# Does Ron Paul's example refute libertarianism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 23, 2011, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216 "2011-12-23T22:04:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/41 "2011-12-25T17:24:20Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > FYI, Rand despised [libertarians](http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=faq_index#obj_q3)Libertarians tend not to mention this. But she used “libertarian” as an adjective in a sentence which has an object of “hippies” meaning she doesn’t approve of so-called “libertarian” anarchist hippies. That’s not an indictment of libertarianism. Posters on this board tend to conflate libertarianism with anarchy, though, so it’s no wonder there’s the confusion. ---
**Author:** ![newcomer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e5b9ba/32.png) [@newcomer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/newcomer)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/42 "2011-12-25T19:17:11Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > However, I think Ron Paul’s example only discredits libertarianism because because he lacks the courage and the honesty to acknowledge opinions that he does hold, and which he expressed when he did not think he would become a national politician. Opinions that he does hold? I thought that at least here - in the Heaven of Reason & Doubt - we can settle the question of Ron Paul being racist. #1 He claims he did not write it and I hope we’ll all agree it is very difficulty to prove it one way or the other. Therefore, reasonable person would look into other ways of proving or disproving it. Or, at least, building a case for it. So, as much as I can see I simply cannot provide any other form of behaviour or tendencies that could be even remotely construed as racist. What I’m saying is that a person of that mindset would slip so to speak, at last once, somewhere to someone and that someone would come forward and speak of it with credibility. There’s none. #2 Guilty by association. I’ll only remind the Dope of Obama’s Rev. Wright “association” in the church he was sitting for what, 20 years or so never to make any form of protest on things Rev. Wright was preaching. And just like Obama, after furious hunt by Fox News, he finally rejected Rev. Wright. why can’t Ron Paul be given same benefit of doubt? BTW - I know there will be plenty of those pointing how Ron Paul case is soooo much more horrible but that’s not the point. The point is, in the absence of proof, look beyond your emotional reaction to a Republican Libertarian (as we all sensed that attacks pon Obama were mostly driven by partisanship). ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/43 "2011-12-25T20:57:53Z")
> [@newcomer](#): > > #2 Guilty by association. It seems that you do not understand what this means. It is not, for example, GBA if you publish a newsletter under your own name and endorse its contents. > [@newcomer](#): > > #1 He claims he did not write it and I hope we’ll all agree it is very difficulty to prove it one way or the other. First, this is epistemological weaksauce. We also can’t prove whether or not we’re all brains floating in jars, but it doesn’t matter. Second, it really doesn’t matter since Paul is on record as endorsing the racism in his newsletters. [ > [@](#): > > The early 1990s writings became liabilities for Paul long before last week’s New Republic story. Back in 1996, Paul narrowly eked out a congressional victory over Democrat Lefty Morris, who made the newsletters one of his main campaign issues, damning them both for their racial content and for their advocacy of drug legalization. At the time, Paul defended the statements that appeared under his name, claiming that they expressed his “philosophical differences” with Democrats and had been “taken out of context.” He finally disavowed them in a 2001 interview with Texas Monthly, explaining that his campaign staff had convinced him at the time that it would be too “confusing” to attribute them to a ghostwriter. > […] > The tenor of Paul’s newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul’s return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul’s first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King “seduced underage girls and boys,” that black protesters should gather “at a food stamp bureau or a crack house” rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.” > > Eric Dondero, Paul’s estranged former volunteer and personal aide, worked for Paul on and off between 1987 and 2004 (back when he was named “Eric Rittberg”), and since the Iraq war has become one of the congressman’s most vociferous and notorious critics. By Dondero’s account, Paul’s inner circle learned between his congressional stints that “the wilder they got, the more bombastic they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from that period.” Cato Institute President Ed Crane told reason he recalls a conversation from some time in the late 1980s in which Paul claimed that his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001. > > The newsletters’ obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic “paleolibertarian” movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new “paleo” coalition. > > Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism.” To Rockwell, the LP was a “party of the stoned,” a halfway house for libertines that had to be “de-loused.” To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. “State-enforced segregation,” Rockwell wrote, “was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.” ]([Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? - Reason.com](http://reason.com/archives/2008/01/16/who-wrote-ron-pauls-newsletter)) ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/44 "2011-12-25T21:15:38Z")
I’m shocked he’s an episcopalian… I am no longer a Christian but I grew up in an AME (African Methodist Epsicopalian) family, and it’s such a mild form of Christianity it doesn’t leave much room for crazyness. Basic Jesus saved, be good etc. I have never met a creationist Episcopalian in my entire life. Episcopalians can be either pro-choice or pro-life as far as I know. ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/45 "2011-12-25T21:20:42Z")
BTW I am not even a doctor, former congressman, or presidential nominee, and if I had ANYONE writing something under my name you’re damn sure I’d read it and sign off on EVERY article before I would allow it to be published in my newsletter. Just in the NEWSLETTER, much less UNDER MY BYLINE. I’d really like a Ron Paul fan to explain to me how, if the man cannot even keep disgusting racist hysteria from being published in HIS own newspaper under HIS name, how he would be a competent delegator as the President of the united states? That is a much larger responsibility than some shitty little newsletter. But they can’t because he wrote them or signed off on them because he is a bigot like most libertarians. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/46 "2011-12-25T21:43:18Z")
