The Liberty Papers

Lately there has been a great deal of brouhaha about Ron Paul’s support amongst white-supremacists and the, er, “racially aware” types that frequent Stormfront. Make no mistake, the support is real. Now, these guys support Ron Paul because they like his policies. The white supremacists are actually making a serious mistake in supporting Ron Paul; their conclusion that his policies are advantegous to the advance neo-Nazi cause is the result of very shallow thinking.

To a Nazi, Ron Paul’s policies at first seem great: he’s against the Federal Reserve banking cartel and against open borders.

The support for his Federal Reserve policy comes from the populism and anti-capital attitudes of the main forms of white-supremacism. Add to that the frisson from the meme “bankers = jews”, and the deluded idiots think that Ron Paul is going to strike a blow against race-enemies.

Then there’s Ron Paul’s opposition to open immigration. I think the Nazis view immigration, especially of hispanics, as a brown sea of untermenschen that are going to drown the white race or somesuch.

Thus they think that, in the current political environment, Ron Paul’s proposed courses of action and the white-supremacist desired courses of action are tangential.

It is clear to me that Ron Paul’s policies should be anathema to white-supremacists. The fact is to make the racist policies work, particularly one modeled on the National German Socialist Workers Party, you have to have a central bank, and you have to have a militant foreign policy and a government that confiscates property at a whim.

Ron Paul wrote a book that explains why he entered into politics, and what his goals are, and frankly any white-supremacist supporters are in for a nasty surprise:

I decided to run for Congress because of the disaster of wage and price controls imposed by the Nixon administration in 1971. When the stock market responded euphorically to the imposition of these controls and the closing of the gold window, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many other big business groups gave enthusiastic support, I decided that someone in politics had to condemn the controls, and offer the alternative that could explain the past and give hope for the future: the Austrian economists’ defense of the free market. At the time I was convinced, like Ludwig von Mises, that no one could succeed in politics without serving the special interests of some politically powerful pressure group.

The book quotes extensively from Paul’s hero Ludwig von Mises’ comprehensive textbook on economics, Human Action:

Men must choose between the market economy and socialism. The state can preserve the market economy in protecting life, health, and private property against violent or fraudulent aggression; or it can itself control the conduct of all production activities. Some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumers by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the government by compulsion.

and

Aggressive nationalism is the necessary derivative of the policies of interventionism and national planning. While laissez faire eliminates the causes of international conflict, government interference with business and socialism create conflicts for which no peaceful solution can be found. While under free trade and freedom of migration no individual is concerned about the territorial size of his country, under the protective measures of economic nationalism nearly every citizen has a substantial interest in these territorial issues. The enlargement of the territory subject to the sovereignty of his own government means material improvement for him or at least relief from restrictions which a foreign government has imposed upon his well-being. What has transformed the limited war between royal armies into total war, the clash between peoples, is not technicalities of military art, but the substitution of the welfare state for the laissez-faire state.

and finally,

Interventionism generates economic nationalism, and economic nationalism generates bellicosity. If men and commodities are prevented from crossing the borderlines, why should not the armies try to pave the way for them? . . . The root of the evil is not the construction of new, or dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

The book makes it clear that Ron Paul is devoted to adopting the policies of Ludwig von Mises. What is the relationship of Ludwig von Mises to Nazism? Well, in Austria in the 1920’s and 30’s, Ludwig von Mises prevented the nation from adopting the economic platform of the NDASP. His speeches and essays were so devastatingly critical of Hitler’s economic policies that when the Nazis entered into Vienna one of the first things they did was to break into the offices of a the Jewish economist and confiscate his papers and books. Had he not wisely fled to Swizerland, they likely would have arrested and liquidated him. To the Nazis, Paul’s hero was an enemy to be eliminated if they ever could get their hands on him.

Should Ron Paul repudiate the support of Nazis, white supremacists, bull-dykes and Methodists,and return their money? I don’t think he needs to. Ron Paul has made it quite clear that he is advocating a set of principles and he is not seeking power for power’s sake. thus, I don’t think you will see him adopting Nazi policies in order to maintain his grip on power. On the other hand, it would probably be to his advantage to make light of their support in a humorous way, for example by saying something like “these guys must not have even glanced at my position papers if they think my policies will help their cause, but if they want to give me money to make a less-racist society, I’ll take it.”

Certainly, Ron Paul’s tireless advocacy of Misesian principles is a sufficient repudiation for me.

Update :

My response to some of the commenters, including Mr Duke is posted here.