Posts in "Reason"

David Harsanyi has recently published a piece for Reason.com that is hard to ignore in light of Ron Paul's recent straw poll victory at CPAC. Is Paul the future of the conservative movement? Harsanyi doesn't think so:

Let's, for a moment, forget Paul (and how I wish this could be a permanent condition, considering the congressman is neither a serious politician nor—and I can't stress this enough—a serious thinker).

He claims that Ron Paul is not a "serious politician," whatever that means. Who ARE the serious politicians? Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin? What exactly makes them serious? Their chance of winning, their ideas?

Harsanyi then claims that he is not a "serious thinker." However, regardless of whether or not Paul has the "serious thinker" capabilities of von Mises or others like him, Paul holds to many of the same conclusions of these thinkers. One need not be Mises, only intelligent enough to pick Mises over... let's say... Keynes or Samuelson. I personally cannot find fault with Paul for not being an eminent scholar. He is, however, an M.D., which is an accomplishment compared to at least one Reason staffer. If someone were to bankroll him in his youth he may have turned out to be something surely more important...like an opinion columnist, for instance.

Liberals and Conservatives Agree on One Thing...Scrap the Bill of Rights

From Reason T.V.:

Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans may disagree on all kinds of things, but based on the way they govern, they've reached a consensus that the Bill of Rights is just way too long.

Indeed, with the exception of the Third Amendment (the one about quartering of troops), is there any aspect of the Bill of Rights that they both support without reservation?