Andrew Foy tries to place Ron Paul in the context of the modern Republican Party:
In his recent editorial “The Fighters vs. the Fixers,” appearing on National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg discussed what I suspect is his crop of contenders for the upcoming election: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee. Considering that Paul smoked all of these candidates in the 2011 CPAC straw poll, where he garnered 30% of the vote, it was an odd choice to leave him out, and even more so when you account for the fact that Goldberg’s recently edited book Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation featured several essays in which the authors expressed strong libertarian points of view.
Ah, but that CPAC straw poll was explained away as “Paultards” packing the event, which no other candidate would ever do, so the poll result was therefore invalid. Oh, and lots of chatter that Paul supporters would not be welcome to the next CPAC.
. . . Paul is an outspoken advocate of Austrian economics. Without being an economist myself, I would say that this economic school of thought argues against econometric models, state planning, bailouts, economic stimulus, and the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. One of the hallmarks of Austrian economics, for which Hayek won a Nobel Prize, is the view that central banks create asset bubbles and hence the business cycle. Austrian economics predicted the recent housing collapse and economic recession when the mainstream economists and politicians, to whom we’re still wedded, were telling us that everything was “A-okay.”
In a 2007 address to the American Economic Association, Bernanke proclaimed, “The greatest external benefits of the Fed’s supervisory activities are those related to the institution’s role in preventing and managing financial crises. In other words, the Fed can prevent most crises and manage the ones that do occur.” A year later, we were mired in the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression. While the great majority of politicians today (Democrats and Republicans) are happy to heed the advice and inflationary policies of the Fed, such as QE2, Paul is a lone voice in the wilderness crying foul. Conservatives should welcome his dissent.
