Paul: Santorum is ‘a liberal’; Goins Report: ‘And he’s wrong on the Federal Reserve and Iranian Nuclear Capabilities’

Hitting three birds with one stone, I’d like to take the time to expose yet another inconsistent “conservative” candidate in the Republican presidential field–

Rick Santorum.

By this article’s end, readers will understand that no GOP presidential candidate–not even Ron Paul–wants to end the Federal Reserve; and of course how much of a big government conservative–a contradiction in terms–Rick Santorum is. Readers will also understand how unreliable and politicized our intelligence information has been regarding the nuclear capabilities of Iran for over 30 years.

Dear Reader, you’ve been misled by the “consensus” once again.

Problem One: Erick Erickson, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul on the liberal Santorum

In a recent interview, Ron Paul has called Rick Santorum a liberal, urging the reporter to just “Go look at his record.”

Ron Paul is not alone.

Erick Erickson of the Red State Blog agrees with Ron Paul.

In a recent column called “Rick Santorum, Earmarxists, and the Pro-Life Statist” Erickson openly called the former Pennslyvania senator a “pro-life statist” and then quoted Ned Ryun who provides the definition of what the term means:

The mistake made is the assumption that because someone is pro-life means he or she is a conservative. Someone who is pro-life, but votes to expand the state and state spending, is in fact not a conservative, but a pro-life statist.

Never has the Paulian saying of everyone in the Republican field being a part of the status quo been so apt. Santorum is, like many other Republicans in Congress, a pro-life statist. He would fit in well.

Sure, he’s running on a platform of lower taxes–a laudable platform–all across the board, just like the other GOP candidates, but, once again, Rick Santorum is running on his professed positions, and not positions he’s actually advocated in the past vis-à-vis Ron Paul who is the most consistent conservative (and by default the most consistent libertarian and constitutionalist) in Congressional history and actually has lived his his life and voted as a fiscal conservative.

Erickson calls out Rick Santorum for not joining the fight against No Child Left Behind, the Prescription Drug Benefit in Medicare Part D, leading the K Street Project which “traded perks for lobbyists for money for the GOP funded with your tax dollars through earmarks and pork projects,” and setting the stage for more big government.

The highlight of the article is the comparison with the last GOP President George Bush:

That’s Rick Santorum. He sees government as the means to conservative ends. But in using government to get conservative ends he has expanded government and set precedents for liberals to use government in the same ways for more liberal government. Rick Santorum was complicit in making Americans more dependent on government and justified it under the rubric of compassion.

The rest you can read for yourself.

Rand Paul also criticized Santorum for “doubl[ing] the size of the Department of Education,” and voting for foreign aid.

Problem Two: Rick Santorum is wrong on the Federal Reserve

As for my criticism of Santorum being wrong on the FED, all we have to do is look back to what he said the solution is. In past debates, Rick Santorum has said that he would not end the federal reserve but return it to a single mandate–the exact same position Herman Cain advocated.

But to advocate a return to the single mandate is an admission of ignorance on how the Federal Reserve has operated historically.

One must analyze history to understand why this is.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago tells the story:

In 1977, Congress passed a law requiring the Federal Reserve to promote both maximum employment and price stability. This is often called the “dual mandate” and guides the Fed’s decision-making in conducting national monetary policy.

In other words, Congress created what is called the Dual Mandate.

According to the average GOP republican 2012 campaigner, everything was just sunshine and lollipops with the Federal Reserve until 1977. Of course, this is false.

When the Fed did have a single mandate (pre-1977), we got the Great Depression, along with several other recessions. The purpose of the Federal Reserve was to eliminate panics and depressions (the cover story) but the real reason was so the FED could serve as a backstop to the big banks and service government debt (the true story).

As a neophyte analysis of history shows, the FED didn’t do a good job to 1977–and after 1977 it got worse.

As Ron Paul wrote on page 27 of End the Fed:

As for business cycles and the abolition of panics, the data shows otherwise. Recessions of the twentieth century as documented by the National Buraeu of Economic Research include: 1918-1919, 1920-1921, 1923-1924, 1926-1927, 1929-1933, 1937-1938, 1945, 1948-1949, 1953-1954, 1957-1958, 1960-1961, 1969-1970, 1973-1975, 1980, 1981-1982, 1990-1991, 2001, and 2007, which is the current panic of which there is no end in sight.

At the Cato Institute’s 29th Annual Monetary Policy conference on November 16, 2011, Ron Paul made it clear that the FED isn’t going to follow the mandate anyway.

As I reported then:

In his speech Paul was skeptical of the idea moving the FED’s dual mandate of using monetary policy to maximize employment and achieving price stability to a single mandate focusing on price stability alone.

“Since I don’t like the Fed, I’m not interested in worrying about what the mandate should be because they’re not going to do it anyway,” Paul said.

“They’re mandate is that they’re supposed to have full employment. They’re failing there. They’re supposed to have stable prices. They’re failing there. So why do we have any trust whatsoever in what they do,” he continued.

In that same report, I also reported on Dr. Paul’s solution to the Federal Reserve:

In his speech, Paul said that he would not end the Federal Reserve in one day because it will “eventually shut itself down” when it destroys the currency. Rather he will work to break the FED’s monopoly on issuing currency by legalizing sound money including gold and silver and repealing legal tender laws.

