So, on top of his apparent association with racists, Ron Paul surely has many weird and wrong views. But you know what’s depressing? When someone gets column space at a major publication not to expose why those views are wrong with any kind of rigor, but to waste readers’ time with a vacuous, folksy “don’t sound right to me” spiel. Hence:
He’s right in the sense that the Bush environmental record is abysmal, but Paul’s solution — let the private landowner protect his own land — is naivetè bordering on sheer lunacy. If Chauncey Moneybags owns 40,000 acres up near the Idaho-Montana border and decides to cash in by letting the timber boys do a little clear-cutting, who’s going to stop him? Paul says Chauncey can do whatever he wants to with his land. How is that helping the natural environment? (I’m assuming here that’s the environment Paul refers to.)
What the author’s telling you here is that he’s never actually read anything about market environmentalism, and indeed, couldn’t be bothered to do five minutes of Googling to see whether maybe his rhetorical question actually had an answer of some kind. I’m all for division of labor, but do we actually need to outsource the production of uninformed, half-assed thought experiments to opinion writers? A scenario like that is what crosses the mind of everyone encountering the idea that private owners are the best protectors of the environment. (Well, unless they already know a bit of economics, anyway. Then the counterargument probably occurs to them unaided.) As long as this guy was getting paid to write about the topic, couldn’t he have gone that extra mile and, like, made a phone call or something? To someone knowledgeable about the topic? I’m not even saying the property-centric view is right here; just that the author clearly didn’t care to learn enough about the topic to render any kind of serious opinion either way.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Gil // Jan 10, 2008 at 2:54 am
I like Alex Tabarrok’s answer to and discussion about a variation of this question.
It’s much better than ignorant dismissal.
2 Vee // Jan 10, 2008 at 10:25 am
I agree with your point, but I have to admit the article from WIRED did make me chuckle a few times.
3 anon // Jan 10, 2008 at 10:42 am
Holy crap, you mean Tony Long isn’t really thinking all that hard when writing an article? I’m shocked, SHOCKED.
4 David // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:47 pm
In an article linked to by Virginia Postrel, there’s this:
“In spite of calls from Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders for an apology for such obvious racial typecasting, Paul stood his ground. He said only that his remarks about Barbara Jordan related to her stands on affirmative action and that his written comments about blacks were in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.” He denied any racist intent. What made the statements in the publication even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U. S. congressman and one presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this. ”
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2001-10-01/feature7-2.php
Note that the first thing Ron Paul does is own and defend these remarks. Only afterwards does he say that he didn’t write them.
Two comments:
(1) Isn’t it telling that his first response is to own and defend the remarks and not put any space between him and that publication?
and
(2) Why believe Ron Paul now if he himself tells us that he lied back then? Doesn’t his own story tend to undermine his credibility on that particular issue today?
5 David // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I bolded those words in the quoted passage.
6 Micha Ghertner // Jan 11, 2008 at 12:40 pm
David, I think it is telling, but what it tells us is either that Paul is a closet racist (as you seem to think), or that he simply didn’t understand how poisonous association with racism can be politically (perhaps because he knows more about Texas politics than national politics?), and didn’t understand that it is far more politically poisonous to be aligned with racists than to admit to a lack of oversight over ghostwriters. I think the latter is the more charitable view, and is backed up by more evidence.
7 David // Jan 11, 2008 at 2:55 pm
There’s a third thing it might tell us:
That he’s quite cavalier about telling the truth, both to the general public and to his own supporters.
8 Micha Ghertner // Jan 11, 2008 at 5:18 pm
A politician cavalier about truth telling? Who wuddha thunk?
Of course, Paul (or at least his supporters) sells himself as being exceptionally principled and honest relative to your typical politician, and while there is something to that (he doesn’t seem to play to the polls as much as others do), remember what Nietzsche said about fighting monsters and gazing into the abyss…
That playing the political game tends to make you dirty is one of the best reasons not to play the political game in the first place. As a great libertarian theorist once said, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.”