Ron Paul

[No More Mister Nice Blog] nails it.

I caught a nit of Ron Paul's speech tonight. I was particularly struck by this:

t’s been -- America has been the greatest country ever, the most prosperous country ever, the largest middle class ever. It’s not that way today. Our middle class is shrinking. The country is getting poorer.

Yeah, schumck, and you know what we had in this country back when we had the largest middle class ever? All kinds of big government programs and expenditures, of the kind you libertarians oppose. The GI Bill. The interstate highway system. FHA loans. Social Security, and eventually Medicare. Evil government! Oh, and (as Paul Krugman never tires of reminding us) a well-regulated banking system (Glass-Steagall!) that was rendered too boring and safe to put the public at risk of having to pay for booms that went bust.

Paul's invocation of the era of the thriving American middle class infuriated me just the way I was infuriated every time Glenn Beck, in his TV heyday, used to weep for the lost America of his viewers' youth. Hey, schmuck, I thought you said we've been living in a fascist nightmare ever since Woodrow Wilson was president! How can your viewers also have lived through a lost Golden Age?

You want to weep for what we had in the mid-twentieth century and lost? Remember how we got it in the first place. It wasn't through unregulated free markets, idiots.