> [@rogerbox](#): > > BTW I am not even a doctor, former congressman, or presidential nominee, and if I had ANYONE writing something under my name you’re damn sure I’d read it and sign off on EVERY article before I would allow it to be published in my newsletter. Just in the NEWSLETTER, much less UNDER MY BYLINE. > > I’d really like a Ron Paul fan to explain to me how, if the man cannot even keep disgusting racist hysteria from being published in HIS own newspaper under HIS name, how he would be a competent delegator as the President of the united states? That is a much larger responsibility than some shitty little newsletter. > > But they can’t because he wrote them or signed off on them because he is a bigot like most libertarians. I’m nto a fan, so I’m not going to try and defend him. But your last statement about libertarians is so out there that I’m going to have to ask for a cite. Got one? If not, I’d say there’s more than a bit of irony in your post. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/47 "2011-12-25T23:23:12Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I’m nto a fan, so I’m not going to try and defend him. But your last statement about libertarians is so out there that I’m going to have to ask for a cite. Got one? If not, I’d say there’s more than a bit of irony in your post. Really? Asking for a cite for whether or not most libertarians are bigots? Do you honestly think that there is some sort of scientific/objective definition for bigot that such a study could adhere to? Or would you only be happy if a survey asked directly if the participant was a bigot and found that 50% responded with “yes”? Obviously, when someone makes the claim “most libertarians are bigots” they are not making a factual or objective claim, as there is no objective measure for bigotry. So asking for a cite for this is like asking for a cite when someone says, “Most republicans are batshit insane.” ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2011, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/48 "2011-12-25T23:53:14Z")
> [@David42](#): > > But she used “libertarian” as an adjective in a sentence which has an object of “hippies” meaning she doesn’t approve of so-called “libertarian” anarchist hippies. > > That’s not an indictment of libertarianism. No, she was describing libertarians as “hippies” which she also didn’t like. See also post 39 for her views on libertarians. She despised them. Additional comments of Ayn’s view of libertarians [here](http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_campus_libertarians), for ex. : > [@](#): > > Q: Why don’t you approve of the Libertarians, thousands of whom are loyal readers of your works? [FHF: “The Age of Mediocrity,” 1981] > > AR: Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/49 "2011-12-26T00:40:05Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > Really? Asking for a cite for whether or not most libertarians are bigots? Do you honestly think that there is some sort of scientific/objective definition for bigot that such a study could adhere to? Or would you only be happy if a survey asked directly if the participant was a bigot and found that 50% responded with “yes”?" No, I don’t think there is a cite. Just like there would be no cite to prove the statement that most blacks are lazy. Hence my comment about the irony inherent in the statement. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/50 "2011-12-26T00:47:22Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > Obviously, when someone makes the claim “most libertarians are bigots” _ **they are not making a factual or objective claim** _, as there is no objective measure for bigotry. So asking for a cite for this is like asking for a cite when someone says, “Most republicans are batshit insane.” That’s quite revealing. So what kind of statement is not intended to be “factual or objective,” and by what means would you persuade someone of its truth? ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/51 "2011-12-26T13:29:31Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I’m certain you’re wrong about that. Refusal to accept evolution as fact is very common in the US. Gallup June 20, 2008 Republicans, Democrats Differ on Creationism Republicans much more likely than Democrats to believe humans created as-is 10,000 years ago by Frank NewportPRINCETON, NJ – There is a significant political divide in beliefs about the origin of human beings, with 60% of Republicans saying humans were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago, a belief shared by only 40% of independents and 38% of Democrats. > **[Republicans, Democrats Differ on Creationism](https://news.gallup.com/poll/108226/republicans-democrats-differ-creationism.aspx)** > > There is a significant political divide in Americans’ beliefs about the origin of human beings, with 60% of Republicans saying humans were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago, a belief shared by only 40% of independents and 38% of... ---
**Author:** ![What\_the](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f4b2a3/32.png) [@What\_the](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/52 "2011-12-26T14:10:52Z")
> [@What\_the](#): > > What is the link between libertarianism and racism? Perhaps I’ve proven that there is no help for me but I’ll try again, this time more generally … what the link between Libertarianism and bigotry ? To espouse it must one believe that everyone has an equal capacity to benefit from his own liberty? Do/can libertarians believe in survival of the fittest? ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/53 "2011-12-26T14:41:23Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > they are not making a factual or objective claim [Jon Kyl](http://californiacommons.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/11711/news-literacy/) is on the SDMB? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2011, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/54 "2011-12-26T15:27:32Z")
> [@What\_the](#): > > Perhaps I’ve proven that there is no help for me but I’ll try again, this time more generally … what the link between Libertarianism and bigotry ? > > To espouse it must one believe that everyone has an equal capacity to benefit from his own liberty? > > Do/can libertarians believe in survival of the fittest? Some racists probably find Libertarianism attractive since it allow racism in the economic sphere. But there is nothing inherently racist about Libertarianism, and anyone trying to enforce racist legislation is not abiding by Libertarian principles. ---
**Author:** ![What\_the](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f4b2a3/32.png) [@What\_the](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/55 "2011-12-28T13:45:43Z")
So am I to understand that the answer to the bolded question in the OP is clearly a resounding “No” ? ---
**Author:** ![Truman\_Burbank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecc23a/32.png) [@Truman\_Burbank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Truman_Burbank)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216/56 "2011-12-29T14:37:29Z")
> [@What\_the](#): > > So am I to understand that the answer to the bolded question in the OP is clearly a resounding “No” ? That seems to be the consensus so far. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-ron-pauls-example-refute-libertarianism/607216.md?page=2)