Could everybody just stop and think, please? Rand Paul won applause from basically freedom-loving folks when he was blocked from boarding a flight by the Transportation Security Administration last week in Nashville, after refusing to submit to a full body pat-down. Carl Gibson on Huffington Post [2] points out a salient little irony to the situation: Paul was headed for Washington DC to participate in an anti-choice event, the "March for Life" [3]! So much for personal freedom! This cuts to the heart of the bogus pseudo-libertarianism of Rand and his old man Ron Paul. Gibson astutely writes:
Ron and Rand Paul dislike big government regulation that forbids logging companies from destroying national forests, laws that forbid oil companies from drilling in the habitats of protected wildlife, or statutes that keep coal companies from dumping waste in a community drinking water supply. The small government the Paul family fantasizes about is one small enough to be incapable of regulating the private sector when it intrudes in the lives of private citizens. It's a government so small that any corporate accountability would be left up to the people, in the courtrooms. And anyone suing for pollution of drinking water, deadly prescription drugs, tainted food, unsafe working conditions, wage theft or any other wrongdoing would lose every time against corporate giants in battles of attrition, using lawyers paid for with bottomless profits.
We're glad somebody else gets it. But it is actually much worse than that. Ron and Rand do not merely share the blind spot of right-wing libertarians about oppression by private rather than governmental entities. They aren't even as progressive as real right-wing libertarians on issues like abortion, immigration and basic constitutional rights. Really, they aren't "libertarians" at all! Ron Paul, in a now-viral video clip [4], embraced the Confederate cause and spoke to a neo-Confederate confab before the symbol of slavery, the Confederate battle flag! This casts his notorious opposition to the Civil Rights Act (on the long-discredited grounds of "states' rights") in a very sinister light—as well as his opposition to birthright citizenship, enshrined in the post-Civil War 14th Amendment.
Even the Libertarian Party [5], with its reactionary economic prescriptions, has enough consistent principles to hold basically progressive positions on abortion and immigration. Ron Paul, in contrast, wants to constrict fundamental rights for wide swaths of the American populace—namely, women and undocumented ("illegal") immigrants—and (sickeningly) their native-born children.
We had to call him out on this in our latest YouTube rant. Ron Paul is a dangerous enemy of freedom who has no business calling himself a "libertarian"! He is sullying the proud legacy of the word. Share this with all your friends who are rooting for Ron Paul!
If you support our message, please support us! Even a small donation will help assure that we can continue our work! Thank you...
See our last post on the Ron Paul pathology [6].
Please leave a tip [7] or answer the Exit Poll [8].
