Tag Archive for congress at Zeal For Truth

Tag Archive for 'congress'

Why Ron Paul Won in 2008

Published by Colin June 5, 2008 in Essays, Politics and Current Events. 40 Comments

With a headline like this, it must be first mentioned that this is not a paranoid conspiratorial piece on how delegates were STOLEN (all caps), votes weren’t counted or the major media somehow sabotaged the Ron Paul campaign. Rather, it is important to take a realistic look at the goals that Ron Paul’s campaign set out to accomplish, and examine how he fared.

First of all, did Ron Paul actually enter this election to win? Before we start getting our competitive juices flowing, just think about what Ron Paul stands for and what a realistic assessment of this kind of “victory” would have meant. He would have gone to the Oval Office with a congress that absolutely hated and loathed him, departments that feared him and would fight him as though their jobs were at stake (which they would be) and a public (after fickle popular support had waned) which was bewildered with the kind of radical policies and actions that were coming from the president. A Ron Paul presidency may have destroyed the best fruits of his candidacy.

Ron Paul’s campaign has always been a bottom-up phenomenon. Secondly, it is a more purely philosophical and ideological agenda - rather than a pragmatic political one. While many have criticized that this is a bad thing - is it not more beneficial in the long-term to sacrifice an election in order to generate hundreds of thousands of individual awakenings to liberty?

Rather than being humble, Paul was being very honest when he said countless times that the campaign wasn’t about him, but about the people who supported him. Paul’s campaign jarred the intellectually lazy and cynical over a few months (which may have been all they needed), and made them take a moment to consider what freedom, consitutionalism and liberty really mean. He showed us what a free society should look like.

This is key, because rather than end up in a politically neutered position of central power, Ron Paul has lit the spark of changed hearts and minds. And for those that have not changed, especially many conservatives, they have had to reconsider what kind of GOP they now support. Paul’s campaign was in the spotlight for enough time to act as a mirror against the new GOP - and show conservatives just how long it’s been since they took a good look at themselves - many of them no longer recognizing their own faces.

Ron Paul’s expectations have been wildly exceeded by his campaign. For the first time in decades, there is an active block of people who are learning about the evils of central banking, empire-building and welfarism. These aren’t the crazies and kooks who were in the cracks of society, burying guns in Idaho - these are regular folks, who work regular jobs and have become evangelical about the message of freedom.

This movement, which has been scattered and divided across the spectrum: libertarians, constitutionalists, republicans, democrats, independents, anarchists and even some former socialists have been united under Paul’s big tent platform. And while it may be easy to ridicule the conspiracy theorists, it is a testimony to the movement that they now join with college professors, intellectuals and businessmen. Or the atheists, homosexual activists and objectivists now aligning with radical Christians and New Agers. These people now realize that they have more in common than they once thought - and while disagreements remain, there is now more than a undefined dissatisfaction with what has happened in America, but a visible way out.

John McCain or Barack Obama will go to the White House in 2008. But their policies, which favour a continuation of America’s slow decline into the also-rans of history, will prove Ron Paul right again. People like BJ Lawson, Murray Sabrin and Carl Bunce are setting themselves up as future advocates. Many of these would have never thought to seek political office, but have been inspired by the optimism and hope that Ron Paul exampled.

Ron Paul won in 2008, by taking the exact opposite approach of most politicians. Instead of coalition building, compromising, pandering and standing for nothing and everything at the same time, Paul explicitly denounced the problems we have created and boldly proclaimed the solutions found in freedom and liberty. Ron Paul has mobilized many in the coming generation to build a better future. This long-term investment may not have resulted in an immediate gratification, but over time, compounded with interest, this movement may very well pay off.

Ron Paul Republican Destroys Neo-Con Rival

Published by Colin May 7, 2008 in Politics and Current Events. 29 Comments

Yesterday we talked a little about B.J. Lawson, a 33-year old with no political experience, running for congress in North Carolina. Last night, Lawson destroyed his opponent with over 70% of the vote. The key is, that Lawson did it primarily on his own merits, without the help of many Ron Paul supporters.

Ron Paul pulled down a little over 7% with 37,392 votes statewide. Lawson received 70% of the vote with a total of 24,410 in just his district. Take Durham County, for example, where Ron Paul received 690 votes but Lawson pulled in 4,501. That means a lot of John McCain, Mike Huckabee or “None of the Above” supporters went with Lawson over the toe-the-line Republican challenger Augustus Cho.

