Whats Wrong With Ron Paul-itics

Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread, the great new hope, the beacon of freedom for a new America. At least thats what you’d be led to believe if confined your political education to YouTube. Thankfully I haven’t.

For those who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Republican candidate running for the 2008 presidential elections. However he’s not the usual “I want to murder innocent foreigners to line my pockets and I hate fags” type of Republican. In fact he’s actually a “Libertarian” (using the grossly inaccurate American capitalist application of the word rather than the more accurate left wing application commonly used in Europe) who seems only to be in the Republican party because he believes there’s no way to achieve anything significant in American politics if you’re outside the two main parties.

He also different to most politicians at that level because I reckon he is actually principled and is not in it just for the power. He believes in something and wants to get people’s support so he can achieve it and he won’t dilute his beliefs just to win votes.

In line with “Libertarian” thinking he’s against America’s continual belligerent interfering with the rest of the world and isn’t afraid to say so and spell out what America has been doing to other countries.

All sounds good right? So what are my issues with him then?

Freedom Should be Banned (the word that is)

Well it all comes down to this notion of freedom. It’s a great word, and seems to go down really well in America. All you have to say is “freedom.. democracy.. the constitution.. founding fathers” and before you know it you’ll have everyone in your hand waving flags and swelling with American pride. Bush does this all the time talking about freedom and democracy and now Ron Paul is getting in on the act.

Now people of course know that Bush’s notion of freedom is bullshit and actually just translates to mass murder and more cash for his buddies. Despite this people still seem willing to just go along with Ron Paul’s notion of freedom without much more analysis than they did the last time someone said it.

If they did they’d soon find out that for the vast majority of people Ron Paul’s “Libertarian” notion of freedom is a very limited form of freedom indeed. You see if you just talk about freedom in the general sense you’re not getting at what’s important. Everyone with political beliefs of any worth (in my opinion) is in favour of maximising individual liberties, but everyone also draws the line somewhere. For instance most people, even “Libertarians”, would agree that we couldn’t allow the freedom to kill people because that would negate other people’s freedom, or as the old adage goes “your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose”.

So essentially no sane person is in favour of absolute individual freedom and most would agree that where two people’s freedoms come into conflict, a compromise has to be reached to maintain order. So, what becomes important in distinguishing your political beliefs is stating where you believe the limit of an individual’s freedoms lie and who or what form of social organisation is responsible for setting those limits and making judgements when they come into conflict.

The only place where you would have to harp on about being a libertarian would be some kind autocratic state where a presumption that individual liberty was held to be a good thing by most could not be assumed. But in America and most western “democracies” despite their flaws most people believe in the individual’s right to liberty, and so describing yourself as a libertarian and harping on about freedom in a generic sense is pretty worthless in terms of conveying your political stance. Whats more it allows you to appeal to and win over people’s emotions without explaining or exposing to them some of the meatier aspects of your politics which they may or may not agree with. This might be a good tactic electorally but it is not what I would consider entirely honest or principled.

So why am I making such a big issue of this? Well you see if “Libertarians” spelled out the freedoms and the limits to those freedoms they are in favour of it might become much more evident that most “Libertarians” believe in a great big stonking limit on freedom, which in my view would make any society in which “libertarian” ideals were fully implemented actually more akin to an authoritarian society. That limit on freedom is the notion of Property!

Proudhon had It Right

So how is property a limit on freedom? Most “Libertarians” tend to hold the notion of property and the freedom to acquire it in high regard so how can property itself limit freedom? Well to address that we have to delve into the “Libertarian” notion of “freedom” :

their concept of freedom is limited to the idea of “freedom from.” For them, freedom means simply freedom from the “initiation of force,” or the “non-aggression against anyone’s person and property.” The notion that real freedom must combine both freedom “to” and freedom “from” is missing in their ideology, as is the social context of the so-called freedom they defend.

What does this mean? it means that “Libertarians” are prone to concentrate their thought on removing things that hamper their freedoms like big government, taxes etc and give little thought to putting in place things that will give people freedoms, like the freedom to not worry about dying because you can’t afford health insurance or the freedom to be guaranteed an education, or the freedom to not starve if you’re put out of work.

Why do they they think of freedom in these terms? Well as mentioned above they lack the “social context”. Yeah sure we all want to be free but we have to aware that we live in an interdependent web of life and our freedoms must always be limited by the needs of others to have freedom too. Our own right to the pursuit of happiness cannot trample on the rights of others. Sometimes we lack this awareness of the social context because of the complexity of the system in which we live and and indirect nature of our transactions which hide the essential fact that every time you get more than you put in someone else gets less, everytime you make a profit it’s off someone else’s back, every time you acquire excess property you steal it from someone else.

Property is often regarded by “Libertarians” and indeed by mainstream society in general as some kind of real tangible thing rather than the social fiction that it is. The fact that one owns something means nothing in physical reality, it only exists as a abstract construct in our mind. It is a notion that was created and as such can be abolished if we see fit.

For example to say I own a field means nothing if I’m not in that field or currently using it, the notion that I own it is purely conceptual. Property only comes into being when we take something and fence it off either physically or through threat of force. This act of creating property, of fencing off what was held communally, is in effect an act of theft, as we are stealing it from the commons, hence as Proudhon said “property is theft“.

