Ron Paul’s Economic Plan: Cut 5 Cabinet Agencies, Cut Taxes, Cut President’s Pay - Washington Wire - WSJ

Mr. Paul’s “Restore America” plan calls for a drastically reduced federal government to help spur American business — a familiar theme for the Texas Republican and many of the GOP White House hopefuls. But unlike some of his Republican rivals who have released economic plans, the libertarian congressman mostly avoids the weeds of tax and trade policy, according to excerpts.

But Mr. Paul does get specific when he calls for a 10% reduction in the federal work force, while pledging to limit his presidential salary to $39,336, which his campaign says is “approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.” The current pay rate for commander in chief is $400,000 a year.

The Paul plan would also lower the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35%, though it is silent on personal income tax rates, which Mr. Paul would like to abolish. The congressman would end taxes on personal savings and extend “all Bush tax cuts.”

He would also allow U.S. firms to repatriate capital without additional taxes. Some lawmakers have recently proposed such legislation as a way to spur job growth. Its critics argue that a tax holiday for companies with money abroad has not historically led to domestic investment.

But the plan, at its heart, is libertarian. While promising to cut $1 trillion in spending during his first year, Mr. Paul would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, Interior and Housing and Urban Development. When former Massachusetts Gov. MItt Romney unveiled his economic plan last month, he said he would submit legislation to reduce nonsecurity, discretionary spending by $20 billion.

Ron Paul’s Economic Plan: Cut 5 Cabinet Agencies, Cut Taxes, Cut President’s Pay - Washington Wire - WSJ

The American Spectator : It's Not Its Business

More evidence that the Right is coming to accept libertarian arguments against government's involvement in marriage, when an argument such as this even gets published in the socially conservative American Spectator!

It is thus entirely possible that a couple of the same sex might very well be better suited to marriage than a couple of the opposite sex. Undoubtedly, there are many who would consider such a notion abhorrent and blasphemous. But Congress cannot legislate morality. Government cannot make you a good person. Marriage and family are important parts of our lives. Perhaps even the most important part of our lives. As such it is a part of our lives far too important to be left to the whims of Washington.

The American Spectator : It's Not Its Business

Republican Postmortem

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, he put together a coalition of (for want of better terms) Christian fundamentalists, economic libertarians, and national-security conservatives. A future Republican electoral success cannot pretend the economic libertarian leg of this coalition does not exist.

The current president, because of the Iraq War, because of his tax policies, and because he successfully energized social conservatives by invoking their fear and contempt for homosexuals, managed an electoral success in 2004, a success that unraveled in 2006 with the Democratic victory in the House and Senate, largely over Bush's grotesque incompetence in executing the War, although Bush's extravagant and irresponsible spending policies and the political corruption of so many Republican politicians played a role.

Libertarians in this coalition had no candidate in the 2008 election. As a libertarian myself I still pulled the lever for McCain, but that was simply a vote against Obama. Why? It was virtually impossible to make a positive intellectual case for McCain. McCain knows nothing of economics it seems and he apparently feels embarrassed by social conservatives. Frankly, I am impressed that he received as many votes as he did.

McCain and the Republicans actually lost the tax issue to the Democrats in 2008, having ceded it to Obama's now famous "95% tax cut" rhetoric.

As a libertarian I come to the issues that energize social conservatives from a different point of view than they.

I seek limited government and quite frankly I could care less what anybody does in the bedroom or what they do with their bodies. Individual human beings, in my thinking, "own" their own bodies and lives and should have their natural rights recognized and respected by the law.

Unfortunately, on such issues as a woman's right to choose, the right of individuals to form a marriage contract, and the right to consume whatever they wish in the nature of foods, medicines, drugs, etc., are subjects about which social conservatives and libertarians will disagree profoundly.

As a libertarian I ask myself how could I possibly ally myself with people who believe they have moral right to deprive me of my right to life, that is, my right to live my life the way I want to, so long as I respect the equal rights of others?

