This
talk was delivered to the Alabama state convention of Young Americans
for Liberty in Auburn, Alabama, on April 6, 2013.
Ive had the
privilege of knowing Ron Paul for 37 years. I worked as his chief
of staff during his early years in Congress, and he played an important
role when I opened the Mises Institute, where he has served as our
distinguished counselor ever since.
Hes the same
person in private life that he is in public: thoughtful, decent,
humble, self-effacing, and generous in acknowledging his intellectual
debts.
These are not
qualities people associate with political figures. Thats part of
the reason Ron became such a phenomenon.
More than anything
else, Ron has been a teacher throughout his years in public life.
In his articles and speeches, and even in the bills he introduced,
he sought to convey the philosophy of liberty and what that philosophy
implies for our daily lives. His books, which include numerous bestsellers,
have done the same thing. Compare Rons books to Mitt Romneys,
and youll see what I mean.
But as the
person who reached more people with the message of liberty than
anyone in our time, Ron has also taught us how that message can
and must be spread. I want to talk about five of these lessons tonight.
#1 The subject
of war cannot, and should not, be avoided.
First and foremost,
Ron is a critic of the warfare state.
The war in
Iraq, which was still a live issue when Ron first ran for the Republican
nomination, had been sold to the public on the basis of lies that
were transparent and insulting even by the US governments standards.
The devastation in terms of deaths, maimings, displacement, and
sheer destruction appalled every decent human being.
Yes, the Department
of Education is an outrage, but it is nothing next to the horrifying
images of what happened to the men, women, and children of Iraq.
If he wasnt going to denounce such a clear moral evil, Ron thought,
what was the point of being in public life at all?
Still, this
is the issue strategists would have had him avoid. Just talk about
the budget, talk about the greatness of America, talk about whatever
everyone else was talking about, and youll be fine. And, they neglected
to add, forgotten.
But had Ron
shied away from this issue, there would have been no Ron Paul Revolution.
It was his courageous refusal to back down from certain unspeakable
truths about the American role in the world that caused Americans,
and especially students, to sit up and take notice.
While still
in his thirties, Murray Rothbard wrote privately that he was beginning
to view war as "the key to the whole libertarian business."
Here is another way Ron Paul has been faithful to the Rothbardian
tradition. Time after time, in interviews and public appearances,
Ron has brought the questions posed to him back to the central issues
of war and foreign policy.
Worried about
the budget? You cant run an empire on the cheap. Concerned about
TSA groping, or government eavesdropping, or cameras trained on
you? These are the inevitable policies of a hegemon. In case after
case, Ron pointed to the connection between an imperial policy abroad
and abuses and outrages at home.
Inspired by
Ron, libertarians began to challenge conservatives by reminding
them that war, after all, is the ultimate government program. War
has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money
printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning,
hubris everything we associate with the worst interventions into
the economy.
Robert Higgs,
in his classic book Crisis and Leviathan, showed how war
left longstanding scars on American society, as power and wealth
grabbed by the federal government during wartime were never relinquished
in their entirety when hostilities ended. When Franklin Roosevelt
launched his New Deal in the 1930s, he appealed to ideological and
statutory precedents established during the American involvement
in World War I.
But Ron Paul
permanently changed the nature of the discussion on war and foreign
policy. The word "nonintervention" rarely appeared in
foreign-policy discussions before 2007. Opposition to war was associated
with anti-capitalist causes. That is no longer the case.
Ron kept insisting
that there was no real foreign policy debate in America because
all we were allowed to do was argue over what kind of intervention
the US government should pursue. Whether intervention itself was
desirable, or whether the bipartisan assumptions behind US foreign
policy were sound this was not even mentioned, much less debated.
In exposing
the fraudulent American foreign policy debate, Ron exposed an overlooked
truth about American political life. The debates Americans are allowed
to have are ones in which the real decisions have already been made:
income tax or consumption tax, fiscal stimulus or monetary stimulus,
sanctions or war, later war or war right away. With debates like
these, it hardly matters who wins. Ron pulled back the curtain on
all of it.
#2 Tell
the truth.
