phik

For a political science professor (and, according to Wikipedia, “publicly professed Libertarian”) Dr. Allan Saxe is either stupendously misinformed, or boldly deceptive. It doesn’t especially matter which.

His article You may like Ron Paul, but would you like his America? was held up by a friend as his explanation for why the Congressman’s presidential platform doesn’t sit well with him. Which would be fine — I’m as excited about a good debate as the next person — except that it is difficult to find any true statements in the article.

In almost every instance, he takes an accurate constitutional position about the role of the federal government, then twists it to assert that Ron Paul would eliminate all levels of government. Needless to say — owing to the constraints of the newspaper column format, no doubt — he cites no sources for these assertions.

A representative example:

At all levels of government, the elimination of programs, agencies and government support would be massive. … All compulsory public education would be erased. If you wish to educate your child, do it yourself, or send your child to a voluntary private or church school. … There would be no state financing of higher education. All education would be divorced from government.

I’m not sure where Dr. Saxe gets the idea that the Congressman wants to end public education in the 50 states. Fifteen seconds of browsing the Issues pages of the campaign web site leads to an article that is exactly on-point, in which he writes, “…under the 10th Amendment public education should be purely a state and local matter.”

The fact is that a prominent plank of the Paul campaign is to reduce federal spending and regulation to those areas permitted by the Constitution. And while, ideally, the federal Department of Education would be eliminated, he writes clearly (and repeatedly) that neither the president nor Congress have any authority to dictate anything about how states provide education.

That is, you will notice, the entire point: to remove federal government intrusion from what should properly be state issues.

Saxe repeats this straw man assertion again and again, about education, transportation, the minimum wage, eminent domain, sports stadiums (!), zoning laws (!), and so on. The nice thing about having a consistent philosophy is that I can state with certainty that Saxe is as wrong about all of those as he is about education. The ways that state and local governments address those issues are simply not matters that a Paul administration would seek to influence.

It’s hard to believe that a political science professor could manage to get tenure and write peer-reviewed papers and eat breakfast without aspirating Cheerios, yet make such an obvious blunder. But it’s also not clear why a Texas libertarian would want to write a misleading article to smear Ron Paul. Maybe Wikipedia is lying to us, and he’s really a socialist.

Can he really be so confused about basic federalism? I doubt it; it reads like a hatchet job. If my friend’s reaction is typical, apparently an effective one.