Let's be clear. The only reason to do so is because the collectivists on the Left are even worse in their disrespect for individual rights than are the social conservatives on the Right.

Social conservatives, if they value their economic freedom and want to have a chance at future electoral victory, might consider showing a little more respect for the economic libertarians that made up the original Reagan coalition.

On the other hand, it is possible libertarians may be able to forge some sort of coalition with voters who have voted Democratic in recent elections but who have no stomach for socialism.

Until and unless social conservatives realize that the libertarian leg is as disgusted with religion-based governmental intervention into a person's most personal and private life, as they are with the libertarian commitment to individualism, the Republican Party will not be able to reclaim Reagan's authority and Reagan's active belief that the only justifiable purpose of government is the protection of individual rights.

Tom Anderson

November 2008

The Politics of Gay Indignation

The Advocate.com, the premier national gay and lesbian news magazine, hosted a lead article by Kerry Eleveld entitled "McCain's" Top Strategist Addresses Log Cabin Republicans," that has stimulated over forty comments. I take note that not one makes any reasoned arguments for its opposition to McCain-Palin. Together, these comments merely make stereotypical assumptions and call names.

I think the gays writing these comments make the error of misunderstanding opposition to "gay rights." If one is a Christian, it is simply difficult, if not impossible, to accept the notion that homosexuals and their sexual expression can be embraced as normal or life-affirming.

As a gay man I can argue all I want to, and disparage all Christians as well as the views of traditional relgious people, but beyond making myself feel self-righteously justified and morally superior, what is the point?

I have wallowed myself in a certain amount of intellectual and moral indignation over the religious influence in the Republican Party. It feels good to protest what one conceives as the moral imbecility of religious people, but the expression of such feeling smacks of personal indulgence, and quite frankly, gays need less drama and more hardheadedness in their politics. Indignation doesn't work.

Hostility to homosexuality is found in both parties, for it is a cultural expression of Judeo-Christian teachings. The best way to promote change is to get off our high-horses and our easy moral indignation and actually work within the parties on those issues, such as economics, foreign policy, etc., where we have opportunity to exert some measure of influence with those who may oppose "gay rights."

As a libertarian, I will be voting for McCain-Palin, first because I believe in limited government, reduced taxation, greater general liberty for people, and second, because Obama does NOT favor "gay rights" either--specifically gay marriage. Neither does McCain, Hillary or Bill, although McCain and Obama both say they support other reforms that advance equal rights before the law.

Notwithstanding, you can be sure that there will never be pro-gay rights legislation until the members of Congress can be elected who favor such legislation, and that will not happen until ordinary religiously-oriented Americans FEEL comfortable around gays and realize that recognizing gay rights does not diminish the rights of other people. How else do we raise this comfort level if we refuse to make coalitions on other issues with which we may agree?

If gays wish to have their rights and interests acknowledged, respected, and supported politically, they simply must begin to advance the case for gay rights on the basis of reason and fundamental fairness. Straight people must come to the realization that gays are, in all respects other than sexual orientation, exactly like themselves, with the same concerns about national defense, taxation, energy policy and every other public issue other than such gay "hot-button" causes as marriage.

It is not likely gay marriage will be accepted by religious Americans as normal or acceptable, at least within the lifetimes of those reading this post. However, progress can be made on other issues, such as employment discrimination, in which straight Americans have had some personal experience and may therefore have the capacity to understand the concerns of gay Americans in not having their livelihoods arbitrarily taken from them.

I suggest there are a number of issues in which gays might ally with members of either of the major parties. Permitting gays in the military does not pose the threat to religious Americans that gay marriage does. The insipidity of cashiering gay linguists in the military, for example, might very well be an issue gays can urge with success upon a new administration, whether Republican or Democratic. But if members or major coalitions in either party feel insulted by self-righteous gays, why would such members offer their support to gays on such issues?