It wasnt just
on war that Ron defied the censors of opinion. Ask Ron Paul a question,
and you get an answer. In Miami he said the embargo on Cuba needed
to be lifted. In South Carolina he stuck to his guns on the drug
war. He never ran away from a question, or twisted it, in spin-doctor
fashion, into the question he wished he had been asked.
And the audiences
kept growing: thousands and thousands of students were coming out
to see him, at a time when his competitors could barely fill half
a bingo hall.
Ron knew that
the philosophy of liberty, when explained persuasively and with
conviction, had a universal appeal. Every group he spoke to heard
a slightly different presentation of that message, as Ron showed
how their particular concerns were addressed most effectively by
a policy of freedom.
When Ron first
spoke to the so-called values voters, for example, he was booed
for saying he worshipped the Prince of Peace. The second time, when
he again made a moral case for freedom, he brought the house down.
But he did not pander to them nor to anyone else, and he never abandoned
the philosophy that brought him into public life in the first place.
No one had the sense that there was more than one Ron Paul, that
he was trying to satisfy irreconcilable groups. There was one Ron
Paul.
#3 The problem
is not one person, nor one party.
Michelle Malkin
writes books about the corruption in Democratic administrations.
The same books could be written about Republican administrations,
and indeed they sometimes are, by the partisans of the other side.
Meanwhile, Americans are tricked into thinking that we just need
to root out a few bad apples, or that the problems we face are caused
by this or that group of occupants of the seats of power.
Ron rarely
gets worked up about some government functionary who had been receiving
some graft. Yes, this is wrong, and yes, the guy should be sacked.
But to spend
inordinate time on the scandal of the day is to suggest that if
only we had good people in charge, the system would work. The vast
bulk of what the state does shouldnt be done at all, with good
or bad people, and whatever else it does can be far better
managed by free individuals.
If a government
official spends inordinate sums on vacations and luxuries, or is
exposed for being on the take, be assured that the persons political
opponents will be all over the story. Meanwhile, the inherent corruption
of the system itself, with its systematic expropriation and redistribution,
is ignored. But that is by far the more important story, and its
the only one that really deserves our attention.
#4 There
is more to life, and more to liberty, than politics.
Before leaving
Washington and electoral politics, Ron delivered an extraordinary
farewell address to Congress. The very fact that Ron could deliver
a wise and learned address only goes to show he was no run-of-the-mill
congressman, whose intellectual life is fulfilled by talking points
and focus-group results.
That a farewell
address seemed so appropriate for Ron in the first place, while
it would have been risible for virtually any of his colleagues,
reflected Rons substance and seriousness as a thinker and as a
man.
In that address
Ron did many things. He surveyed his many years in Congress. He
made a reckoning of the advance of the state and the retreat of
liberty. He explained the moral ideas at the root of the libertarian
message: nonaggression and freedom. He posed a series of questions
about the US government and American society that are hardly ever
asked, much less answered. And he gave his supporters advice on
spreading the message in the coming years.
"Achieving
legislative power and political influence," he said,
should
not be our goal. Most of the change, if it is to come, will not
come from the politicians, but rather from individuals, family,
friends, intellectual leaders, and our religious institutions.
The solution can only come from rejecting the use of coercion,
compulsion, government commands, and aggressive force, to mold
social and economic behavior.
How many bills
did Ron Paul get passed, his neoconservative opponents demand to
know. I think of it this way. No one is going to remember any bill
that Rick Santorums advisers drafted for him. No one is going to
remember Rick Santorum. Ron Paul, on the other hand, will be remembered.
Of how many other congressmen can it be said that they (1) urged
students to read thousand-page treatises on economics, and (2) the
students actually did it?
Today, at a
major homeschool convention in Ohio, Ron announced the Ron Paul
Homeschool Curriculum. His program covers Kindergarten through 12th
grade. Students will be exposed to thinkers they would never encounter
in a government school. They will know history and economics better
than anyone their age.
They will learn
public speaking, and writing, and social media. They will emerge
as top-notch ambassadors of the ideas Ron has championed his whole
life. They will, I predict, join Young Americans for Liberty.
There is no
bill that Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum, or the rest of them ever
got passed that amounts to a grain of sand compared to what Ron
Paul will accomplish in just this one endeavor, by educating young
students.
