Ron Paul's Freakshow

So there’s an internet stirring of support for this strange Texas Republican named Ron Paul because his libertarian stance just seems so darn cool. Curiously, Paul’s resolutely not libertarian when it comes to women: like the rest of the American Taliban, he thinks they should be the wards of the state(s), the sum of their reproductive parts, biological devices to foster surrogate GOP-voter fetuses. Paul’s main thing is that he believes in the fantasy of the free market to solve all our problems and make everybody rich. That’s some serious crack. There is no such thing as a free market; markets are almost instantly captured by those with power, either old elites or the new ones which often rise with the market. History shows us the results: monopoly and oligarchy. Unfettered capitalism leads to stunted lives, poisoned land, food, water, and… children’s toys. China’s the perfect model: an utterly corrupt military/party dictatorship, rampant befouling of the land and the products in a race to the bottom.

Paul’s recent comments on ending slavery are another clue to his disturbing thinking. He said the American Civil War was unnecessary, that slavery would end like it did in the UK and all those other places. What astonishing ignorance (or is it just cracker justification?) of the circumstances of 19th century America. The first half of that century was dominated by the struggle over slavery, with crisis after crisis and compromise after compromise as Southern elites tried to expand their filthy institution into the emerging Midwest and Western territories and states in order to maintain their wealth and power, both in the south and nationally. They showed the distance they would go to maintain their command of property (capitalism’s grail, no matter that it was made of human beings); they seceded and they started the war.

Because Reconstruction was drowned like a unwanted baby by whites in the North and South alike, the “unfinished revolution” never really got to dismantle the Slave Power’s hold on the South; American apartheid lasted another century, and the Southern barons largely ruled the nation with their hammerlock on the Senate, making, for instance, sure that the New Deal would barely touch southern blacks. More recently, the GOP replaced the Democrats as the ruling party of the “Solid South,” anchoring their national dominance, but things haven’t changed all that much; the Bourbon barons are still in charge. And the white underclass, whose ancestors were canon fodder during the civil war, are still firmly loyal to their masters, like the true house slaves they are.