Ron Paul Joins the Loudmouths

In the past I found Ron Paul a refreshingly intelligent voice on the American political right, one who seemed to have carefully thought through the issues and come to reasonable conclusions. I did not always agree with him, but I took him seriously.

But now he's starting to take a different tack - my hunch is that he found "being honest and sincere in one's beliefs" was not sufficient to be seriously electable. That determination on his part may have been reached at least in part because every supposedly serious presidential candidate these days (Trump, Gingrich, Palin, Santorum, etc.) gets lots of media attention for making wild, strident overstatements and indulging in at least implicit racist statements and calls to violence against the American left.

So now – and I say this with considerable regret - Paul seems to me to be recasting himself in the same mold.

Most recently he has compared Social Security and Medicare to slavery, and noted that they are not sanctioned in the United States Constitution as the business of government, and so should be dismantled.

Think about these comments.

To compare Social Security and Medicare to slavery is clearly absurd. Consider what slavery meant, that you were literally owned, literally property, subjected to the most inhuman conditions imaginable. There is no way people are, under Social Security or Medicare chained to servitude, and subject to torture and death if they try to escape it. Indeed, Medicare and Social Security are just about the best successes among all the federal programs ever invented. Without Medicare and Social Security, most of our sick and elderly would be reduced to the same pauper status that they endured before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those who receive these benefits worked for them and are grateful for them; the “benefits” of slavery went not to the workers, slaves, as Paul’s comment would suggest, but to others, the slaveowners. But those who need it most benefit most from Social Security and Medicare, not the ultra-rich corporate plutarchs.

Paul’s statement is also highly insulting to African Americans (and others) whose ancestors lived and died in those deplorable conditions, and who continue to feel the sting of institutional racism and bigotry to this day. The statement is moreover very possibly implicitly racist, a way of saying, "Well, you black folks experienced the chains and whips of slavery to us whites, but, hah!, we whites are “enslaved” to Medicare and Social Security!

To say there is no provision in the Constitution for Medicare and Social Security is blatantly ridiculous; to say they should be dismantled for that reason is to say nearly every federal program should likewise be dismantled – as a libertarian this is, presumably, exactly what Ron Paul wants. But there are lots and lots of other things that the federal government does which are not mentioned in the Constitution. So, if Ron Paul were consistent, that would mean an end to federal highways, to border security, to inspecting meat and milk and other foods, to countering the growing power of corporations, and a thousand other things that most Americans, and I’ll bet Ron Paul too, are very glad exist.

Indeed, one thing Mr. Paul overlooks is that political parties, too, are not set forth in the Constitution, and so they should be dismantled. I do not expect Ron Paul to agree with me that political parties should be disbanded. Political parties represent a political power-grab - your elected representatives to Congress, and to state and local legislatures, vote not according to the collective will of their constituents, but of party bosses who trade votes to get their own way. Hence, if they were eliminated, we would have political candidates speaking their honest individual views, rather than the pompous prejudiced platitudes put into these political puppets by party potentates.

Ron Paul himself used to speak his honest views (whether or not listeners agreed) before apparently throwing in the towel and recasting himself as just another lunatic teabagging wacko.