#5 The Fed
cannot be ignored.
No focus groups
urged Ron to talk about the Federal Reserve. No politician had made
an issue of the Fed in an election in its 100-year history. Stick
to the script, the professionals would have said: lower taxes and
lower spending, the monotonous refrain uttered by every Republican
politician, who typically has no interest in carrying through with
either one anyway.
Yet Ron pointed
to the Fed as the source of the boom-bust cycle that has harmed
so many Americans. His dogged insistence on this point got a great
many Americans curious: what, after all, was the Fed, and what was
it up to? An unlikely issue, to be sure, and yet it was his willingness
to talk about it that in my view helps to account for much of his
fundraising success. There was a small but untapped portion of the
public that responded with enthusiasm to Rons very mention of the
Fed, and they wanted more.
Here again,
had Ron adopted conventional political advice, he would have forfeited
these historic moments and the Ron Paul phenomenon would not have
been greatly diminished, if not compromised altogether.
Only a few
months after Ron officially suspended his 2008 campaign, the financial
crisis struck. Just as Ron had said, there was something indeed
wrong with the economy. His opponents, meanwhile, were exposed as
the fools and charlatans we knew them to be. Just one week before
that crisis hit, Herman Cain was dismissing all complaints and warnings
about the economy as nothing but an anti-Republican media conspiracy.
John McCain,
meanwhile, the partys nominee, had said the fundamentals of the
economy were sound, and that although he wasnt an expert on the
economy, he was reading Alan Greenspans book.
Because he
hadnt hesitated to say what he believed, even if it meant dealing
with an issue no political operative would have encouraged him to
discuss, Ron was a prophet. That point alone opened countless more
people to Rons ideas: here was the only guy in Washington who warned
us of what was to come. (And incidentally, has there been a time
in American history in which more people were reading and writing!
anti-Fed books?)
People could
see, too, that Ron hadnt just gotten lucky in 2007 and 2008. In
2001, Ron said on the House floor that the Fed-fueled bubble in
tech stocks, which had just burst, was being replaced by a Fed-fueled
real-estate bubble, which would burst just as surely.
*
* * * *
I mentioned
earlier that Ron has left politics. To the media, for whom political
life is everything, that meant Ron would henceforth be invisible.
They wish.
Ron is putting
his money where his mouth is: when he says theres more to life
than politics, he means it. And hes going to prove it.
I already mentioned
his forthcoming homeschool curriculum, which will be enormously
influential and do more good than we can imagine.
But he is going
to do so much more: in television production, with a new website,
in commentary, in speaking, with a new institution on the most important
issue, with new books--including a homeschooling manifesto--and
much more.
When a well-known
radio host asked Ron what hed be doing in retirement, Ron responded,
"Well, theyre not putting me in a rocking chair, I can tell
you that!"
You can say
that again. Ron is stepping everything up
I am convinced
that historians, whether or not they agree with him, will continue
to marvel at Ron Paul for many, many years to come. Libertarians
a century from now will be in disbelief at the very notion that
such a man actually served in the the US Congress of our time.
But my purpose
tonight has not solely been to pay tribute to Ron, though I am always
happy to honor my friend whose shining example deserves far more
than my own words. In reviewing Rons public life, Ive picked out
ideas and lessons that must live on.
It is your
great task, the young men and women of this organization which
developed out of Students for Ron Paul who have taken such inspiration
from this great man, to embody these ideas and lessons.
For what is
Rons legacy? It is all of you. You reflect what Ron has stood for
his whole life. You crave knowledge and understanding. You are not
afraid to stand against the establishment in fact, you relish
it. You know the message of liberty will grow not by running away
from it, minimizing it, compromising it, or being ashamed of it,
but by embracing the great moral ideal it represents.
America and
the world are groaning under the burden of war, fiat money, economic
crisis, expanding police states, and official lawlessness. Its
true that we predicted the outcome were seeing today, but more
importantly, we also know the way out.
If you love
and want to spread Ron Pauls message at this critical moment in
history, follow his example. It is the only sure path for those
who believe in liberty, and who seek its triumph in our lifetimes.
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