He's guilty of poorly explaining the principle, but the principle itself is valid.

Paul doesn't like earmarks so he votes against bills loaded with them and the overall framework whenever possible. But he recognizes that, regardless of his vote either way, many of these bills will pass and the money from his district will simply be redistributed to another district if he doesn't throw in his own earmarks.

It's actually quite logical. I run into the same thing when people tell me I'm a hypocrite for accepting U.S. mail or various other things. Yes, I would *like* to see the U.S. Postal Service abolished, but as long as I am paying for it anyway, I might as well get some of my money's worth out of it instead of getting no return.

Put more simply:

1. Ron Paul's first choice is for his constituents to get all of their tax dollars back instead of being used for earmarks, so he votes against specific earmarks and the overall earmark system whenever possible.

2. Ron Paul's second choice, in the event of earmarks, is for his constituents to get some proportional fraction of their tax dollars back in the form of public works and services rather than the money simply being taken from them and handed to somebody else, so he submits his own proportional earmarks to cover that (most likely) scenario.

The most rational and principled way to go about achieving his first and second choices, in that order, is to do exactly what he is doing. It's not objectively hypocrisy. You can accuse him of not going far enough and suggest that he martyr his constituents' tax dollars to make a point, but that's more of a question of tactics than philosophy. I personally don't feel I have to live in the woods, hunt for food, and become a hermit to be a principled advocate against big government.

Dan,

Your first point above may be your view, but it's not Ron Paul's, who does not oppose earmarks in principle. He thinks (sometimes) the entire budget should be "earmarked", and it is objectively hypocritical for him to claim that not voting for earmarks is an act of significance, when he has made sure his personal earmarks are inserted in a bill that is likely to be passed. That places him squarely in John Kerry I-was-against-them-after-I-was-for-them territory.

If a someone with David Cicilline's record or, one level down in government, Dominick Ruggerio's record were to brag about how he grabbed some tax money for his district, without having to record a vote in favor of it, that wouldn't be viewed as a positive thing. Likewise, Ron Paul deserves no special pass for wanting to create a public record that's different from his acts or his beliefs, that other spend-first/worry-about-the-justification-later pols wouldn't get.

Beware of the trap of believing that libertarianism is whatever Ron Paul says it is. There are a lot of other influences that he mixes with some libertarian principles.

Andrew,

I admit that I was not 100% familiar with Ron Paul's stance on earmarks. This was mainly because, consistent with your advice, I don't equate Ron Paul with libertarianism or base my own views on what Ron Paul believes. Regardless, I should have researched the issue more beforehand. I did find this video which explains his view on them nicely:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0CnDhNJrUw&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL777328DEEE303442

I think what he says in the video makes a lot of sense and I agree with it. I suspect you might as well. Of course Congress maintaining spending authority and specifying how funds are to be used is a good thing in and of itself.

After watching the video and reviewing your original comments, I am still inclined to give Ron Paul the benefit of the doubt. As he points out in the video, technically, earmarks don't add any expenditures by themselves, but we both know that funding is often added with the idea of earmarking the funds for questionable member projects. I think this is what most people in America mean when they criticize "wasteful earmarks" and what Ron Paul means in his advertisements and remarks to mass audiences. The fact that he supports them as a concept for transparency reasons is more academic and confuses the point he is trying to get out - maybe he should do a better job of explaining that distinction and why it is consistent. In any case, earmarks are 1% of the budget total, and Ron Paul certainly wants to cut more overall than Romney or Gingrich.

I do still disagree on the following:
- As I expressed earlier, reclaiming money in the form of services is not necessarily libertarian hypocrisy, and could actually be considered consistency. Ron Paul has expressed this principle himself, as in this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWTyHbGcUQY

-In your final paragraph, you seem to conflate the hypocrisy issue with the flip-flopping issue, or at least pile one on top of the other. I think it's necessary to separate and evaluate these issues separately, even if they both touch on the earmarks subject.

- The issues you bring up are not the main reasons why Ron Paul hasn't enjoyed mainstream support. They aren't even on the radar. It's much more simple than that - most people are not libertarian. Most people support either an extremely aggressive foreign policy or some form of a welfare state, both of which Ron Paul is against. There are also certain things that virtually all educated people in this country know are true but you simply don't say because they are offensive (e.g., the United States didn't enter WW2 to stop the Holocaust). Instead of dodging questions like Romney et al, Ron Paul answers them honestly and creates the offensive soundbytes that sway the stupider portions of the population. This will continue to be a problem for his candidacy.

Ron Paul believes the entire budget should be earmarked, yet he claims that he's superior to other candidates because he never votes for earmarks. How does he expect to advance his ideas on earmarking, when he's constantly undermining their legitimacy in public? The problem for his foreign policy is the same. He says he's for individual liberty, yet far beyond not supporting a so-called aggressive foreign policy, Paul believes it's wrong to speak any official word about increasing the liberty of the individual in country's where it's severely restricted.

How do you explain someone who makes a point of taking high-profile stands against what he says he believes in? There are two obvious possibilties. He might believe that history marches on, whether or not people taking a conscious role in advocating for positive change (i.e., a non-libertarian, paleoconservative thinking in foreign policy), or he might be most interested in picking the biggest moments to take symbolic stands that say "look how different I am" to the world than anything else. The 2nd, I believe, plays a bigger part in Ron Paul's positions than most of his followers recognize -- how else do you explain someone who has made a career out of claiming to be a consistent Constitutionalist suddenly deciding that "world law" was the most important consideration in the OBL raid. Where exactly is America's subservience to "world law" in the US Constitution, and what libertarian goes to "world law" for an explanation of anything?

Ron Paul has fringy poll numbers, because he behaves in this fringy manner.

This time I will be more careful in my response: I am not exactly sure what Ron Paul meant by "World Law" in that instance, but I have watched enough of his videos and read enough of his writings to make an educated guess. These issues are all about sovereignty to him - individual sovereignty, state sovereignty, and national sovereignty. When he talks about violating "World Law" or something to that effect, he is probably using it as a shorthand for violating the sovereignty of foreign countries. I'm fairly certain, based on everything I know about him and his writings, that he doesn't subscribe to some body of law dictated by the UN or the Hague or some such thing - he would reject that as a violation of our own sovereignty as a nation. So he is likely using the term in a different way than progressive/one-world type people use it. If I am mistaken, and he is actually advocating for such principles, then I certainly won't agree with him there, but I haven't seen any evidence that he is.

I'm not involved in his campaign, and my intention is not to be an apologist, but again, I think he is guilty of poorly explaining himself and not being sufficiently careful about the soundbytes he creates more than any sort of hypocrisy or violation of limited government principles. As you saw yourself, he did initially confuse me about his earmarks position, so if your criticism is that he doesn't always get out a clear and consistent message, I agree with you there.