26) The medium is the message
The Distributed Republic
by Micha Ghertner
"The best an intellectually rigorous libertarian can say about the Ron
Paul movement is that it's a great form of advertising. No one
seriously believes Paul will win the nomination; the most we can hope
for is that the campaign will awaken the dormant love of liberty in
many who would have otherwise continued living a life of apathy in the
campaign's absence. While I no longer actively support the Libertarian
Party, and long ago ceased deluding myself into thinking it will ever
achieve electoral success, I do owe a considerable debt to the LP for
awakening my own personal interest in liberty. (Thank Zeus it didn't
all begin with Rand for me; I can only imagine the sort of nutcase I
might have become if it did.) If Paul's campaign manages to do the
same for others like me, so much the better, and I hope it succeeds in
this limited way." (11/28/07)
27) Progressive libertarianism and the problems with Ron Paul
Liberty and Power
by Steven Horwitz
"First, let me say I consider myself a very staunch libertarian, and I
have been for more than 25 years. I worked on the Ed Clark campaign in
1980 as a cherub-faced 16 year old. As I've argued here before, I
consider myself a libertarian of the left in the senses that 1) I
believe that libertarian policies will better achieve most of the aims
of the left than will their own preferred policies and 2) libertarians
should be joining forces with the left on cultural issues, e.g.
feminism and gender issues. Even if we don't agree with them that more
state intervention is the way to address the problems, we should be
more willing to recognize the problems and talk about both policy and
cultural solutions to them. It will then come as no surprise that I'm
a Paul skeptic." (11/28/07)