printAt 13 percent, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin were tied in a presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. A point made in “Sensational Sarah” obtains: “Would that Rep. Ron Paul, the only politician who adheres to America’s founding philosophy, was Palin’s running mate, wisely steering her boundless energy and excellent instincts in excising the cancer from the body politic.”
As for the other straw “winners”; they’re real losers. Mitt Romney came first (“best 2012 GOP presidential candidate”). Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the runner-up.
My colleague Vox Day sums it up:
“These results tend to indicate that a little more than one-quarter of the ‘conservatives’ at CPAC have a functional brain. Romney is a liberal technocrat. Jindal is a little goblin who just blew his first moment on the national stage.”
An award for upholding the Constitution belonged to Congressman Paul but went to Rush Limbaugh.
On the merits of that award collected by Rush, I once angered ditto heads for pointing out, in “It’s About Federalism, Stupid!”, Rush’s ruthless and unconstitutional case against actor Michael Fox on the matter of stem cell research and the fetus fetish:
“The pompous talk-show host’s sneering assault on a deformed Michael J. Fox was utterly depraved. Aping Fox’s Parkinson’s-induced spasms, Limbaugh told listeners: “He is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act.” Rather than lampoon an-obviously afflicted human being, someone with a head and a heart would have stuck to the issue.
And the issue is this: The founders bequeathed a central government of delegated and enumerated powers. Intellectual property laws are the only constitutional means at Congress’s disposal with which to “promote the Progress of Science.” (About their merit Thomas Jefferson, himself an inventor, was unconvinced.) The Constitution gives Congress only 18 specific legislative powers. Research and development spending is nowhere among them.
Neither are Social Security, civil rights (predicated as they are on grotesque violations of property rights), Medicare, Medicaid, and the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses—you name it, it’s likely unconstitutional. There is simply no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does.”
Update I (March 2): About the welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”: Article I, Section 8 our overlords have taken to mean that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.
Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”
The complete column is “The Hillary, Hussein, McCain Axis of Evil.”
Update II: With respect to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Barbara makes a good point. Having spoken openly about decentralization and devolution of power to the states, Jindal is considerably more conservative than most of the Republican governors. Not being as pale as Palin—he is of Indian descent—Jindal has diversity on his side. He is therefore less likely than, say Sarah, to be condemned as a “conservative zealot.”
I think the fact that “the only politician who adheres to America’s founding philosophy” only got 13% of the vote, is cause for alarm in itself.
Last time I read the constitution, it says “promote the general welfare” not “provide for the general welfare“. If I understand the word “promote” correctly, it means “get off your lazy a.. and provide for your family”!
I was debating a couple of liberals last week on this very point. The politicians take an oath to uphold the Constitution, then spend every waking moment of their term violating it with impunity.
When I asked these liberals if they’d ever bothered to read and understand the document, they were candid enough to admit they hadn’t. And that is the crux of the problem. Politicians will do whatever we allow them to get away with, and they will get away with murder if the public is ignorant.
I disagree with Vox on a couple points. First, though Obama’s spending package will fail, there is no guarantee that the electorate will see it as such. How about “Hope Needs Time” as a slogan for continued spending, along with the promise that if we just give the stimulus more time to work, things will turn out fine. After all, Obama will be speaking to Americans who, in the majority, believe that FDR’s wasteful spending brought us out of the Depression. He will also have the press on his side, having hired a lot of them recently.
Second, I think it’s wrong to write off Bobby Jindal. He is very well-educated and he has done well by the people of his state in cutting spending, if I understand correctly. He had a very tough act to follow: Obama is an excellent orator. The fact that the networks were incapable of getting in a good audio connection to Baton Rouge (the signal kept dropping out, eliminating many words) didn’t help. Give the man from Louisiana a chance, I say. He has a lot of potential.
(1) About the welfare clause: several colonies were originally established as Proprietary Colonies (see http://www.answers.com/topic/proprietary-colony) with the government run for the benefit of investor-owners. The American revolutionaries did not want the governments’ delegated powers to be used for the “specific” welfare but rather for the entire “general” welfare. This can be seen in the 4th section of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (see http://www.nationalcenter.org/VirginiaDeclaration.html). Republicans and Democrats who expand government to serve their contributors and favorite industries steadily perverted the meaning of general welfare since 1787. // (2) I was happy to see Ron Paul, Thomas Woods, Andrew Napolitano, and Bruce Fein in person in DC on Friday but the philosophy of liberty of them and the Campaign for Liberty is not compatible with the and the 87% Bushian rightwing-statists who love Ken-doll Mitt, Cheerleader Sarah, Dark-skinned Jindal, Mouthy Rush, and Prodigy Krohn who are merely in search of a Reaganesque spokesman to take the helm of the 4.5 trillion dollar Ship of State (on its way to the iceberg of national bankruptcy) away from Captain Messiah Obama. I got enough sampling of “mainstream conservatives” smear Ron Paul as a “9/11 truther” and “anti-American” to not stay for CPAC.
Jindal mentioned in his speech that Republicans, once committed to principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility, have lost the trust of similarly committed Americans, and want to regain it. I hardly think that this places him in the category of Bushian statists.
[Saying stuff means nothing. Newt said as much at CPAC, and he is firmly in the camp of “Bushian statists.” Let’s see how Jindal sticks to his guns.]
Conservative Jindal’s record – here are the state spending for Louisiana 2005 – 2010 (projected)
in billions: 16.8, 18.6, 20.5, 22.6,25.0, and 27.5.
Here is total state & local: 32.6, 35.3,38.2,41.4,44.9, and 48.7. I guess that is what he means by fiscal responsibility. As Ilana said, “saying stuff means nothing”.
Ben Franklin said that once the people can vote themselves expensive gifts, the country is done. I think I remember Pericles saying something similar.
A thought: Is what we are seeing now simply universal suffrage taken to its logical conclusion? Did giving every single citizen an equal vote make this inevitable?
Van Wijk, I’ve wondered about this for a long time. Looking back, there are a myriad of voting schemes more sensible than one-adult-one-vote. 19th Century Germany used a weighted voting scheme in municipal elections: all the taxpayers in a town would be divided into three categories based on how much tax they paid. Tax paid by all the members of each category would be equal, and the voting power of each category would be equal. Obviously, the numbers of voters in each category would not be equal.
I think the above scheme does not count subsidies against people. A very simple modern scheme for voting is, everyone who is a net taxpayer gets one vote. Subtract civil service salaries, welfare, government contracts, etc., from total direct tax paid. (Some make an exception for military and police salaries.)
[The Founders didn’t think the propertyless should have the franchise. If you pay taxes, you vote; if you consume them; you don’t, or else you get to vote another man’s property your way.]