Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, writing at Reason Online, say the identity of the person who authored racist, homophobic screeds in Ron Paul’s newsletters is an open secret. They identify him as Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., Paul’s former congressional chief of staff, who promoted a strategy aimed at fusing the libertarian right with paleoconservatives.
Rockwell denied the allegation when contacted by The New Republic, and he refused to talk with Reason. But Sanchez and Weigel have gathered a lot of material. And as they say, Paul’s “new supporters, many of whom are first encountering libertarian ideas through the Ron Paul Revolution, deserve a far more frank explanation than the campaign has as yet provided of how their candidate’s name ended up atop so many ugly words.”
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Anonymous
Read about this a few weeks ago. As far as I’m concerned, regardless of who actually writes the pieces for Paul’s newspaper, he is responsible for what gets bublished.As an aside, I was surprised to learn that it was Lew Rockwell who founded the far right-wing pseudo-libertarian von Mises Institute in the early 1980s. I would have believed that von Mises had something to do with it, but apparently not. He died about a decade earlier–raj
Anonymous
The source is irrelevant. Five seconds of digging into Libertarian philosophy brings you to their obsession with Freedom of Association.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_associationFreedom of association is a term popular in libertarian literature. It is used to describe the concept of absolute freedom to live in a community or be part of an organization whose values or culture are closely related to one’s preferences; or, on a more basic level, to associate with any individual one chooses.The libertarian concept of freedom of association is often rebuked from a moral/ethical context. Under laws in such a system, business owners could refuse service to anyone for whatever reason. Opponents argue that such practices are regressive and would lead to greater prejudice within society. Right-libertarians sympathetic to freedom of association, such as Richard Epstein, respond that in a case of refusing service (which thus is a case of the freedom of contract) unjustified discrimination incurs a cost and therefore a competitive disadvantage.In a Libertarian world, refusing to interact with blacks and gays is your fundamental right, which no law should abridge. Ron Paul’s comments, ghostwritten or otherwise, are perfectly justified within a Libertarian context.