Avoiding Revolution with Ron Paul and the Libertarians
Revolution is an avoidable disaster if libertarians carefully sift their ideas and promote the best of them. by Random Outlier
(libertarian)
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Hot off the press: "Oil Hits New Record as Investors Flee Falling Dollar."
The AP headline refers to oil near $115 as the American greenback falls below 63 euro-cents for the first time in history.
Carried far enough, this is the stuff revolutions are made of, and revolutions aren't nice. People shoot at your little kids.
If you wanted to play Pandora, you could say it's already started, but your evidence so far would be limited to a few scattered food riots in countries where the greed of oligarchs and their hired politicians exceeds even our domestic venality.
Still, for the first time in 25 years I am accumulating ammunition beyond what's needed to enforce my will on empty beverage cans.
That last occurred when Jimmy Carter was imposing his doddering liberal confusion on the markets, American foreign policy, and the confidence of Americans in America itself.
Carter's otherworldly maladministration of 1979-1983 (and its immediate antecedents) moved Americans to think the unthinkable -- that maybe the American experiment had run its course and nothing lay ahead other than a black hole of disorder and want.
Seriously average citizens were buying canned tuna and Hormel chili by the job lot and storing them against the day when the local supermarket posted its "SOLD OUT" notice and locked the doors.
Survivalist literature became a craze, and normally peaceful souls began reading "Soldier of Fortune."
The magazine "Mother Earth News" announced that the nation wasn't working and suggested a five-acre homestead in the hills, learning to spin cloth in your living room, and the economics of direct barter. It was a very popular magazine.
Writers go beyond truth in calling such times "frightening" or "panicked" or some such. But it is solidly in truth's realm to report that millions of Americans were frightened, and some, in fact, were panicked.
Panic is almost never justified. Fear sometimes is, and at that point in history it was.
The United States had just suffered the Vietnam humiliation, and Carter joyfully accepted the Lyndon Johnson fantasy that we need not actually pay the war bills. Guns and butter. Run the presses.
That created a new glut of purely fiat money which, paradoxically, no one wanted but no one had enough of. Stagflation.
It was all punctuated with famous bullets.
Shot dead were John F. Kennedy in 1963, Robert Kennedy in in 1968. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were targeted, the latter twice. Ronald Reagan was wounded in 1981. Candidate George Wallace was maimed in 1972, and in the same period period civil rights figures Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Medgar Evers were slain.
Blacks rioted, whites reacted, and the national psyche became attuned to terror as large parts of big cities flamed and rang with gunfire.
An especially ugly reaction occurred in the rise of the private war lords, usually styling themselves as militias.
It is one thing to be prudently armed in personal self defense. It is another -- an ugly other -- to hang a swastika in your den and hawk copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on a Skokie street corner, your Pistole 08 snugged down under your tunic. Or to toss your double-barrel into the back of the pickup, next to the oil-soaked cross.
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Only a fool would attribute the close call of one generation back to any singularity -- to economics or to one political leader or even one political party.
Only a greater fool by far would deny that economics played its leading role, with the prime rate at 20 per cent, silver at $50 per ounce, gasoline sometimes unavailable at any price.
No matter what one thinks of Ronald Reagan, he played second fiddle to no one in helping usher in the solution.
Forget for a moment the rising influence of the neocons in the Reagan years. That president grasped, however imperfectly, two key ideas: Transfer payments are not wealth. Money must have a predictable value.
From that follows a parade of good things.
--Busnessmen and consumers can plan based on rational market expectations without being sidetracked into the Alice in Wonderland morass of guessing at what Washington and the central banks will decide money should be worth.
--People get a crash course in learning that you can consume no more than you produce.
--Commodities -- from oil to corn to copper -- trade at their value as commodities to be used rather than as a bulwark against a currency whose actual worth no one knows.
--Speculation, merely one form of honest business, becomes the discipline of judging future supply and demand of needful things -- again, corn and oil, for instance -- rather than a mad panic to predict the value of a rubber-band currency whose stretching and contracting is a function of politicians swaying in the populist winds.
---
Anyone requiring a history lesson in what unstable currencies do to societies is probably not going to even consider Ron Paul's argument for reining in the fiat-money fallacy. Others will recall Rome near her demise and 1920s Germany.
It's too early to predict that in 21st Century America, but it's not too early to give the idea some thought.
Part of the solution is in the libertarian ideal, and it does not precisely require an immediate shift to a gold standard. It does require an immediate confidence-building move in that direction.
A competing currency, as Dr. Paul suggests. A money tied in some way to a workable store of value. Our sainted Walt Thiessen's suggestion of a circulating gold dime has merit.
(Actually, something a little like that has occurred. In the early '80s, gun show crowds were noticing an item selling for, say, $10 "or ten silver dimes.")
No monetary system is immune to fluctuations. Inflation plagued Europe in the 1500s when Spanish gold from the New World hit the streets. But any plan divorcing the dollar from the ambitions of oligarchs, implemented by their political servants, is preferable.
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Meanwhile, I continue to pick up a few boxes of .22s on sale when I can. Pacifist that I am, having no urge to shoot anyone, I still consider it prudent. It's a great inflation hedge for one thing, lead having shot up from an historical half-buck a pound to about three times that today -- and still rising.