“My idea is sort of a copy of what Hayek’s had talked about,” he said. “Why don’t we denationalize money, legalize competition, allow free markets to work, allow free market banking to work?”

He added that we should repeal taxes on gold and silver and even allow private mints to issue gold.

Mark Calabria, a Cato Institute scholar in attendance, was asked to comment on Herman Cain’s analysis of the Federal Reserve (which is relevant to this post):

“I would disagree somewhat in that particularly during the 60s and 70s we where seeing double-digit inflation. We certainly weren’t seeing a very good track record from the Federal Reserve.”

He added that because of the FED’s involvement in the Great Depression, which is still debated by economists today, “it would probably be generous to say that the FED has been a success even half the time it’s been around.”

In support of that, he highlighted the FED’s role in contributing to the real estate bubble and stock market bubble in the 1920s. He also said that problems the FED got into in 60s and 70s were a result of abandoning price stability as their primary goal.

Case in point: Rick Santorum believes that all we have to do is lower taxes and things will be A-ok! He believes that returning to a single mandate is all we need to do to return to peace and prosperity.

Of course, he ignores that if we did have a single mandate focusing on curbing inflation, then the FED would just ignore it anyway like it did for the first 50 years of its existence.

Santorum trusts that a private banking cartel that has historically operated independently from public (read: Congressional) will will, upon reversion to a single charter, keep its promises although its entire existence casts doubt on that proposition.

The student of history would be wise disagree with Santorum.

And the educated voter should, too.

Problem Three: He Believes in the Anti-Iranian War Propaganda

Rick Santorum makes the following clear on his website:

President Barack Obama naively and cavalierly once declared Iran as a “tiny country” that did not pose a serious threat.  However, this week’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now shows that these radical Islamists are on the verge of having a nuclear weapon.

It continues:

In fact, Rick Santorum has recognized the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions for nearly a decade – standing tall against both Republicans and Democrats who have discounted and dismissed the reality that this radical theocracy is intent on destroying Israel and western civilization.

The first problem with all this is that he, like his fellow candidate Michelle Bachmann, actually believes the IAEA report and goes beyond what the report says. But Ron Paul has been proven right by CBS News fact checkers on this point.

The second problem is that intelligence sources have been wrong on Iranian nuclear ambitions for more than three decades. As I reported here on this blog a few weeks ago:

Anti-war.com posted the highlights of a recent Christian Science Monitor article that pointed out how “intelligence sources” have misled the public on Iranian nuclear capabilities for more than 30 years. As they put it, the Iranians have pretty much always been on the verge of having a bomb.

1979, 1984, 1995,1998, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 are some but not all the dates mentioned in the article. But if the development of Iranian nuclear weapons has been “just around the corner” and “imminent” for over 30 years, then that begs the questions whether we agree on the definition of imminent and whether can we really trust our “intelligence sources.”

How many times will the experts cry wolf on this issue? We have 30 years of them being wrong to justify our skepticism.

Santorum, too, has a solution for Iran:

• Economically target Iran by sanctioning Iran’s central bank coupled with opening all forms of energy production in the U.S effectively devastating Iran’s only economy
• Refuse to negotiate on any level with the terrorist state of Iran.

This is the status quo position; and on a side note, I always wonder whether Christian candidates and representatives ever remember who is collateral in all of this. It’s not just Shiite Muslims; I think it’s also Iranian Christians.

According to UMD statistics, 50 percent of all Iranian Christians live in Tehran. It would be interesting if someone put forth the question to those who support sanctions on Iran–be they Congressmen or presidential candidates–whether they care if these groups get hurt by those very sanctions. Put differently, if they went through with the sanctions, was it worth it?

What we need after all of this is education: education on Rick Santorum’s background, education on the Federal Reserve, and education on Iranian politics.

The Race for Iran is a wonderful non-partisan blog devoted to covering Iran’s geopolitics and is a great place to start.

On the Federal Reserve: To understand the why Rick Santorum’s position on the Federal Reserve is wrong, read my short post “Ron Paul ‘Hardly’ Agrees with Herman Cain on the Federal Reserve” and watch the video I linked to in the article.

On Iranian Nuclear Capabilities: Please read one of my recent articles, “Misleading us all on Iranian Nuclear Capabilities for 30 years” to see how our “intelligence” sources have been wrong for far too long on Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Iran has been an imminent threat for 30 years.

On learning about Ron Paul:If you are not a Ron Paul supporter, I hope you seriously take a look at the other side as I invite you to read my post “Ron Paul’s Supporters in their own Words” to see why so many people from so many different backgrounds support the Champion of the Constitution. (And make sure you watch the video in that post, too.)

If you are already a Ron Paul supporter, then check out this site set up by grassroots supporters of Ron Paul called Ron Paul Myths. It completely systematically debunks popular notions of Ron Paul and easily navigable. Also visit the Blue Republican website to learn how to register Republican just to vote for Ron Paul.

Yes, the Blue Republicans are real. I’m kinda sorta one of them.

Read more at The Charleston Tea Party