This results in an interesting analysis: while republicans do not like Ron Paul, they do like his message. Obviously, Lawson (as we mentioned yesterday) has a slightly less-aggressive tone than Paul, but his philosophical arguments remain almost identical. Cho (who is also a presbyterian minister) was a bastion of neo-con, neo-fascist philosophy - he sounded exactly like a mix between Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson (debate: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) - two of the candidates beloved by more traditional republicans.

The next big test of course, is what a more conservative, constitutional and philosophically consistent republican will do against a democrat - especially an incumbent like David Price. Cho declared of his opponent:

It’s going to take a true republican to beat David Price. Not a libertarian closet-republican… whose essentially going to divide up our party. If you support Ron Paul, then you know what? You need to support my young primary opponent because he’s a Ron Paul libertarian: 100%. If you go to his webpage, everything he stands for is right there. I call him Ron Paul Jr., because that’s what he is.

He’s not going to beat David Price. When David price looks at this guy, he’s going to look at him and spit him out.

While it is clear that Lawson has an uphill battle, it is just as clear that Ron Paul’s message can win within the republican party. In fact, Ron Paul’s message may be the only thing that can save the GOP in congress - which is looking like it’s going to get obliterated this November.

Ron Paul’s Republicans

Published by Colin May 6, 2008 in Current Events. 25 Comments

Ron Paul has a key primary today in North Carolina, and it is not the presidential primary. Paul has been spending the last four months or so of his campaign to support “pro-liberty” candidates for federal, state and local offices. One of them, B.J. Lawson, is going to see if he can get out of the republican primary.

Lawson seems to hold positions similar to Paul - which is much of the GOP platform (albeit more strictly adhered to and interpreted) as well as an opposition to the current interventionism of the Bush Administration. From his website:

National security is critical, and we need a strong national defense. We also need to stand in support of our troops who answer their country’s call to duty, both when they are deployed and when they return as veterans.

As your Congressman, I will insist that we use deadly force in self-defense, and that we only go to war with a Congressional Declaration of War as specified in Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. I will resist any attempts to declare preemptive war . As any sheriff knows, “If you start a fight, you lose your rights [to self defense]”.

I will work to keep our nation secure with an economic offense and strong military defense, instead of an economic defense and military offense…

With respect to the Middle East, we can, and must, be a force for stability in the region. We cannot rely on unilateral, preemptive military force to bring “democracy” to unstable countries. Furthermore, democracy shouldn’t even be the goal. Democracy is simply tyranny of the majority. Instead, countries need to be encouraged to build representative governments that protect individuals with the rule of law.

This is a key difference in that Lawson supports the conservative “constitutional war” view rather than the libertarian “anti-war” view. I would suggest that Ron Paul is more the latter, while many of the Ron Paul republicans are somewhere between.

Lawson also takes a more moderate position than Paul on the Federal Reserve:

Constitutional money is gold and silver, not a debt-backed paper currency. There’s no need to disrupt the current system, however, and we don’t need to “fix” our existing paper dollars to some amount of gold or silver. We just need to give those paper dollars some honest competition by again allowing gold and silver currency in addition to Federal Reserve Notes.

Paul has advocated this policy in debates but he has also been publicly supportive of Austrian economics and the abolition of the Fed. Lawson espouses a more careful tone.

Candidates like BJ Lawson and the other Ron Paul republicans, indicate that Paul’s candidacy has awakened a long dormant section of the republican party - a segment that wants to advocate conservatism by conservative means - rather than the current method of conservatism by statist means.

Immigration is not the Problem: American Policy Is

Published by Colin June 8, 2007 in General and Current Events. 15 Comments

Cannock coal mines similar to those my father worked in.

I am a first generation american - my father came here in the 1970’s from the state-owned coal mines and military imperialism of the United Kingdom in Ireland. In England he lived in a government housing project, worked in a government coal mine and joined the military to participate in peacekeeping in Northern Ireland during the bloodiest years in Northern Ireland’s modern history. Those were his options. The military took him to South America in the mid seventies where he served out his time.

He ran into some Texans in Belize who picked him up and drove him to Harrisburg, Oregon. There he met my mother and decided to marry her and was promptly deported - barely managing to get a visa. He started his life with her in a spare room working a temporary job in a local manufacturing facility. Now, though he still retains his British citizenship, he is Worldwide Director of Quality for a large manufacturing outfit based in central Los Angeles owned by an Iranian and staffed by pacific islanders and Mexicans.

My father is clearly not part of the problem - he has come over to work for himself and what he holds dear. He has done this in the likeness of the immigrants in the 19th to mid-20th century - gambling with all he has to make a better life for himself.

But some of today’s immigrant are different. They come to the United States with no intention of staying and rather than work for themselves, they quickly seek to gain access to America’s vast welfare net. They have children while in this country to get them taken care of by the state as well.

