Rob Dreher explains why libertarianism is becoming appealing. He concludes:
In other words, to protect my ability to educate my children in a conservative way, I’m learning a strange new respect for libertarianism.
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Homeschooling and Libertarianism
David Frum and His Politics of Constant Change
Frum adapts to the latest talking point, and it has worked. He is now NPR’s Moderate Conservative voice. Justin Raimondo describes this transformation:
This is the New David Frum, the moderate, measured, wonkish would-be charmer, who only loses his soft edges when the subject of foreign policy is raised. After a well-publicized break with the American Enterprise Institute over his supposed opposition to Republican orthodoxy, he also broke with National Review, where he had once taken on the role of ideological enforcer, and underwent a makeover. He set up the “Frum Forum” as the online headquarters of the Frummian Republicans, a small but extremely self-satisfied gaggle of online bloviators, who sneered at the Tea Party and cheered as Frum announced the GOP was in danger of being taken over by anti-government “extremists.”
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Is the Military Cut Overstated?
Justin Elliot observes:
“It is downright misleading to say that sequestration will cut defense by $600 billion,” said David Berteau, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Defense Department official. (Sequestration is the term often used in Washington to refer to the cuts.)
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Militarism
Leithart summarizes George Friedman’s view of American Militarism:
Once we dominated North America, we have to guard ourselves against possible rivals and enemies in the Southern hemisphere; hence the Monroe Doctrine and our meddling in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Having stretched from sea to sea, we had to secure our coasts from invasion,eventually stretching our power as far as Alaska and Hawaii to prevent attack from the West. We now control the oceans to a degree unprecedented in human history, and we have to protect our hegemony against the rise of other global naval powers.
Fearful isolation, combined with power, thus breeds interventionism. Our desire to live in security breeds militarism.
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Paul Ryan and the Federal Reserve
Salon reports,
The Congressman from Wisconsin, who is most known for his laissez-faire budget proposals, is also celebrated or reviled in more nerdish circles for his supposedly unwavering support of a laissez-faire approach to monetary policy – “my first love,” as he once described it.
In 2008, he sponsored legislation designed to strip the Federal Reserve of its full employment mandate. He has also characterized expansionary monetary policy as “insidious” and favored by those with “a narrow view of interest.”And in response to quantitative easing in November 2010, Ryan blasted the Federal Reserve, saying“[it’s] going to give us a big inflation problem down the road.”
But WikiLeaks Cablegate disclosures indicate that what Ryan says about monetary policy behind closed doors doesn’t always comport with what he says in public. His supposedly rigid ideology might be more malleable than popular lore indicates.
For example, Ryan, in a meeting with Argentine legislators in earlyJanuary 2009, “cited monetary policy and protecting jobs as critical issues that consume the attention of the U.S. Congress.” It doesn’t exactly sound like the sort of thing a true believer in austerity might say.
And in another meeting with then Argentine Cabinet Chief Minister Sergio Massa in late December 2008, Ryan’s criticism of contractionary monetary policy and a hands-off approach was even more penetrating (emphasis mine):
Rep. Ryan noted that among the many tools being deployed to address the crisis, careful attention was being paid to monetary policy, which previously had sought to contain inflation but now needed to target potential deflation. He called “historic” the Federal Reserve’s decision the previous day to lower interest rates to near zero. Ultimately, the important thing was to fix the financial system by requiring greater transparency and to keep speculation from spinning out of control … Rep. Ryan recalled that Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke was one of the most prominent scholars of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and that two lessons he had drawn from Bernanke’s academic work were the negative consequences in this type of crisis of taking liquidity out of the system and of enacting protectionist measures.
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Chris Edwards Analyzes Ryan’s Plan
Cato’s Chris Edwards offers his analysis on the Paul Ryan tax and spending proposals.
