Can Libertarianism And Republicanism Co-Exist?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – According to Politico, the libertarian brand of Republicanism is making inroads and a big comeback.  I will tell you that certainly when it comes to young people, the youth, they tend to be more libertarian.  There’s a problem with that.  Young people age.  As they age, they tend to become a little less libertine or libertarian.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Politico.com has this story: “Libertarianism Goes Mainstream.”

[reading]

Stereotyped for decades as pro-pot, pro-porn and pro-pacifism, libertarians are becoming mainstream.

Fair or not, Ron Paul epitomized to a swath of voters the caricature of a goofy grandpa who invests in gold, stockpiles guns, sees black helicopters whirling overhead and quotes Friedrich Hayek.

His ride into the sunset — combined with an evolving electorates’s move away from hot-button social issues — gives a new libertarian guard the opportunity to rebrand their governing philosophy as more reasonable, serious and compatible with the Republican Party.

Led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), libertarians hope to become a dominant wing of the GOP by tapping into a potent mix of war weariness, economic anxiety and frustration with federal overreach in the fifth year of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The country’s continuing fixation on fiscal issues, especially spending and debt, allows them to emphasize areas of agreement with conservative allies who are looking for ways to connect with Republicans who aren’t passionate about abortion or same-sex marriage. A Democratic administration ensures consensus on the right that states should get as much power as possible.

[end reading]

Mike:  I love the way that people who are uneducated about the federal process write about it.  Oh, they’re all agreeing that states ought to get as much power as possible.  This is the perversion.  I didn’t intend to get off the libertarian story, but this is just so perverted.  The states ought to get power?  The states created the federal government.  It doesn’t exist if the states don’t agree that they need to go have a convention in Philadelphia and amend the Articles of Confederation.  It doesn’t exist if the conventions convened in the states to ratify the Constitution don’t ratify it and give it power.  It wouldn’t exist tomorrow if the states didn’t call elections and say: We’re going to have new elections this year like we do every two years and send our members of Congress.  It wouldn’t exist if the states didn’t have elections to elect the next United States senator.

The idea here that the states are somehow just a bunch of groveling counties that exist at the pleasure of the federal government is an absolutely bass-ackwards proposition.  The writer, James Hohmann has it exactly backwards.  I suspect that Mr. Hohmann is not alone.  I suspect also that most people that write at Politico or Washington Compost or New York Times or any of the other vainglorious news publications of our day also have it incorrect.  As a matter of fact, I suspect that about 90 percent of the citizenry has it incorrect, which is why they tolerate this massive mess that we call a federal government that is anything but federal.  It is an insult to etymology and the term federal to call the government that we have today federal.

We ought to do an entire show about that.  What is federal supposed to mean?  Why would we want a federal instead of a national legislature?  Did you know that in the early days of the convention that produced the Constitution, the term national legislature was used in James Madison’s brainchild, the Virginia Plan.  It was voted down in the first week, voted down in the first week.  [mocking] “Mr. Madison, we’re not here to make a national legislature, sir.  We’re here to amend the Articles.  We’re not going to have a national legislature,” even though Madison kept trying to insert it back in and then kept trying to have a veto power over the acts of the states inserted in what ultimately became this thing called the Constitution, so that the almighty federal overlords would actually have the authority spelled out in the Constitution to veto acts of the states that they didn’t like.  He was never able to achieve this.  He even tried in the first Congress to get that amendment, he called it a rights of consciousness amendment, inserted back into what we know as the Bill of Rights today.  He failed in that endeavor as well.

I just marvel at the great mythological lie that has been perpetrated and the amount of people that believe the mythology and just recite it as if it was fact.  You want to talk about living in a fantasy world, we are living in one of the largest fantasy worlds ever created.  J.R.R. Tolkien did not create as large a fantasy world in Middle Earth as the citizens of the United States of America have created here in North America.  We ought to call it Middle Dumb Earth where we live.  It would be Middle Dumb Earth if there weren’t more uneducated louts living to the south and to the north of us.  My, oh, my, what a misguided, uneducated lot we humans have become with the advent of the computer and the internet.  Oh, with the internet we’re going to be so smart.  No, we will now have the leisure to make ourselves imbecilic.  Oh, boy, are we don’t a great job of it.

