The Freedom to Starve
Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul
By SHERRY WOLF
12/26/07 "Counterpunch' -- "POLITICS, LIKE nature, abhors a vacuum,"
goes the revamped aphorism. Republican presidential candidate Ron
Paul's surprising stature among a small but vocal layer of antiwar
activists and leftist bloggers appears to bear this out.
At the October 27, 2007, antiwar protests in dozens of cities
noticeable contingents of supporters carried his campaign placards
and circulated sign-up sheets. The Web site antiwar.com features a
weekly Ron Paul column. Some even dream of a Left-Right gadfly
alliance for the 2008 ticket. According to the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, liberal maverick and Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis
Kucinich told supporters in late November he was thinking of making
Ron Paul his running mate if he were to get the nomination.
No doubt, the hawkish and calculating Hillary Rodham Clinton and
flaccid murmurings of Barack Obama, in addition to the uninspiring
state of the antiwar movement that backed a prowar candidate in 2004,
help fuel the desperation many activists feel. But leftists must
unequivocally reject the reactionary libertarianism of this longtime
Texas congressman and 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
Ron Paul's own campaign Web site reads like the objectivist rantings
of Ayn Rand, one of his theoretical mentors. As with the Atlas
Shrugged author's other acolytes, neocon guru Milton Friedman and
former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, Paul argues, "Liberty
means free-market capitalism." He opposes "big government" and in the
isolationist fashion of the nation's Pat Buchanans, he decries
intervention in foreign nation's affairs and believes membership in
the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty.
Naturally, it is not Ron Paul's paeans to the free market that some
progressives find so appealing, but his unwavering opposition to the
war in Iraq and consistent voting record against all funding for the
war. His straightforward speaking style, refusal to accept the
financial perks of office, and his repeated calls for repealing the
Patriot Act distinguish him from the snakeoil salesmen who populate
Congress.
Paul is no power-hungry, poll-tested shyster. Even the liberalish
chat show hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on "The View" gave a
friendly reception to Paul's folksy presentation, despite his
paleoconservative views on abortion, which he-a practicing
obstetrician-argues is murder.
Though Paul is unlikely to triumph in the primaries, it is worth
taking stock not only of his actual positions, but more importantly
the libertarian underpinnings that have wooed so many self-described
leftists and progressives. Because at its core, the fetishism of
individualism that underlies libertarianism leads to the denial of
rights to the very people most radicals aim to champion-workers,
immigrants, Blacks, women, gays, and any group that lacks the
economic power to impose their individual rights on others.
Ron Paul's positions
A cursory look at Paul's positions, beyond his opposition to the war
and the Patriot Act, would make any leftist cringe.
Put simply, he is a racist. Not the cross-burning, hood-wearing kind
to be sure, but the flat Earth society brand that imagines a
colorblind world where 500 years of colonial history and slavery are
dismissed out of hand and institutional racism and policies under
capitalism are imagined away. As his campaign Web site reads:
"The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a
limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of
individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market
capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence-not
skin color, gender, or ethnicity."
Paul was more blunt writing in his independent political newsletter
distributed to thousands of supporters in 1992. Citing statistics
from a study that year produced by the National Center on
Incarceration and Alternatives, Paul concluded: "Given the
inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice
system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black
males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." Reporting
on gang crime in Los Angeles, Paul commented: "If you have ever been
robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-
footed they can be."
His six-point immigration plan appears to have been cribbed from the
gun-toting vigilante Minutemen at the border. "A nation without
secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight
terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked," reads
his site. And he advocates cutting off all social services to
undocumented immigrants, including hospitals, schools, clinics, and
even roads (how would that work?).
"The public correctly perceives that neither political party has the
courage to do what is necessary to prevent further erosion of both
our border security and our national identity," he wrote in a 2005
article. "Unfortunately, the federal government seems more intent
upon guarding the borders of other nations than our own." The article
argues that, "Our current welfare system also encourages illegal
immigration by discouraging American citizens from taking low-wage
jobs." The solution: end welfare so that everyone will be forced to
work at slave wages. In order that immigrants not culturally dilute
the nation, he proposes that "All federal government business should
be conducted in English."
