SPEAKING OF MEATHEADS...

Bruce Bartlett Rips Bush, then Turns Turret Towards Ron Paul

Peter Klein notifies us of this Bruce Bartlett column taking libertarians to task for their narrow focus on economic issues. (I note with irony that Bartlett's two books listed in his bio are Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. I haven't read either of them, but I'm guessing they don't deal too much with police brutality or childhood literacy.)

Now fine, maybe there are a lot of libertarians who focus too much on low taxes, and don't worry enough about civil liberties and especially interventionist foreign policy. In fact, I can think of many prominent libertarians who do just this. I won't name names, but a lot of them work for "small government" think tanks.

Yet instead of going after these groups by name, Bartlett decides to target the Campaign for Liberty, the group spawned by the Ron Paul campaign. Now if you wanted to come up with the one libertarian who couldn't be accused of selling out on foreign policy in order to "fit in" with hawkish supply-siders, I would think Ron Paul is probably the name that would come to most people's minds...

Bartlett apparently suffers from the same problem as Andrew Samwick, who demanded that the "Tea Party" protesters come up with specific budget cuts. What Bartlett and Samwick don't realize, is that when someone says, "I'm against government bailouts," that person means, "The government should stop doing that." Or when someone says, "We should bring the troops home," the person means, "We should bring the troops home."...
Bob Murphy's blog

-flynn