I have only one hasty stitch from last night’s GOP Fundamentalist Revival / Comedy Hour:
RON PAUL: Well, I think we should read the First Amendment, where it says, “Congress shall write no law.” And we should write a lot less laws regarding this matter. It shouldn’t be a matter of the president or the Congress. It should be local people, local officials. The state should determine so many of these things that we just don’t need more laws determining religious things or prayer in school. We should allow people at the local level.That’s what the Constitution tells us. We don’t need somebody in Washington telling us what we can do, because we don’t have perfect knowledge. And that’s the magnificence of our Constitution and our republic. We sort out the difficult problems at local levels and we don’t have one case fit all, because you have a Supreme Court ruling like on Roe versus Wade; it ruined it for the whole country. And that’s why we shouldn’t have it at a central level.
As I blogged previously: This man is not a libertarian. Never was, never will be.
Libertarians do not believe that theocracy is perfectly hunky-dory, so long as it’s at the school district level and not at the federal level. Libertarians do not blank out the Fourteenth Amendment and its incorporation of the First Amendment (and most of the rest of the Bill of Rights) to apply equally and coextensively to the states. Libertarians do not forget that there is no such thing as “states’ rights” — that there are only individual rights, including the right not to be religiously coerced by government in any way, at any level.
Not a libertarian. Never was, never will be.
P.S. Not to nitpick, but it’s “Congress shall make no law…”
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Technorati Tags: Ron Paul, libertarian.
3 responses so far ↓
Link Tony // Jun 6, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I missed the debate last night. Wow. This champion of the Constitution managed to dismiss it entirely in two paragraphs. Majoritarianism is not fine just because it's 2 people ganging up on 1 instead of 270 million ganging up on 30 million. Quantity makes no difference if the principle is to matter at all. Unbelievable.
Link Geek // Jun 6, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Kip,
While I wholeheartedly agree with the fact that Ron Paul is not a libertarian (he did after all vote for the Partial Birth Abortion Act – embracing the New Deal version of the Commerce Clause), and while I share your views on the 14th Amendment (although I wouldn't use the term incorporation but that may be semantics), I'm not sure our appreciation for the 14th Amendment is universally embraced by libertarians.
There are libertarians who oppose the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it further centralizes federal power against the states, especially with respect to Section 5 of the amendment. I read this paper some time ago which covers this topic. For me to comment on this, I'd have to re-read it. It was interesting at the time I read it but I wasn't necessarily persuaded by the argument. It may be because I read it shortly after reading Elizabeth Price Foley's Liberty for All, where one of her arguments was that the original Bill of Rights (at least some provisions) did in fact apply to the states (despite Justice Marshall's opinion in Barron).
I'm not suggesting that even those libertarians would agree with Ron Paul because they most certainly would not. They would advocate protecting liberty at a localized level. Admittedly, this applies to the more hardcore libertarians but I thought I'd make the point.
Tony, I couldn't agree with you more.
Link Jennifer // Jun 7, 2007 at 10:25 am
I watched the debate the other night and it made me nauseous. Blech. It seems that candidates these days fight over who is perceived to be the most religious. I am glad Ron Paul is part of the debates simply to throw some different ideas into the mix (and to annoy the other candidates), but I must say that I was fairly horrified at some of the things he said since I'd always heard he had rather libertarian tendencies.
I'm not very familiar with libertarian view of state's rights, can you elaborate in another post? What exactly is the role of states if you are saying there is no such thing as state's rights? I do agree that individuals certainly do have the right to not have religious views imposed on them, so now I'm curious how the states rights vs. individualism would work in other situations. I'm sort of new to libertarian principles so I'm curious.
Now I'm going to have to go re-read the 14th amendment.