Outlawing anti-gay employment discrimination can be advanced on the principle of equality of rights before the law. At the very least, this is an issue in which no obvious objection can be advanced on religious grounds, as there is with marriage.

So long as the very definition of marriage remains a culturally disputed notion, gays will lose, and even their "victories" will become Pyrrhic, as the opposition uses such apparent advances to prey upon the ordinary fears of Americans.

Americans want to have their voices heard on the issue of marriage rather than have basic changes forced upon them through the actions of the courts. So long as such basic change comes "top-down" upon the people, Americans will be vulnerable to those religious folks who do bear a grudge against gays. But not all religious folks agree with the Don Wildmons and the Fred Phelps of this world and gays only hurt their prospects by talking and acting as if they do.

I have always argued that the subject of gay marriage was the worst possible linchpin for a political strategy to advance the equal rights of gay Americans. The reason is simple. When has any group been successful in advancing its cause politically by attacking one of the opposition's central tenets of belief?

Satan doesn't attack Christianity by attacking a belief in the existence of God. Rather he undermines the world view by attacking its vulnerabilities, at the margins. He works his will with subtlety. To fundamentalist Christians, gays are in league with Satan to destroy civilization as we know it. We can deny we are in league with the devil all we want to. Instead of fighting Christian paranoid fantasies, why not use them to our benefit? At minimum, this means we don't stand the on the rooftops shouting down Christians as idiotic moral cretins, which many gays do, if the comments section referenced at the beginning of this post are an indication.

To put this insight into another context, why do you suppose Christians still bristle when philosophers and scientists put forth Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the origin of species? They do because evolution substitutes a mechanical principle for the action of a divine creator, leaving the Creator with nothing much to do. In short, evolution trivializes God and makes the entire religious enterprise seem merely jejune, nothing more than bedtime stories and intellectual comfort food for people too weak-minded to accept the harsh facts of scientific realism.

These are just the facts of the case. Let's discuss strategies for reaching our goals as gays rather than attack people whose support we will ultimately need to pass any meaningful legislation.

Tom Anderson
September 2008

Gay Republicans?

Or, Why Gays Should Hold Their Noses and Vote Republican Anyway

Far be it from me to suggest that gay men and women differ so little in their political views that it makes sense to talk about a specifically “gay” political ideology.

Yet gays do seem to have some common political objectives, mostly having to do with the right to be left alone.

Unfortunately, the desire of gays to live their lives without being discriminated against in employment and to be able to form close personal and sexual relationships in the same manner and with the same legal protections as heterosexuals, outrages the Christian fundamentalists in our midst, causing them to express their hostility to gays politically by supporting Republican politicians who mouth anti-gay slogans at election time, but who, at other times and places, employ gays, have gay friends, and may even engage in homosexual activity themselves, as “closet homosexuals.”

As seen in the recent Foley scandal, some gays seek to “out” closeted gays, arguing that honesty is better than hypocrisy.

I argue that gays do have a common politics, and it is a very old political viewpoint–-the French have a wonderful phrase for it: laissez-faire capitalism.

What the phrase basically means is that the purpose of law should be to secure the rights of the individual against those exercising through law disproportionate economic and political power. It means, simply, “Leave us alone!”

What gives those exercising greater power the right to do so? What gives government the right to deny to gay couples, what is offered to heterosexual couples upon payment of a small legal fee?

Any group in society secures its power to abridge the rights of others by getting laws enacted that are generally justified at the time of their enactment by appeals to “the public interest” or to some similar political abstraction that can be twisted and turned to serve whatever political goals the group has in mind.

At present the varied political interests that make up the American electorate are broadly arrayed into “conservatives” and “liberals”. We also have two major political parties: the dominant party, the Republicans, consist of a very broad coalition of interests, and the Democrats, the party “in the wilderness”, seems far less broad, apparently consisting of Neanderthal Leftists, such as those whose views are best represented by The Nation magazine, and other self-styled “progressive” groups each of which seems to have a favored hobby-horse to ride.

