Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Senior Cato VP Goes GaGa Over Paul Ryan

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, told Buzzfeed:
Ryan is going to be very attractive to the broad libertarian voter.He has obviously talked more than anybody else in Washington about getting control of the budget and spending.  
He is well-educated in the free market libertarian point of view.
But, according to BuzzFeed, Boaz did have some "quibbles" with Ryan's budget plan:
"It doesn’t take a serious enough look at the military budget and it doesn’t propose getting the federal government out of many of the areas that libertarians would like to get it out of," Boaz said. "But it is a serious attempt to deal with a federal budget that has doubled in 10 years."

Puhleez, under Ryan's plan the military budget expands. That would be a problem for libertarians. Then there is the problem Ron Paul has pointed out, Ryan's cuts come over a time period that all politicians love, 30 years.

Finally, there is the absolutely horrid Ryan voting record where he voted for ALL the bailouts, voted in favor of prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients, Section 8 Housing vouchers, extending unemployment benefits, No Child Left Behind Act, making the PATRIOT Act permanent, allowing electronic surveillance without a warrant, authorizing military force in Iraq, emergency $78B for war in Iraq & Afghanistan,.

Ryan also supports the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, federal bailouts, increased federal involvement in education, unconstitutional and undeclared wars, Medicare Part D (a multi trillion dollar unfunded liability), stimulus spending, and foreign aid.

He voted to extend the PATRIOT Act, for CISPA, for DOMA, for the NDAA (three times), to expand the Department of Homeland Security, to extend troop commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and to give the President the power to appoint department heads without Senatorial approval.

Oh yes, quite the libertarian. The kind only  a Catoite would love.

22 comments:

  1. I think he was better on the Munsters.

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  2. "He has obviously talked more than anybody else in Washington about getting control of the budget and spending."

    Cato's deliberate attempts at stuffing Ron Paul down the rabbit hole is absolutely revolting.
    I wouldn't trust them to walk my dog, much less their understanding of liberty.

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  3. How does Ryan fool so many people that he is some Randian libertarian fiscal conservative when his record is one of the worst in terms of any definition of conservatism you think of? It blows my mind.

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  4. "Ryan is going to be very attractive to the broad libertarian voter."

    - David Boaz

    I don't think libertarian means what David Boaz thinks it means.

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  5. You do realize that all of your points were made by another Cato VP in a piece prominently featured on their homepage, right?

    http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/paul-ryan-dont-believe-hype

    I appreciate that you want to find bad things to say about Cato whenever possible, but when you sacrifice intellectual honesty to do so, it makes you look/sound petty.

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    1. What did he lie about? When you make stupid comments it makes you look stupid.

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    2. He's not saying anything bad about Cato in this article. He's saying something bad about David Boaz, and since Boaz is with Cato, it stands to reason that Boaz is the kind of "libertarian" that those at Cato love, otherwise he wouldn't be there.

      So there is no intellectual dishonesty there.

      I myself would say, that is says more than enough about Cato that someone like David Boaz can be Senior VP for them.

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    3. So many people clamor to read the homepage of Cato....

      I don't appreciate Boaz making asinine statements about libertarians. We've finally gotten to a point where a lot of people at least roughly understand libertarianism, and Boaz seeks to make us look just like neocons.

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    4. I disagree with the original post that Wenzel was being dishonest or "petty" Having said that that article by Healy, does show that CATO is not a monolith. Boaz does not speak for CATO as an institution on political matters. Its his voice only. I agree that its laughable for Boaz to say that Ryan's plan is a serious effort. Its not, just smokescreen. A serious plan was Senator Rand Paul's. However Boaz has shown some respectful support for Ron Paul over the years at least for a D.C. libertarian.

      Here's an encouraging piece at CATO that indicates that the Tea party is slowly but surely being transformed into a more self consciously libertarian mold and give due credit to the man himself, Ron Paul. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/ron-paul-tea-party-playbook

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  6. Is Boaz joking? Sigh. I hate CATO.

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  7. Damn! Boaz is still there. I was hoping he would get canned with Ed Crane.

    Boaz is here what he has always been: a beltway suck-up to power. Characterizing Ryan as libertarian is a gross fraud. Ryan is no more libertarian than Obama. Ryan is terrible on civil liberties, terrible on foreign policy, terrible on military spending. His much ballyhooed budget plan doesn't actually cut any spending and doesn't balance for 30 years even under his own lofty economic projections. Ryan's voucher proposals all are phony and they will expand, not limit the reach of government.

    I am not a fan of Obama/Biden and they certainly aren't libertarians by any stretch, but forced to pick between them and Romney/Ryan I would with them anytime. They are a bit less belligerent and I would rather have Obamacare (as bad as that is) than Romney's 2+ trillion dollar military buildup.

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    1. The sane choice when choosing "how to die" is the answer:

      "none of the above"

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  8. Does anyone else think Ryan looks kinda like Hitler without the moustache?

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    1. Yea, a little. But let's face it, Hitler was way more charismatic and at least had an ideology he understood and believed in.

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  9. In other words, he's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

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  10. Ha ha. David Blow-ass strikes again.

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  11. "very attractive to the broad libertarian voter..." You've got to be kidding me! Broad as in being a "fat head idiot"? I don't know what kool-aid Boaz is mixing but I'd stay the hell away from him and whatever he's brewing.

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  12. Ah, Boaz-O the Clown ... always good for a laugh.

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  13. And yet, nearly every tweet I've seen out of CATO since Ryan's pick has been overall negative... *sigh* Can't wait for the LRC crowd to fade into obscurity again without Ron Paul to champion their cause.

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  14. Supertrendy neocondemocripAugust 15, 2012 at 4:45 PM

    P.R. Is neocon trash. Thanks for the ,"broad libertarian voter" line. I needed one of those genuine guffawing laughs I haven't had In a while. My fellow liberty lovers, don't vote come November. You only encourage them.

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  15. David Boaz has written several books attempting to define for the public "libertarianism" as a combination of neoconservatism and libertinism. He has failed, as has CATO in general. It's been around for 30 years and not one single piece of federal legislation that cuts back anything in government is associated with it. And he is as much the voice of CATO as Lew Rockwell is of the Mises Institute. He was Ed Crane's right-hand man for the past several decades.

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    1. So, I guess you also think LRC and Mises.org are failures too, since none of their suggestions have resulted in cuts to the federal govt.

      CATO might not be perfect, but they do a reasonable job of educating some of the many economic illiterates in this country. Would you rather have the Brookings Institute educating them?

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