I haven't followed Ron Paul closely, and while I like many of his libertarian ideas, I am discomforted by his overall anti-intellectual demeanor. He strikes me as the kind of person who has a natural attraction to conspiracy theories. However he is only allowed to believe the ones that coincide with his libertarian ideology. Which isn't so many (most of those theories are dreamt up by non-libertarians and thus have anti-libertarian elements), and that means he ends up sounding more somewhat sensible than he really is.
I don't doubt Paul's sincerity, but I would like to know his theory of why most economists—even market-oriented ones—don't agree with him on monetary policy. I suspect he thinks he knows some secret that others do not.
There's what a politician believes, and how a politician believes. As I get older I put increasing weight on the latter. As a protest vote, Ron Paul seems fine, but hearing him or reading about him just makes me depressed. A good rule of thumb is not to get too excited about any candidate whose actual election would make the Dow lose thousands of points.
Indeed, this is the nativist candidate who said:
Federal Reserve policies also benefit big spending politicians who use the inflated currency created by the Fed to hide the true costs of the welfare-warfare state.
Such a view is an incredibly naïve and abecedarian take on US monetary policy. Federal revenue from seigniorage and open market operations pale in comparison to revenue from taxation, which is how the government funds our "welfare-warfare" state. Rep Paul continues:
Congress' constitutional mandate regarding monetary policy should only permit currency backed by stable commodities such as silver and gold to be used as legal tender.
To the contrary, you have to look pretty hard to find commodity prices, over any reasonable interval, that are stable. The only way to convince yourself otherwise would be to look at a commodity priced in a currency while said currency was pegged to that commodity.
I could only generate the chart for the last three years, but the numbers are still all over the place. Time to stop mislabeling the Congressman's paleoconservative conspiracies as libertarianism.
