instance, the typical Paulian-like statements that the US should not have gotten into WWI or WWII and that the Civil War was unnecessary misses the historical context and any type of fact surrounding those major events.  On Paul's foreign policy (he could serve as President Kucinich's foreign policy adviser) in regards to Iran and Iraq:

It is in light of this digression that you can understand Ron Paul’s stance regarding Al Q’aeda and Iran. Our troubles are, he persistently tells us, our own fault. We have provoked these people, and what they have done to us in return is perfectly understandable and, he implies, perhaps even just.

We had troops in Saudi Arabia, says the Congressman, and that is why Al Q’aeda attacked the twin towers and the Pentagon (if, of course, it was not the work of Mossad). Ron Paul conveniently ignores the fact that the troops that we stationed in Saudi Arabia were there at the invitation of the government of that country, and he never mentions the fact that the first attack on the twin towers arranged by Al Q’aeda took place before we had any troops in Saudi Arabia at all. In an alternative universe in which the libertarian isolationists reside, inconvenient truths are resolutely ignored.

Ron Paul wears blinders of a similar sort when he discusses Iran. The truth is that the Khomeini regime has been prosecuting a war against us for more than thirty years. At the outset, when Jimmy Carter was President, the theocrats of Iran seized our embassy and took our diplomats hostage. Later, when Ronald Reagan was President, they arranged for a suicide bomber provided by Hezbollah to take out our embassy in Beirut and a great many of our diplomats. Not long thereafter, they did the same for a marine unit posted elsewhere in Lebanon. Later, they arranged for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and when we were in Iraq, they carried on a covert war in that country against our troops.

In our dealing with Iran, we have been comparatively restrained and circumspect. It is true that, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War, we provided intelligence support to the Iraqis; and when the Iranians tried to shut down the Gulf, we intervened to keep that shipping lane open. But for the most part we have held our fire, mindful that Iran could easily become a quagmire. And we have repeatedly – from the time of Reagan on (remember the Iran-Contra affair?) – made overtures to the mullahs, but never to any avail.

Mr. Paul obviously overlooks anything that would do damage to his political ideology and instead lifts consistency above reason.

I could say more about the now infamous newsletters that went out under Paul's name in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that feature racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and conspiracy mongering, his close association with the conspiratorial Alex Jones who constantly talks about the few ultra rich elites setting up a New World Order by euthanizing the rest of us, his almost open 9/11 Trutherism, his embrace of neo-confederates and open flirtations with secession (why this brand of libertarianism involves a full-throated defense of the Confederacy I will never understand), and his statement to Cato President Ed Crane that "his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001" but I will leave it at that.

To say the obvious:  Mr. Paul is clearly unfit to be the next president.