Great Quotes: Ludwig Von Mises

The aforementioned individual was a widely acclaimed economist and political philsopher of his time. Born in 1881 in what is now Liviv, Ukraine, he became a great leader in the classical liberal movement and in advancing the Austrian School of Economic though (libertarianism and extremely laissez faire economics, respectively). Justifying his opinion that government ought not to be in the business of protecting people from their own foolishness, he opined in his great book Human Action, as follows:
Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous and habit forming drugs. But once a principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music?

The passage struck a chord with for the same reason it did for the great skeptic and libertarian Michael Shermer, who said of the passage that it  “…resonated with me because his analogue from the physical to the ideological is so effective in conveying the central message of freedom and liberty[.]”

Liberty is not unlimited…

Liberty was a word I heard often as I researched the candidacy of Ron Paul this past year. I heard it not only from him, but also from his supporters–on the streets, at rallies, on blogs, and on youtube. “We must defend liberty”; “Liberty…its the most important thing”. Or “The liberty to do whatever we want as long as we don’t infringe on the rights of others”.

It sounded great. And to a substantial extent, I think the cause of liberty is a legitimate one. People should be able to act freely. We should have a free society. But a nagging question kept coming to mind: Is Liberty really the transcendental value that subsumes all else? Should liberty theoretically be defended at all costs? I’m still trying to decide where the proper balance is. As I think on these things, I find one passage written by Rousas D. Rushdooney very captivating. He writes in 1984, in his book titled “Law and Liberty” that:

“When we are told that there can be no laws against _____________[insert any perceived social ill, like pornography, drugs, adultery] without endangering liberty, we must challenge their claim to be interested in liberty. There is no area where freedom is unlimited. Take freedom of speech, for example: no man has the right to slander others, nor do our laws allow him the liberty to do so at will. Neither do we allow any man the liberty to shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre when there is no fire. Freedom of speech does not give any man the right to walk into the floor of Congress and speak his mind. His liberty is limited no only as to where he can say it but also as to what he says. This does not mean that I lack freedom to speak my mind, if it be done decently and in order.

Freedom of press means the liberty to publish, but it does not mean liberty to publish libelous statements, nor does it mean that any man can demand that his freedom of press be subsidized to enable him to publish. A man has the liberty to publish if he provides the cost of publication or interests a publisher in doing so. Moreover, the contents of what is published are also subject to limitations. Libel has already been cited. No man has the right or liberty to publish materials violating the privacy of others. There are all kinds of legitimate and necessary restrictions on every kind of liberty a man has, and these are necessary for the maintenance of liberty.”

As mentioned above, I think the cause for more liberty and less government is for the most part a legitimate one. I am an ardent supporter of almost everyone of Ron Paul’s ideals. The question at issue is: “How far should that liberty be extended and how do we decide at what point it starts and where it ends?”

The usual libertarian response is well placed from a strategic and rhetorical standpoint. Their reply usually goes something like this: “A person should enjoy every liberty he can attain, provided he does not infringe on the liberty of others to act freely in their own right” or something along those lines. Basically, exercise your rights, as long as you don’t violate the rights of others.

I like this explanation, but (aside from the fact that I’m not sure its a biblical perspective, something I’ll articulate another time) I’m not sure it really solves the debate or saves any time. For as soon as these words fall on the dialogue, the debate is not ended with satisfaction to both sides. The argument immediately shifts to issue of what constitutes a violation of another person’s rights?

At this point, someone will try to differentiate the difference between positive and negative rights, saying that people have the right exercise their negative rights, while they are not necessarily entitled to their positive rights. But again, this only starts the process over again: What exactly constitutes “negative” rights? Who says that am entitled to this set of rights but not to another?  A traffic light violates my freedom to move through the intersection when I see fit. Yet, to not have a traffic light would endanger the public safety, thus, as many people as will go through the intersection in the absence of a traffic light, the same number of individual rights will be violated…the right to life and safety of other individual besides myself is negated by the absence of a traffic signal.

