"When the choice is between extreme and mild conservatives, progressives don’t stand a chance."

Mike Konczal has a post about Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which he points out that the lead witness is a big Lincoln-hater and defender of the Southern secession.

And it’s true! I went to his articles at Mises, and clicked more or less idly on the piece about American health care fascialism — I guess that’s supposed to be a milder term than fascism, although he seems to equate the two. And sure enough, he ends:


I presume that Amity Shlaes is already working on her Lincoln assessment, The Even More Forgotten Man.

Ron Paul is holding one of his first monetary policy hearings today and he hasn’t sold out. Ron Paul is from the school of libertarians that hates D.C. libertarians, which is weird since he is one of the most well-known libertarians in D.C. How does that work?

The term Kochtopus was originally used as a slur by some libertarians to describe the Koch brothers’ funded wing of the libertarian movement (Cato, Reason, etc.). There’s a lot of fighting over ideology, purity, funding and intellectual legacies between two groups of libertarians that splintered in the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Paul is on the other side of that divide. Here’s a representative explanation by Lew Rockwell:


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I’m not trying to cherry-pick. You can read his articles at Mises or Lew Rockwell. He has his opinions and arguments. What I’m interested in is the dialectical relationship between what Ron Paul is doing and what other people on the right are doing. By moving the goalposts and the dialogue so far to the right, and by properly harnessing the people’s mass discontent with the financial system, the crisis and the Federal Reserve, Paul’s activities are going to make the idea of stripping Maximum Employment from the Federal Reserve’s mandate seem downright sensible. He’s going to clear the space for the idea that the regional bank chiefs, instead of being ultra-conservative people who think unemployment is fine and who want a monetary policy that benefits business interests, are “regular folks” who “get it” outside the failed navel-gazing bureaucrats of the Federal Reserve.

He’s also going to make Paul Ryan look reasonable, instead of someone who is both uninformed and terrible on monetary policy. In each case he’s building on problems people are experiencing and pushing them further to the right. Do liberals have any type of counter-narrative to put out, rather than relying on discredited technocrat expertise?