It is, of course, perfectly correct to place the blame for these actions on the immigrants that are doing this. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves a tough question - is there anything different about modern America that is contributing to this? Surely there are still hardworking immigrants; but why aren’t we getting more of them?

America has set itself up for the current immigration problem over the past eighty years. Indeed, immigration itself is not actually even the issue here. Yes, today’s immigration problems are actually the unintended consequences of domestic policy decisions originally intended to help Americans.

There was absolutely no attraction in 19th century America for the kind of immigrants that are now entering the country in droves. Immigrants faced thsi reality: work hard - or suffer. There was no safety net, no free health care, no free education, no free retirement and no legacy of amnesty for law-breakers. However today’s America represents an attractive entitlement prize for anyone who can just get here long enough to have a child or get bailed out by amnesty bills.

Thus, the immigration problem was not caused by lack of a fence, lack of border security or lack of some other kind of further government involvement - the immigration problem has been caused by government and it most definitely will not be solved by government. We are merely reaping what we have sewn. The answer then is not more intervention - but less.

We have to take a critical and honest look at the consequences of our welfare state expansion if we are going to fix this. We have to be willing to allow America to again be a land of opportunity (and risk) for any who would seek to come and gamble for a better life.

The reality is that the American dream is a dream of immigrants, like my father - and it takes immigrants to rejuvenate that dream in every generation. As it stands now, we are attracting people who dream of a handout and materialistic, lazy comfort. And the dream will die with this generation unless the cogs of American capitalism are allowed to once again be turned by citizens and immigrants working together - for themselves.

Amnesty is beaten, but not dead

Published by Chang He June 8, 2007 in Politics. 14 Comments

As I write these words, the much vaunted “immigration reform” bill is dying in the Senate. In its relatively short life, the bill dragged down the now Democratic congress’s approval rating to pre-election levels, alienated most of the President’s remaining supporters, and changed the familiar right-left division to a commoner-elite one. The commoners have won this battle, and it remains to be seen whether we can win the war. To do so, a clear, consistent, and supportable set of goals will need to be promoted.

First, existing immigration laws need to be enforced. America can do anything it sets it mind to, and if that means deporting 12 million people whose presence costs our country trillions a year, who presence adds little or nothing to our society, then we can do that too. They are criminals, and while they need to be treated as people, they can firmly and kindly be sent home. Criminals need to be punished, and granting amnesty now, with a promise of stricter enforcement later, is caviling at best and deceptive at worst. We must hold our government to its responsibilities, including upholding the rule of law and protecting our country from invasion, both military and civilian.

Second, a firm idea of what citizenship means must be promulgated. We must begin to understand citizenship and its benefits as a great privilege, and not hand out this privilege cheaply. It is not helpful when Senator Harry Reid of Nevada says on the Senate floor that the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants are “Americans.” They are not. They are foreign lawbreakers, and are an economic drain on our society. In order to preserve America, we citizens cannot allow her to bankrupted, especially not for the sake of non-citizen criminals. There are many who argue that it is unfair to send illegal immigrants home when they are better off here. But that is precisely the point. They are better off here because this is America, and if we want to preserve what America is, we must enforce her laws, and we must not allow the breaking of them to be rewarded.

Third, constructive and effective immigration reform needs to be passed. A vague notion of America being a “land of opportunity” with open borders still exists in the minds of many Americans. This idea, like most ideals, does not work in reality. America was able to be a land of opportunity in the past, when higher levels of education were not as necessary as work ethic to success. In a modern world, education is necessary to succeed, and immigration should be restricted to those individuals able to contribute in meaningful ways to our society. Confrontation with the Mexican government must be forced. For years they have eased their social tension by exporting their lower classes across our border, and we must stop this flow from both sides. We must enforce our laws regarding deportation and we need to encourage responsibility in the Mexican government, refusing to allow them to force us to pay for their problems and their citizens. Opponents of the war in Iraq often point to its cost as a significant mark against it, with various estimates between $400-700 billion floated. This amnesty plan would cost at least four times that amount. And we must end birthright citizenship for the children of illegals. This legal loophole only encourages lawbreaking, and should be replaced by a model rewarding the legal naturalization process by only allowing the children of those in the country legally to become citizens.

S. 1348 was bad for America, and its defeat is a positive good. But we as a populace cannot rest now that the government is truly reacting to our desires. We must press on from here in a direction that benefits us all, and preserves our country.

EDIT: The original version of this post neglected the hyperlink in the second paragraph.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Sep
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Zeal For Truth