But (playing the part of devil’s advocate for a moment) I should have the right to go through the intersection when I want to. So, who’s rights and interests should win the debate? Now the debate simply shifts again: Whether or not, when in conflict, individualism should be valued over collectivism. I have an individual right to traverse the intersection, something that the traffic light delays, and a collection of other members of society who will be traveling through that intersection have a right to public safety and life.

Thus, libertarian rationalism, which adores rationalistic, logical thought process’ to come to its conclusions, seems to falter; for it cannot come up with an enduring, transcendental standard by which to govern society. For any libertarian who asserts that “these are the rights you are entitled to, while these are not” will always be hopelessly challenged to explain how he came to his conclusion about what rights are more important than others (My right to move when I want vs. society’s right to a traffic signal in the interest of public safety), and why when in conflict, this should be valued over that–the traffic light and individualism vs. collectivism being prime examples of this never ending cycle of argumentation.

At this point, having convinced myself that rationally engineered rights can never be rationally clarified (the never ending circle of argumentation referred to in preceding paragraphs), it seems to me that the best way to conclusively address the issue is to adopt an unconventional strategy: Espouse the cause of liberty in theory, and use the Bible and the biblical worldview it provides to clarify what rights should be enjoyed and what rights should be limited. On this basis, issues seem to fall into place: Free speech, yes–but since the 9th commandment says “though shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” we justify laws against slander. How did property rights vs. eminent domain come to be such an issue from the 1600’s on in the western world? Because religious reformers influenced policy makers who applied the principle “thou shalt not steal” as a limitation on government action. Thus was born the notion that government should be limited in taking land for whatever purpose, and that if it must use the land, it should be paid for.

Adopting the biblical worldview as a standard political mindset and policy guideline will no doubt precipitate a storm of criticism and scandal. It would “forcing our will” on others. How bigoted. But in reality, doing so is no worse than what the Marxist, Socialist, Progressive, Liberal, Republican, or Humanist does every time they vote in the legislature. All law and policy necessarily springs forth from some foundational mindset (call it religion, political philosophy, mindset, etc.) held by each person, and thus, every politician–foundational presuppositions about the world and the humanity it contains; about the origin, purpose, and destiny of mankind as a whole. Christian worldview is one of those mindsets…it just happens to be called religion, while every other philosophy enjoys a more agreeable title–Marx called his Marxism “science” and my libertarian friends call their mindset a “Philosophy of Liberty”.

Now some will cringe from this challenge because they assume that because biblical worldview is found to be dismissed in politics as irrelevant because its religious it’s therefore not relevant to politics because most people in politics don’t think it belongs in the political debate.

Yet the majority’s lack of belief in something does not equate to making it irrelevant. Just because people don’t believe you when you cite the biblical worldview as a justification for action doesn’t mean you must leave it behind when you work in politics. Republicans don’t believe in the Democratic Party, yet the democrats are very successful in implementing their agenda step by step. Perhaps an analogy will help bring this into perspective:

You are walking through a city in the Great State of Texas. You, being the great citizen you are, have your concealed carry permit and a Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol in your back pocket. A thug steps in front of you, waves his knife with meaning, and demands your money or your life. But being the sturdy Texan you are, you snatch out your Springfield and say “Sir, I have a Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol that delivers 30,000 kinetic foot pounds of force on impact! Do reconsider your present course of action or proceed at your own risk! A bullet does carry farther than a knife!” But instead of being deterred like you thought he would be, he instead says “Well, I don’t believe in your gun…” And with this astounding revelation, you think “I can’t believe it. He doesn’t believe me” so you throw down your Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol take off running.