What until fairly recently distinguished the two parties was the willingness of the Republicans to champion “limited government.” Ronald Reagan welcomed the Christian Right into his crusade to “get the government off the backs of the American people”, but he never let the Christians rule the roost. While his administration was not particularly helpful to gays with the explosion of HIV-related deaths in the 1980’s, indifference and incomprehension are not the same as hatred and the desire to do injury.

Even today, as the Foley scandal highlights Republican attitudes towards gays, what emerges is more an attitude of opportunism–the desire to play the “gay card” in order to motivate homophobic Christians to vote for Republican candidates–than any outright hatred or desire to inflict injury upon gays.

As much as homophobic Christians might wish to harm gays, the most significant anti-gay legislation since the election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency in 1992 has been the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by Clinton. The other significant bit of law to harm gay people was the Clinton military policy of “Don’t Ask–-Don’t Tell”. Justified in the name of making it possible for gays to serve honorably in the military, the policy has become a shameful blot upon the military by a civilian government that seeks to keep its anti-gay credentials well burnished for election-day politics, despite the positive harm the policy does to our military–-depriving it of skilled and expensively trained personnel by cashiering gay soldiers and officers–-and to gay self-esteem, by treating gays as second-class citizens, unworthy and unneeded in the defense of the country against foreign enemies.

Any hope that the long-suffering American people might be done with “Big Brother” type government was dashed in the 1988 election of the first Bush Presidency. Reagan rose politically with the first conservative revolution, the taking over of the Republican Party in 1964 with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. “Goldwater Republicans” considered themselves “movement conservatives” and typically believed in a very libertarian-oriented society where government, particularly the federal government, would have its many functions substantially reduced or eliminated.

Why democratic government tends to expand in its functions despite the best efforts of people like Goldwater or Reagan to restrain it, is a conversation for another time. But there is a lesson for gays to heed.

Gays need to look to the history of a party and not just its current crop of politicians to see where specific gay interests are more likely to find political defense.

Are not gays interested in a prosperous economy where their hard work and intelligence are rewarded? Do not gays enjoy keeping most of their earnings for their own use and disposal rather than have increasingly larger portions of their earned income siphoned off to support tax breaks, subsidies, and special legislation for Big Business, otherwise known as Crony Capitalism?

Do not gays have an interest in protecting our borders against illegal immigrants? Are we not interested in preventing further attacks on our cities from Islamo-Fascists? Do we not enjoy tax cuts? Are not our economic interests enhanced by laws that reduce government intervention into the economy?

I don’t like to quote statistics, but isn’t it true that gays have more disposable income than non-gays?

Gays don’t seem to fit the profile generally used to describe the left-wing “nut-cases” that control the Democratic Party at present, for the simple reason that gays want respect and freedom to be left alone. They don’t want what the Democratic Party normally promises: more subsidies, more taxes, more regulation, more intrusion of the Nanny State into every aspect of their lives.

The Republican Party today is up for grabs. George Bush is not a movement conservative. I believe gays should not leave the Party but reclaim it by holding it up to its professed libertarian origins. What will become clear, if the proper arguments are made, is that homophobic Christians in the Party express beliefs difficult to square with limited-government rhetoric. And while there may be more homophobes than gays in the GOP, clearly gays can have a significant impact intellectually by making the arguments that Republicans really can’t ignore.

To some extent, I must confess, either party has some libertarian origins gays could draw upon; but which image is more likely to be gay? A ward of the state, or a businessman? A ward of the state, or a creative artist? A ward of the state, or a leatherman seeking to find his bliss in consensual erotic adventures?

The Republican Party, whether the current crop of politicians understands this or not, is the “natural” home for gays and lesbians. Our nemesis is not the Party, but the homophobes within it who would replace politicians with priests.

Tom Anderson

October 2006