Congressman Ron Paul is leaving Congress for good, following three failed runs for President, once as the Libertarian candidate in 1988, and twice as a Republican in 2008 and 2012. His third was his strongest showing, in which pundits puzzled whether the Obstetrician from Lake Charles would upset the Iowa caucuses. He did take third place in Iowa, followed by second place in New Hampshire, but his primary battle ran out of steam by the time he hit Nevada, where he placed worse than Newt Gingrich, whose campaign was all over when he lost Florida to Mitt Romney and his ad blitz in the Sunshine State.
Ron Paul’s last speech on the House floor maligned the efforts of free market economists to convince the public that less government and more private enterprise would reinvigorate the economy and restore prosperity to this country. He failed to recognize that most Americans have no information or experience with free-market capitalism, as most states and the federal government have instituted a mixed system based on limited government intervention which has gotten bigger. The need for identity and security trump liberty, for a man without a name cannot call forth anything for himself. In the same guise, no man can step out into the unknown without knowing who he is. Human beings are fussy like that.
This matter of identity, based on traditions as truth, animates the virulent, intractable conflict between Hamas and Israel along the Gaza Strip. Peace and freedom mean nothing if one side refuses to recognize the right of the other party to exist. Such is the case with Hamas, still expressing in their party’s charter the end of the Jewish stat. At least once before has Congressman Ron Paul avowed this “Garden of Eden” libertarianism during the primary debates. He discouraged sanctions with Iran. He claimed that free trade would normalize relations between Israel and Iran, even complimenting the rescue efforts of the American Navy for Iranian officers in the Strait of Hormuz as an example of international friendship. Former Senator Rick Santorum correctly chided the Congressman’s dangerously childish naiveté. Under a Paul presidency, the United States would have had no troops stationed there in the first place, Santorum reminded everyone.
Now Congressman Paul’s naiveté has crossed into insolence, as he continues to insist, along with left-leaning interests, that Israel is the aggressor, not Hamas. His recent Op-Ed for the progressive “OpEdNews.com”reeks of a blind moral equivalence, one which gives small “L” libertarians and limited government conservatives a bad name. Even HBO Comedian/armchair political pundit Bill Maher had more sense. In 2006, Maher gladly respected the opinion of then minority leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who explained that the Islamic terrorists act from a different evil, a malevolent opposition which surrenders youth, women, and handicapped individuals as suicide bombers for the greater cause. The same ideology that runs Iran has no qualms about running a nuclear arms race, even if the leaders destroy themselves and their Muslim allies in order to destroy Israel and usher in a new Islamic era.
Ron Paul’s insolent naiveté has placed the commitment of “limited”ahead of “government”, neglecting to notice the evil forces in this world which do not tolerate individual liberty and religious freedoms of any kind. It is amazing how easily legislators forget that the same President who won the dispute presidential election in 2009 has declared not four years prior his desire to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” The Texas Congressman’s officiously charges that Gaza is “a concentration camp" of Israel’s making. A flowering resort community was blossoming in the region, a unique reflection of the prophet Isaiah’s premonition of fountains bursting forth in the desert. Sadly, instead of mountains singing and trees clapping, there is now bombing and desecration, a culture of death which proliferates in the ancient land of the Philistines, enshrined in the charter of Hamas. Attacking both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Paul decries the United States’ “one-sided”foreign policy as the chief stumbling-block to peace. Once again blaming the victim, the Congressman refuses to realize that Israel’s giving up Gaza was a means to pursue peace, and it did not work. The rockets flying and the populations fleeing in the region go beyond the self-determination of one people (Hamas), but the annihilation of another: the Jews.
Paul’s moral blindness on the Gaza-Israeli conflict sheds light on the eternal limitations of libertarian philosophy as a political framework. Beyond its economic insight, the deeper needs and expansive fears of man, the decisions dividing life and death from good and evil, cannot be answered with “less government.”One Jewish scholar, free-economist economist Murray Rothbard, acknowledged this limitation. Paul still has not. Republicans should rejoice that the morally ambivalent policies of a foreign policy based on extreme limited government are leaving with Ron Paul’s retirement. A Republican platform of less government with a stronger stance on Israel’s behalf can encourage peace, not one at any costs, but one which deprives religious fanaticism of its illiberal sting.
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