So you go home and do some research. You discover, (using, of course, wikipedia) that guns are indeed very effective. You find a study that documents these facts and effects, print it off, place it in your other back pocket, and start back across the city again, carrying your Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol. Lo and behold, the same crook appears in front of you, waving his knife and demanding your money or your life! So you pull out your Springfield .40 caliber subcompact X3 and exclaim: “Sir, I have a Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol that delivers 30,000 foot pounds of force on impact! Do reconsider your present course of action or proceed at your own risk! and look–I have a study right here proving that my gun is more effective than your knife…statistically, my gun will be much more effective and destructive than your knife. I can prove it!

Full of expectation, you eagerly anticipate his response. But your hopes are dashed as he simply straightens up and says: “It doesn’t matter…I don’t believe in your study. It was probably done by biased researchers who had unreasonable faith in guns anyway”.

Your heart sinks with discouragement as you realize that your efforts are rebuffed by your opponent. So, acting under the realization that he really doesn’t believe in your gun, you throw it down and take off running in the opposite direction.

How absurd. But you have one last chance. You’re walking through the city, and hallo there! Before you appears the same thug, waving his knife, demanding your money or your life! Again, you whip out your Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol and inform him, saying: “Sir, I have a Spingfield .40  caliber X3 subcompact pistol that delivers 30,000 foot pounds of force on impact! Do reconsider your present course of action or proceed at your own risk!” Again, he starts giving his usual mantra: “I don’t believe in your gun…” But this time is different. You’ve decided that pulling the trigger will do more to make him a believer in guns than anything else.

Now, certainly this story is not meant to imply that we should violence to implement our agenda. Nor does it mean that we will force people to become Christians. But what the above story does do is illustrate the folly and absurdity of waiting for your enemies to agree with you as a precondition for action.

But this same fallacy is, I fear, committed by politicians who “personally” claim to be Christians, yet keep that out of the scope of their political philosophy.

Yet what an opportunity we are missing! Christians grow ashamed of the name of Christ and neglect to bring his name into the debate–be it over abortion, gay “rights”, property rights, religious liberty, Ten Commandment displays, etc, and they lose the battle! Wow! I would never has guessed to that once we forgot about God in public debate that we would just happen to lose some ground as well. Unbelievable!

When we bring Biblical foundations to our positions in the public square, we will of course be criticized. But doing so gives us an excellent opportunity to bring the debate into another field that is far more relevant than any social ill–once the our Christian foundation for our political decisions is attacked, simply turn the debate into one issue: Is the Bible true? Is Christianity true? If they can disprove God or the Bible, go for it. But until they do so, you are perfectly justified in subscribing to a something that you think has good evidence and arguments backing it up. The more research and study I do, the more I am persuaded that with a continuing focus on research, knowledge, and dialogue on Christian theology and apologetics, the Christian message and world view is one that we can defend vigorously, reasonably, and logically.

Here’s the summery creed we need to present to our opponents, and then challenge them to attack it–as Christian Apologist, author, and family man Voddie Baucham once stated:

“Is that your final answer? I hope its not. Let me give you an answer to that question that I believe is better than ‘I was raised that way’ or its better than “Well I’m Southern Baptist and that’s the way we believe’ or its better than “I tried it, and it worked for me” Let me tell you why I choose to believe the Bible. I don’t believe the Bible because I was raised that way—because I wasn’t. I don’t choose to believe the Bible because I tried it and it worked for me. My mother’s Buddhism worked for her—that’s why she was a Buddhist! I need something more than just ‘because it works’. Here’s the answer—I’ll give it to you and unpack it for you:

I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report [of] supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies and claimed that their writing are divine rather than human in origin.”

Rational Libertarianism doesn’t solve. It uses logic to arrive at its conclusions, but logical and philosophical conundrums seem to make it a never ending rabbit trail of argumentation against what seem to be, at root, arbitrary standards of what constitutes “rights” and how those rights should be arbitrated when they conflict.

To the contrary, invoking a biblical standard in deciding what liberties should be enjoyed and what ones should not promises, I think, to open up a whole new strategy of debate on social issues and open up discussion much more relevant issues than endless cycles of dispute over “natural rights” and other notions precipitated wholly by human thought. Its time to invoke a standard outside of ourselves, and standard, that, I think, is true. Why not.