For another thing, if I'm wrong in assuming that we'll somehow painfully muddle through, it will make great direct-barter wealth.
"I'll swap you ten rounds for two rabbits and a fat squirrel while we all wait for the Safeways to reopen. "
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Funny article, I have to say that you are nailing it, the fact is that right now with the many sheep that occupy america it isn't surprising that it just takes a couple of history lessons to shut the mouths of those who go against sound money ideals.
I also, wish to point out that you have a good idea, if you've been paying attention to the news there are more gangs collecting copper nowadays than ever before.
I wonder why?
A revolution is a horrible thing and at this point very unnecessary but, only IF and its a big if, things start turning around into solutions, cut the federal budget and start seeing the dollar rise. Or disavow the fed and stop seeing the dollar plummet. Either way these people who think they are so correct in spouting their indoctrinated sermons back and forth on the internet come off as more ignorant all the time. Its hard to fight a battle of the wits when the other side is unarmed. Give them the knowledge they need and let them make their own minds. Sure we need some government but this much is stomach turning. Hope is what we need, hope and proper education, not indoctrination and fear.
Long live the American revolution, no taxation without representation and if congress is my representative, then I vote no confidence. Start working with in your states to solve these problems before they get worse, support candidates that see there is a real need for change. :-) thanks for the time and again thanks for the article.
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2008-04-16 13:16:25
I must take you to task on two points.
First, I hope you don't really think I'm sainted! ;-)
Second, I want to point out that there is an important difference between revolution and rebellion. Revolution is primarily a change in ideas and thinking, while rebellion is primarily change by bullets and bombs. Rebellions are often wrongly called revolutions. The word "revolution" derives from the Latin word revolutio which means "to turn around." Clearly, turning around has nothing directly to do with committing violence against others.
Good article, except for some of the critcisms mentioned above. I doubt any masses today would go so far as to rebel against the status quo. When you look at the degree of western tolerance and the ones actively engaged in protesting human rights violations and such crimes in other coutnries are mainly relegated to their college campuses, it is the youth that will emerge scathed, bitter, and possibly diminished. The government doesn't want a rebellion, not because they can't afford one or are afraid of losing, but because it's easier on them, and they've taken preparations in any event for one.
Knowing this, and forced to take the slow way to change-politics and diplomacy- what ideas do you suggest other than a gold standard will actually make a dent in the public's conscience. Everyone will have different answers and almost wholely reject the few mainstream ones that could present an actual adaptive strategy to the laws placed against third parties.
If Libertarians are to succeed, even libertarianism in general, we must accept ourselves firstly and foremost before being accepted by the mainstream. Libertarians these days can't even embrace a unifying strategy to break into politics, be it through mainstream issues or not. For proof, look no further than at people such as Lloyd Kempson above, asserting that the "loony kooks...are always the ones to speak for us".
There is a firm taboo in the libertarian camp in general about compromise and taking the gradual shift. Furthermore, their predictions always reflect absolute pessimism. If this is truly how we present ourselves, it's no wonder we attract even more "kooks" and thus can never coalesce into a meaningful force.
I won't bore you with any concepts or strategies except to say that appeasement to the masses (not the corporate masters) and concentrating on a specific voting bloc or region should be the priority of the Libertarians. Start proposing your gold standard, for example, on Michigan, or California, where there is surely an appetite for growing change against the state's own budget defecit, that threatens to plunge it into a recession all by itself.
Think about how other third parties have flourished in the past. Flourished as in actually GOT something. What is the last issue you can say the party actually wholly influenced in the present two-party duopoly? The good news is that there is no difference between the parties that existed back then and the Libertarian party today. The laws may change, but those parties never succeeded due those law's absences anyway.
Whereas Obama clicks his silver tongue about hope and unity in America, and healing the divide between red and blues, it is truly the Libertarians who need it most.
Posted By: Random Outlier
Date: 2008-04-17 06:11:19
Walt writes: " First, I hope you don't really think I'm sainted! ;-) "
Yep. Tried to check it out with the Pope at lunch yesterday but the language barrier intruded. We no capish one another too good. But who needs him? You're a publisher/editor dealing with writers which, ipso facto, is saintly,
Bill Bryson in "Made in America" has a good take on "revolution" as a legitimate term for violent uprising. He credits Paine for helping devlop that sense of the word.
Tell me, what are the planks of the libertarian platform? Whatever they have been is irrelevant when you consider what major changes the two main party platforms have undergone in the last few decades. What we need now is a party that believes in and works for small government, constitutionalism, rule of law and non-internationalism. Freedom is the key element. We need a party now that won't take it away from us. The democrats and replublicans have been gradually doing that for decades, through trade agreements and regional military alliances. Both of these were repeatedly and strongly warned against by our founding fathers. They are leading us to giving up our nation's soveriegnty to the United Nations.
Ron Paul believes in these principals of freedom. He needs a party to be on the ballot in some states in November. I'd like to vote for him even if just to send a message that it is time for a freedom loving party to run the federal government. A real revolution would be when the masses start voting intelligently for the good of the country. Too many vote emotionally because of name recognition, speach delivery, race, incumbency, anything but issues and voting records.
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