Now some “Libertarians” will respond to this notion and say they acknowledge that property is just an abstract concept but that it is still valid as people have the freedom to enter into contracts with each other. Well even ignoring the fact that no one can really own the property the contract may concern as it was stolen originally, there is the fact that the laws of property apply to millions of people who never entered into a contract to abide by it. For example my daughter was born into a house which is owned by a landlord, she has no freedom to use the house in which she lives, to paint her nursery walls or build a tree house, instead that freedom belongs to a landlord who lives far away, who has no use for this house and in fact has another house of his own.

The notion of property sounds good on a small scale, in that a person has a right to their home and their personal belongings and the tools of their trade, but when scaled up it ends up meaning that some have the right to acquire far more than they could ever actually need while many don’t even own their own home or belongings. Those who have more can unilaterally use their resources to effect the lives of the many who have less without any democratic process.

If you’re wondering what the alternative is and you’re thinking that the only one is some kind of soviet style collectivisation and you have your arguments ready about how that destroys people’s connection and sense of control over their environment (while quietly ignoring that the vast majority in our own system who are forced to pay lifelong mortgages to banks and live in rental properties where they can’t even put a nail in the wall undergo the same same detachment and loss of control and freedom) then you’re wrong as there are many ideas for alternatives to the current property laws.

My own personal favourite is a form of stewardship which maintains small scale holdings relative to the wealth of the community but all resources beyond that are held communally (where the community is a network based directly democratic one). You may also argue that a system without the freedom to acquire property and capital is a system without incentives, and in that case I recommend reading some books on psychology and anthropology and acquainting yourself with the myriad forms of social incentive and you might that find that desire to acquire excess wealth is often just a desire for social status which can be met in other ways in different social systems.

But the point I’m trying to make is not to argue my ideas on possible alternatives to property but simply to point out that while the right to own and acquire property is most certainly a freedom, it is also a gross imposition on the freedoms of others, to the extent that these impositions outweigh the justification for it. So I see the laws of property as a barrier to freedom and I don’t believe that anyone who supports them can honestly call themselves a “Libertarian”, hence my ongoing use of quotes around the word.

So whether you agree with me or not I think you would have to accept that freedom is not as clear cut as the sloganeering of Ron Paul would make out, and his ideas, even though I disagree with a good many of them, would be more honestly served if he spelled out the details rather than the headlines.

Step in the right direction?

Now of course some people have said to me “Okay so you don’t support Ron Paul’s American Style “Libertarian” ideas but you’re against big centralised government and believe in individuals and communities doing things for themselves, so wouldn’t his polices be a step in the right direction?”. This argument is somewhat akin to that of horizon anarchism whereby getting closer to your goal in increments is seen as a viable path. I’m not against this idea in principle but it doesn’t hold true in all cases especially if the incremental move forward blows away other incremental moves already made.

What I’m saying in relation to Ron Paul’s policies is that while removing centralised taxation and large centralised government would bring certain freedoms it would still leave the imposition of property in place and as long as this is so we need the things that big government and taxes provide like welfare and health care to ensure people don’t starve and die due to their lack of property and resources.

So while I’m not against incremental steps towards a better society I believe that the removal of big government and its associated benefits and disadvantages has to go hand in hand with the removal of excess private property otherwise we’re just gaining some freedoms in exchange for others.

The other point is that while large government maintains some basic freedoms for a lot of people (the freedom not to die from starvation when you lose your job for example) the freedoms most people would gain from Ron Paul’s reduction of government would be minimal, as most freedom would be gained by those with the most assets. I hear a lot of Ron Paul supporters thinking that Ron Paul is against large corporations but I think they are misunderstanding him. He’s against the way certain large corporations are supported by goverment though lobbyists and handouts and the like. So while his policies would certainly affect these companies they would either adjust to the new playing field or be replaced by companies that could. It would not however affect the existence of large corporations but would instead give free reign to the dynamics of capitalism to allow them to exert even further undemocratic control over our lives (and before you say it, ordinary people exerting consumer control is not a democratic counter balance, as some people and corporations have more consumer power than others – see explanation on property above )

So with all that said and done…

So there you go, Ron Paul has a sound and ethical foreign policy which might be reason enough to vote for him given that America’s still in the thick of a war. He’s out there actually talking about things like the nature of the economy and the purpose of government, which are things which need to be discussed and explored continually rather than glossed over and accepted as they are by the usual gaggle of self-serving baby kissing sound byte politicians.

However he is not a great new hope for America, his “Libertarian” policies are not some great new idea but hark back to the old and flawed ideas of individual-anarchism and right-wing “Libertarianism” which have been argued over and refuted many times in the last 150 years or so by people more able than myself. While I’ve no doubt these policies would be good news for capitalism and those who benefit greatly from it, it would leave ordinary people worse off in the long run.

So now that I’ve explained it could you people please stop with the badly edited YouTube homages to Ron Paul that just say freedom about a hundred times while building up to an emotional crescendo with a cheesy soundtrack, I can’t take them any more