Maybe I’m idealist; overly optimistic. After all, maybe this new strategy won’t be as simple as I think. After all, even if we did adopt the Bible as our standard for public policy and liberty, would it indeed clarify anything? Are there not many and diverse ways of interpreting the scriptures?

Undoubtedly yes. Place any two churches side by side and you’ll get a taste of what that’s like. But surely there are some basic principles that could be agreed up and forcefully argued and articulated from God’s word that would provide a lens by which to judge public policy and proper restraint of liberty.

So challenge me. Correct me where I may be wrong; where I might be overlooking a key aspect of an issue or oversimplyfying the problem or the solution. In the meantime though, at least, I think the Biblical world view is more relevant and tenable than most Americans, politicians, and pastors think.

 

Ron Paul Live!

I got to see Ron Paul today live. He spoke at University North Texas in Denton, TX. It was an incredible experience. I got some autographs. I’ll try to post more on this experience later. I hope to find some photos and videos to post later.

Why Ron Paul will not win: Part II

An excellent counter-weight to my somewhat depressing article on Ron Paul can be found:
HERE 

Why Ron Paul will not win

The Ron Paul campaign is undoubtedly disappointed by their low showing in Super Tuesday’s splash. The campaign received on average about 4% per state, spiked at times only by a rare double digit showing in a few states like North Dakota.

It wasn’t supposed to be that low. The Paul campaign had conceived and executed a number of notable and worthy exploits; November saw the rise in Ron Paul’s ascendancy after he (or rather, his unsolicited supporters) raised $4 million on November 5^th of last year; he roughly equaled his Republican opponents 3^rd quarter fund raising totals; he won more straw polls than any other Republican contender; he won a substantial amount of debates; he received $6 million on a Sunday in December, and came close to breaking existing one-day fund raising records; at times, his internet popularity rivaled those of his opponents. Consequently, expectations that campaign efforts would turn into votes were running high.

 

It was not to be. First came Iowa; then New Hampshire; then South Carolina; Nevada provided some hope, only to be met by the catastrophe of Super Tuesday.

 

Thousands were disappointed. I must confess that I include myself in that number. But as I was going over the countless youtube videos and the numerous “issues” links on the Campaign website, I began to see why. Patterns started to emerge.

The barrier between the Ron Paul Revolution and the ballot box was four fold. Part of it this barrier was Ron Paul’s problem, part of it the American people’s preference, part of it the Media’s habit. .

Negativity—An ‘everything is wrong’ attitude drives voters away:

The first and most obvious pattern I observe in the Paul camp is ‘negativity’. Everything is wrong. Government is oppressive. America is an empire builder. The economy is going to pot. We don’t have a gold standard. The DHS should be abolished. The CIA is a secret police/world force. Gun rights are trampled on. The United States provokes terrorism. The tax system is too complicated. The Republican Party is losing its way. The Neo-Cons are high-jacking our foreign policy. All negatives. All is wrong.

 

A candidate cannot move him/her/self forward if all they do is remind the voter about problems. To move forward, a candidate must balance not only condemning the wrongs but also optimizing the solutions and advantages of the proposed change. If a candidate primarily castigates problems and doesn’t promote himself as the solution, voters will subconsciously associate the candidate with the problems—because that is all the candidate talks about. What one talks about, one becomes associated with, and when a candidate associates himself with negatives, voters are much less likely to positively affirm him at the ballot box. Voters will be filled with a pessimism about the Status Quo, rather than with the optimism of the proposed change .