Though he rants about his commitment to the Constitution, he
introduced an amendment altering the Fourteenth Amendment
guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States, saying
in a 2006 article: "Birthright citizenship, originating in the 14th
amendment, has become a serious cultural and economic dilemma for our
nation. We must end the perverse incentives that encourage immigrants
to come here illegally, including the anchor baby incentive."
Here we come up against the limits of libertarianism-Paul wants a
strong state to secure the borders, but he wants all social welfare
expenditures eliminated for those within them.
Paul is quite vocal these days about his rank opposition to abortion-
"life begins at conception," he argues. He promotes a "states'
rights" position on abortion-that decades old hobgoblin of civil
rights opponents. And he has long opposed sexual harassment
legislation, writing in his 1988 book Freedom Under Siege (available
online), "Why don't they quit once the so-called harassment starts?"
In keeping with his small government worldview, he goes on to argue
against the government's right "to tell an airline it must hire
unattractive women if it does not want to."
In that same book, written as the AIDS crisis was laying waste to the
American gay male population prompting the rise of activist groups
demanding research and drugs, Paul attacked AIDS sufferers
as "victims of their own lifestyle." And in a statement that gives a
glimpse of the ruling-class tyranny of individualism he asserts that
AIDS victims demanding rushed drug trials were impinging on "the
rights of insurance company owners."
Paul wants to abolish the Department of Education and, in his
words, "end the federal education monopoly" by eliminating all taxes
that go toward public education and "giving educational control back
to parents." Which parents would those be? Only those with the
leisure time, educational training, and temperament commensurate with
home schooling! Whatever real problems the U.S. education system
suffers from-and there are many-eliminating 99 percent literacy rates
that generations of public education has achieved and tossing the
children of working parents out of the schools is not an appealing or
viable option.
Paul also opposes equal pay for equal work, a minimum wage, and,
naturally, trade unions. In 2007, he voted against restricting
employers' rights to interfere in union drives and against raising
the federal minimum wage to $7.25. In 2001, he voted for zero-funding
for OSHA's Ergonomics Rules, instead of the $4.5 billion. At least
he's consistent.
Libertarians like Paul are for removing any legislative barriers that
may restrict business owners' profits, but are openly hostile to
alleviating economic restrictions that oppress most workers. Only a
boss could embrace this perverse concept of "freedom."
Individualism versus collectivism
There is a scene in Monty Python's satire Life of Brian where Brian,
not wanting to be the messiah, calls out to the crowd: "You are all
individuals." The crowd responds in unison: "We are all individuals."
Libertarians, using pseudo-iconoclastic logic, transform this comical
send-up of religious conformity into their own secular dogma in which
we are all just atomized beings. "Only an individual has rights," not
groups such as workers, Blacks, gays, women, and minorities, Ron Paul
argues. True, we are all individuals, but we didn't just bump into
one another. Human beings by nature are social beings who live in a
collective, a society. Under capitalism, society is broken down into
classes in which some individuals-bosses, for example-wield
considerably more power than others-workers.
To advocate for society to be organized on the basis of strict
individualism, as libertarians do, is to argue that everyone has the
right to do whatever he or she wants. Sounds nice in the abstract,
perhaps. But what happens when the desires of one individual infringe
on the desires of another? Libertarians like Paul don't shy away from
the logical ramifications of their argument. "The dictatorial power
of a majority" he argues ought to be replaced by the unencumbered
power of individuals-in other words, the dictatorial power of a
minority.
So if the chairman of Dow Chemical wants to flush his company's toxic
effluence into rivers and streams, so be it. If General Motors wants
to pay its employees starvation wages, that's their right too. Right-
wing libertarians often appear to not want to grapple with meddlesome
things like economic and social power. As the bourgeois radical
Abraham Lincoln observed of secessionist slaveowners, "The perfect
liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people."
Too much government?
