...more insidious still is what he may be doing in the name of his father's actual libertarian principals. Take his stand against the Federal Reserve, for instance.
Many libertarians and former supporters of Ron Paul can tell you the exact moment when they realized that his son, Rand, was not cut from the same cloth. For me, that moment occurred during Rand's Senate run when he released a gung-ho, warhawk, “win the war on terror” type advertisement suggesting that, whatever his actual view on America's overseas military commitments, he bought into the phony, manipulated, staged war on terror itself. Or, worse yet, he was shamelessly pandering to those who have bought into it.
For others it may have been when he endorsed Mitt Romney over his own father in the 2012 election race in what many have alleged was a back room deal for Ron to concede the 2012 nomination in exchange for party backing of a Rand 2016 run. Others may have been disgusted by the way he treated Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change and Abby Martin of Media Roots as they tried to ask him questions about this endorsement; Rand sicked the Capitol Police on them, forcing Martin into a Senate Media Relations Committee interrogation and trying to strip her of her press credentials. Others may have been disheartened by Rand's repeated attempts to cut all Palestinian foreign aid while continuing aid to Israel. Still others by the recent fiasco that saw him immediately walk back his comments on the vaccine/autism connection at the first sign of pushback and even tweet out a photo of his smiling self conveniently receiving his Hepatitis A booster at the height of the fiasco.
But more insidious still is what he may be doing in the name of his father's actual libertarian principals. Take his stand against the Federal Reserve, for instance. Many supporters of Ron Paul might be happy to see Rand taking over his father's “Audit the Fed” legislative legacy, reintroducing the bill in the Senate last month with 30 co-sponsors. Paul is looking to make the Audit the Fed initiative a key part of his early campaigning, holding a rally on the topic earlier this month in key presidential caucus state Iowa.
“It is alarming that the Federal Reserve, which was granted Monopoly money-making power, is now specifically trying to stop my legislation,” Rand wrote in a recent Breitbart editorial on the subject. “The Fed, with unlimited ability to print money, now prints that money to lobby against Congressional oversight. It is a disgrace and every citizen in the land should rise up and say: We the people are in charge and we demand an audit!”
Sounds like vintage Rand Paul-type stuff, doesn't it?
Well, not quite. Rand has enthusiastically adopted his father's “money bomb” technique for raising money by asking donors to contribute in a telethon-style internet drive, with his recent “Audit the Fed Money Bomb” raising over $88,000 for RAND PAC in one week. But something is missing. Even at his most conciliatory, Ron Paul never prevaricated about what he really wanted to see happen to the Federal Reserve; the title of his 2009 bestseller was “End The Fed,” afer all. But nowhere is this clear-cut message to be found in Rand's PR push. Instead, he's joining political hands with the likes of establishment GOP hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to table Audit the Fed legislation that, as The Hill notes in a recent column, is more about burnishing his libertarian credentials than actually hindering the Fed's operations.
“Citizens have the right to know why the Fed’s policies have resulted in a stagnant economy and record numbers of people dropping out of the workforce,” said Rand in a recent statement. But more so than having a right to know why this is happening, they have a right to an economy that is not dictated by the whims of an unaccountable Board of Governors or the presidents of the private regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve System. The Fed needs to be audited only as an intermediate step toward its abolition and the end of central bank manipulated funny money. And unless Rand starts making this clear, we can chalk this up as yet another subject on which the Rand Paul apple is falling far, far away from the Ron Paul tree.