Practicality & Plausibility:

‘Abolish the CIA’ or ‘ establish the Gold Standard’; ‘abolish the DHS’. Whether or not these institutions should be abolished is debatable, but let’s face it: In an era when candidates are elected based on media sound-bytes and pep rallies, seemingly radical positions like the ones mentioned above are hard to credibly defend in view of modern constraints. Just because these propositions are radical doesn’t mean they are bad ideas. But most of America is turned off by these suggestions anyway. It’s doubtful that Congress would approve any of these. So the Political Pundits write the candidate off as a ‘fringe’ candidate, the media conveys that perception, so the public believes it. Thus another couple of pieces of the voting pie go down the tubes.

Christianity—The Evangelical Vote: Evangelicals constitute a noticeable portion of the conservative voting bloc. Consequently, not losing the evangelical vote is critical for winning the nomination.

As Christians, the Religious Right by and large favors constitutional amendments banning both abortion and states from recognizing gay marriage. Since Ron Paul voted against the marriage amendment and believes that abortion should be decided by the States, it is hard to see how Paul can garner this crucial support for his bid.

This doesn’t mean it is impossible, immoral, or contradictory for Christians to support Ron Paul. They could. Here’s why:

 

 

-Voting against the marriage amendment is not to say that he is against biblical marriage. It means he believes that marriage is a religious institution that should not be regulated by the State. For if the state claims the liberty to define marriage favorably, could they not also whimsically choose to define it wrongly? It would seem to be better if the Federal Government did not regulate this at all, and rather in this case follow a “live and let live” policy.

 

Abortion: Saying that Federal Government should not ban abortion is not saying that one supports it. It simply means that one understands that there are different jurisdictions for different levels of government. Dr. Paul personally opposes abortion, but believes that the States should regulate it. Hopefully, ban it. Will all States abolish abortion immediately? No. Will lives still be lost? Yes. And the States will have to deal with God about their moral iniquity.

 

So, it is possible to be logically consistent Christian and support these platforms. Does that mean that Evangelicals who don’t support Ron Paul are illogical? Not necessarily. It could be that Christians have thought these through, and in the end decided that they’d prefer a candidate who would push for Constitutional Amendment solutions to these issues rather than rely on the States action or lack thereof.

 

 

Attackability, which leads to a lack of Media Viability: Not going after his rivals means the media is less likely to put him on the front page and treat him with any sense of credibility.

Ron Paul proclaims his message. He then moves onto proclaim the message—again; consistently. The problem is that, after he gains territory by preaching his message, he does not make more room for himself by going after and attacking his rivals. By this I do not mean he should run an excessively negative campaign like Romney, but rather go after the policies advocated by his opponents. He rarely does this, and this translates in part to a lack of media attention.

 

Why? Because the media loves clashes. It gets coverage and viewers. The media doesn’t like to cover the norm. They like to cover something that is busy, combative, and attractive. They report on the exceptions, explosions, and fires. That is why the headlines are “Giuliani, Romney, clash over immigration” rather than “Candidates peaceful for some of the time”. So Ron Paul not attacking his rivals translated, I believe, into not only a lack of media attention by virtue of his non-combativeness (which equals non-attractiveness), but also helped the other candidates keep their voters. If the candidates get to keep their voters, that means less people vote for Ron Paul. But if Ron Paul had been willing to go after his rivals and refute what they assert in addition to winning more converts with his “message”, than the number of ‘Paulistines’ (as Michael Medved loves to call them) might have been larger, and so the outcome of Super Tuesday just might have been different.

Summery:

The purpose of this post was not to prove why Ron Paul shouldn’t be elected, but rather, why he won’t be. I must confess that I myself felt (to put it euphemistically) ‘less than opposed’ to Ron Paul’s message, candidacy, and potential presidency. I believe in limited government; I believe in a humble foreign policy; I believed in state’s rights, and I believed that Ron Paul could do some good. So therefore I must confess that I was numbered among those who were disappointed at the results from Super Tuesday that so intensely shattered the dreams and optimism held by so many—a dream that I must for now bid goodbye.

 

 

Source used for getting the voting record:

http://www.ontheissues.org/Ron_Paul.htm

Source for opinion on the CIA (a lot more can be found on youtube)

 

http://www.kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=7824231