The Teflon Libertarian Moderate

There is a member of the Libertarian Party who advocates the following positions of many of us in the Reform Caucus.

• He does not advocate anarchism and believes there are "proper constitutional functions of the federal government". He is "dedicated to limited, constitutional government" and believes there is a "proper role for government in a free society". He identifies "the real purpose of government in a society that professes to be free: protection of liberty".
• He does not dispute the Art I Sec 8 taxation powers of Congress, and advocates funding the federal government through some combination of "tariffs, excise taxes, and property taxes" -- all of which are verboten under Rothbardian zero-force-initiation dogma.
• He rejects the LP's absolutist position on abortion, and suggests that local jurisdictions should be free to draw the personhood line somewhere between conception and birth: "Would you be happy with a law that says abortion can be done no later than at six weeks' gestation? [...] I don't think anybody's going to win this. You [a pro-choice interviewer] are not even for abortion for anybody every time a minute before birth. You don't want to abort these normal babies. At the same time, I don't think we'll ever reach the stage where there will be no abortions. I want to sort this out the way the Constitution mandates, and that's at the local level."
• He rejects the LP's traditional absolutist demand for unrestricted immigration.
• He advocates what Rothbard called "an order to destatization", making immigration reform conditional on welfare reform: "The real problem is not immigration, but rather the welfare state magnet."
• He demurs from immediate or even near-term abolition of the nanny state: "Q: Department of Agriculture. Commerce. Health and Human Services. Housing and Urban Development. You'd get rid of all of them? A: Yeah. Of course, that's not on the immediate agenda, but in theory they're unnecessary, and we should think about what kind of a country we'd have without these departments."
• He cites social disruption as a reason to defer immediate destatization. "Q: Is [Medicare] something you'd get rid of? A: Yes, but that's not high on my agenda. As a matter of fact, we've taught a couple of generations of Americans to be very dependent on government. That's not my goal, because I think you have to have a transition period."
• He denies that markets can provide national defense: "A: I happen to think that the market can deliver any service better than the government can. Q: Even -- would you use that for defense too, or no? A: No, no, we'd have defense, but this militarism isn't defense, it's the opposite of defense."
  
• He believes in a "vital constitutional role in overseeing monetary policy", as opposed to the Rothbardian dogma that there should be no government-sanctioned currency.
• He apparently supports the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to coerce innocent third-party witnesses to attend trial: "What other principles from our founding era should we discard for convenience? Should we give up the First amendment because times have changed and free speech causes too much offense in our modern society? Should we give up the Second amendment, and trust that today’s government is benign and not to be feared by its citizens? How about the rest of the Bill of Rights?"
• He is a traditionalist about juries and presumably believes in the principle that jury duty is compulsory in the absence of compelling reasons against serving. Compulsory jury duty violates the anarcholibertarian Zero Aggression Principle.
• He supported the use of the tax-financed military against those nations (e.g. Afghanistan) that aided or harbored the planners of the 9/11 attack, and does not endorse the idea that the existence of the tax-financed U.S. military is a crime against liberty.
• He apparently believes in the federal government's constitutional authority to provide postal roads and manage interstate waterways, as a large percentage of the congressional earmarks he supports for his home district are for interstate highways and federal waterways.
  

Despite all these public heresies, this moderate member of the Libertarian Party is embraced and endorsed in some way by all of the following radical figures in the libertarian movement, each of whom is nevertheless a bitter critic of reform and moderation within the LP:

• David Nolan
• Mary Ruwart
  
• Lew Rockwell
• Burt Blumert
  
• Jacob Hornberger
• Walter Block
• Roderick Long
  
• Ernest Hancock
  
• L. Neil Smith
• Justin Raimondo
• Eric Garris
  
• Steve Kubby
• Christine Smith
• Wes Benedict
• Anthony Gregory
• Starchild
• Less Antman
  
• Lawrence Samuels
• Mark Selzer

Who is this Teflon libertarian moderate? You know damn well who he is. He's Ron Paul. He's the Libertarian analog to the HypnoToad and the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. His name is like the Godelian self-referential paradoxes that Captain Kirk invoked to make smoke come from the ears of alien robots. Only a tiny handful of LP radicals -- like Tom Knapp, Susan Hogarth, and perhaps the oh-so-conflicted Angela Keaton -- are immune to his Svengali-like powers of moderation. Radical libertarians confronting the campaign of the movement's most beloved political figure have to choose between inconsistency and self-marginalization, and it turns out the only way out of this catch-22 is to be gay. Radicals among the Outright Libertarians have a valid (though parochial) excuse for not supporting Paul, and the moderator of their forum candidly put it this way: "Expecting us to have a broad view of Paul within our niche is futile."

Tom Knapp estimates a 90% chance of Ron Paul seeking the LP nomination (which he of course would win), but I think the odds are unfortunately far lower. Ron Paul's bio (admittedly on his GOP nomination campaign site) doesn't mention the LP or his 1988 LP presidential candidacy, but Paul was making the same elision on his congressional web site as early as 2004. Paul will very likely stay in the GOP race as long as he thinks he has a chance to draw major non-embarrassing attention on the national stage inside (or outside) the 2008 GOP convention. When those odds start to look too long, he's likely to just reclaim his current House seat and from it try to surf the wave he's created. He doesn't need the LP to do that, and he's probably aware that a rerun of his 1988 LP presidential bid would be anticlimactic after the way his pre-Iowa GOP nomination campaign has rewritten the campaign manuals. Changing this picture would surely require some kind of wild card -- a major deterioration in Iraq, a major terrorist attack on Americans, or a sudden major entrance or exit among the (vice-)presidential candidates. Unfortunately, the wave of the Ron Paul Revolution remains very likely to be broken up by the rocks of the GOP primary calendar, when actual electoral returns and delegate counts will eclipse Internet polls and money bombs. The radicals listed above will then use their well-practiced skills in historical revisionism to try to explain why the relative success his campaign of constitutionalist minarchism did not tend to confirm the claims of LP reformers. LP leaders and reformers, meanwhile, will be trying to figure out how to dress up the LP's Anarchist Asylum so that it appears to offer political asylum to refugees from the Ron Paul Revolution. Will the radicals above give amnesty to Ron Paul Revolution veterans who advocate that the LP Platform make room for the heresies listed above, and treat them as converts instead of "infiltrators" and heretics? Not bloody likely. You see, it turns out that the Zero Aggression Principle has an exemption for anyone whose name is spelled R-o-n P-a-u-l.