Let’s give the states some power.  What if the states were actually going to grow a set and tell the Feds: We’re not going to let you do any of the things that our citizenry doesn’t want you to do anymore?  Of course, that’s most of your fellow citizens out there that don’t give a rat’s furry behind about what it is that the general government does as long as it benefits them and their little darlings and sweethearts or some aged relative of theirs that has to be cared for.  Of course, we would be totally incapable of caring for our own aged relatives if it were not for massive transfers of wealth that are about to take place.

Did you know that every month 300,000 Americans retire and apply to the Social Security Administration for what they have coming to them, and then are compelled to enter into this God-awful thing called Medicare and apply for those benefits as well?  Who’s going to pay for that?  There is no Medicare trust fund.  That money was squandered long ago.  There is no Social Security trust fund.  That money was squandered.  There is only what goes into the Treasury and what is spent.  Who’s going to support those 300,000 souls?  Let’s do the math.  That’s 3,600,000 per year, per annum.  What’s going to happen after ten years and there are 30 million of them wondering where their next meal is coming from because there have been promises made to them that cannot possibly be kept?  Yes, but let’s have discussions about whether or not we should take guns away from the rest of the citizenry.  Let’s have discussions about importing another 20 million alien members into our midst.  That will make everything right.  Back to the story:

[reading]

“The viewpoint of the libertarian is we’ve been doing the wrong thing for a long time,” he (Ron Paul) said in an interview. “The group that’s in Washington now is going to have tremendous opportunity because there’s a lot more disenchantment.”

“It’s better late than never,” he added.

Paul and his allies see the re-examination of their ideas as a return to the Republican tradition. The party nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964, who was by any modern conception one of them. Ronald Reagan proclaimed in a 1975 interview that “libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.” But small-government westerners were not enough to forge a winning coalition, so the former California governor cozied up to Southern evangelicals ahead of 1980. [Mike: There’s much more in this story about the inner workings of what’s going on inside the Republican Party. The piece mentions Justin Amash.]

Libertarians have described themselves for years as part of “the liberty movement.” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a Paul disciple, wants to get away from this.

“It’s a sizable portion of the Republican Party now,” the 32-year-old rising star said. “The other parts of the party are actually shrinking, and that’s been part of their trouble in recent elections…The establishment-type Republicans, the ones who have really controlled the process here for the past 10 to 20 years, are the ones who have narrowed the base to the point where we have a very difficult time winning national elections.”

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat last fall, even Washington Post columnist George Will said the 2016 Republican nominee needs to tilt “toward the libertarian side of the Republican Party’s fusion of social and laissez-faire conservatism.”

Liberty for All is a Super PAC co-founded by a millionaire in his early 20s who helped freshman Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) win an upset in his primary last year with a huge infusion of cash…The idea is to build a bench and a network to boost other libertarian candidates down the road.

“Let them get their feet wet,” Ramsey said. “It makes a lot of sense to allow them to gain some traction early rather than just try to run for a big office right out of the box.”

[end reading]

Mike:  According to Politico, the libertarian brand of Republicanism is making inroads and a big comeback.  I will tell you that certainly when it comes to young people, the youth, they tend to be more libertarian.  There’s a problem with that.  Young people age.  As they age, they tend to become a little less libertine or libertarian.  Certainly not all, and I’m not saying that you don’t stay committed to libertarian thought and to the study of it.  To actually put the numbers down, it would have been impossible for President Obama to have won an election specifically on the strength of that most touted of all groups, the youth vote.  He couldn’t have done it.  There weren’t enough of them.  He couldn’t have won it singlehandedly on the strength of the minority vote, although it did give him a distinct advantage.  He had to put coalitions together.  He had to put multiple peoples together.  There still has to be some manner of I guess you could call it a melting pot of sorts in between conservatives and [r]epublican conservatives and libertarians, if there is to be a large enough and strong enough coalition to be formed to win those national elections.

As people keep saying, the demographics are against you.  What the real problem with the demographic angle on this whole thing is why is there something that is demographically desirable in something as needful and necessary as a free people as ordered liberty?  That ought to be a white thing, a black thing, a Hispanic thing, a geezer thing, a youth thing.  To me, that’s the real problem there.  There are not enough people that are willing to tend to their own business and actually live free and have small, very small, limited government.  The fact of the matter is, we’ve become quite accustomed to the state doing all sorts of things for us so we don’t have to do them, regardless of whether or not you’re a Democrat or Republican, or an Independent for that matter.

End Mike Church Show Transcript