Unwavering hostility to government and its collection of taxes is
another hallmark of libertarianism. Given the odious practices of
governments under capitalism, their repugnant financial priorities,
and bilking of the lower classes through taxation it's hardly
surprising that libertarians get a hearing.
But the conclusion that the problem is "big government" strips the
content from the form. Can any working-class perspective seriously
assert that we have too much government involvement in providing
health care? Too much oversight of the environment, food production,
and workplace safety? Would anyone seriously consider hopping a
flight without the certainty of national, in fact international, air
traffic control? Of course not. The problem doesn't lie with some
abstract construct, "government," the problem is that the actual
class dynamics of governments under capitalism amount to taxing
workers and the poor in lieu of the rich and powerful corporations
and spending those resources on wars, environmental devastation, and
the enrichment of a tiny swath of society at the expense of the rest
of us.
Ron Paul argues, "Government by majority rule has replaced strict
protection of the individual from government abuse. Right of property
ownership has been replaced with the forced redistribution of wealth
and property" Few folks likely to be reading this publication will
agree that we actually live in a society where wealth and property
are expropriated from the rich and given to workers and the poor.
Even the corporate media admit that there has been a wholesale
redistribution of wealth in the opposite direction. But Paul exposes
here the class nature of libertarianism-it is the provincial
political outlook of the middle-class business owner obsessed with
guarding his lot. As online anti-libertarian writer Ernest Partridge
puts it in "Liberty for some":
"Complaints against "big government" and "over-regulation," though
often justified, also issue from the privileged who are frustrated at
finding that their quest for still greater privileges at the expense
of their community are curtailed by a government which, ideally,
represents that community. Pure food and drug laws curtail profits
and mandate tests as they protect the general public."
In fact, the libertarians' opposition to the government, or the state
if you will, is less out of hostility to what the state actually does
than who is running it. Perhaps this explains Paul's own clear
contradiction when it comes to abortion, since his opposition to
government intervention stops at a woman's uterus. But freedom for
socialists has always been about more than the right to choose
masters. Likewise, Paul appears to be for "small government" except
when it comes to using its power to restrict immigration. His
personal right to not have any undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
seems to trump the right of free movement of individuals, but not
capital, across borders.
Right-wing libertarians, quite simply, oppose the state only insofar
as it infringes the right of property owners.
Left-Right alliance?
Some antiwar activists and leftists desperate to revitalize a
flagging antiwar movement make appeals to the Left to form a Left-
Right bloc with Ron Paul supporters. Even environmental activist and
left-wing author Joshua Frank, who writes insightful and often
scathing attacks on liberal Democrats' capitulations to reactionary
policies, recently penned an article citing-though not endorsing-
Paul's campaign in calling for leftist antiwar activists to reach out
to form a sort of Left-Right antiwar alliance. He argues, "Whether
we're beer swilling rednecks from Knoxville or mushroom eatin'
hippies from Eugene, we need to come together," ("Embracing a new
antiwar movement").
Supporters of Ron Paul who show up to protests should have their
reactionary conclusions challenged, not embraced. Those of his
supporters who are wholly ignorant of his broader politics beyond the
war, should be educated about them. And those who advocate his
noxious politics, should be attacked for their racism, immigrant
bashing, and hostility to the values a genuine Left champions. The
sort of Left-Right alliance Frank advocates is not only
opportunistic, but is also a repellent to creating the multiracial
working-class movement that is sorely needed of we are to end this
war. What Arabs, Blacks, Latinos-and antiracist whites, for that
matter-would ever join a movement that accommodates to this know-
nothing brand of politics?
Discontent with the status quo and the drumbeat of electoralism is
driving many activists and progressives to seek out political
alternatives. But libertarianism is no radical political solution to
inequality, violence, and misery. When the likes of Paul shout: "We
need freedom to choose!" we need to ask, "Yes, but freedom for whom?"
Because the freedom to starve to death is the most dubious freedom of
all.
Sherry Wolf is on the editorial board of the International Socialist
Review. She can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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