That’s why I hope, as a gesture of good will and political acumen, Romney chooses Rand Paul as his running mate. Here is why I think it is a good idea:

1) It would provide him with a base of enthusiastic supporters. Of course, I imagine that there is a hard-core of Ron Paul supporters who would not support Romney under any circumstances. But all political movements are broad and multi-layered, and I think enough Ron Paul supporters to make a difference would end up supporting Romney if he chose Rand as a running mate. I am one of them.

2) It would serve as a clear demonstration of the power, relevance, and  legitimacy of the “paleo” movement. By “paleo” movement, I mean the coalition of strict Constitutionalists, libertarians, “paleo”-libertarians, paleo-conservatives, and fed-up-with everything conservatives who banded together to support Ron Paul. No longer could the likes of David Frum, Michael Gerson, or even personalities such as Hannity or Limbaugh write off this section of the right wing as “fringe” or “extremist” – or at least, without straining their own credibility.

3) This is a no-brainer: it sets the stage for a Rand Paul presidential run in 2016. He could run even without having been VP, but it would provide a tremendous boost ceteris paribus.  I would support a Romney-Paul ticket for this benefit alone.

I am sure there are “purists” who hate this idea. Some of them even dislike Rand Paul, they don’t think he’s as pure as his father. Maybe he isn’t. But he would be a thousand times better than anyone else, and has a much better chance at one day capturing the White House. And if we can’t appreciate that, we deserve to be dominated by an oppressive state.

As a Ron Paul supporter and Constitutionalist, I am not a fan of Rick Santorum. His foreign policy strikes me as reckless and absurd, and his support for the assassination of the American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki demonstrates to me that he isn’t the least concerned with restoring Constitutional government to the United States. He is a right-wing statist. I don’t support him at all and I wouldn’t vote for him under almost any circumstance.

But my dislike for the Santorum political program is nothing but a weak shadow compared to my contempt for pornography.

I hate porn. I think it is a plague that is ripping apart families and undermining the foundations of civilization.

The “there’s no data to support that” refrain of the porn industry and the pro-porn left is simply a lie. There is actually plenty of data to support the contention that porn is extremely harmful to individuals and society, even if it is not directly responsible for rape as is often said. And let’s be real, shall we? Even if they saw the data proving the harm caused by porn and considered it irrefutable, they’d still insist that they have an inalienable right to produce it. So the notion that we can’t do a thing to restrict porn because the “data” suggests it is harmless is not only false, but a total distraction.

I can already hear some people: “how can you say that? I thought you were a libertarian!?” I have heard from various traditionalists, Distributists, and even leftists who aren’t perverts that this is one of those examples that demonstrates the folly of libertarianism. It will eventually clash with non-negotiable Catholic values and you’ll have to put it aside. After all, if we have a truly “free” market, you can’t object to something that is made, distributed and consumed by consenting adults.

Well, strangely enough, the classical liberals who founded this country would have completely rejected this assertion. The idea that porn is part and parcel of “free speech” is simply a lie. It was never intended to be covered by the 1st amendment, as is evidenced by the anti-obscenity laws on the books in every state, some of which have been in place since the very beginning of this nation. Rick Santorum is absolutely right to point out that there are anti-obscenity laws that could be enforced. But I don’t expect the sort of people who grunt and moan for a living to have read Miller v. California.

Why would the founding fathers, who were supposedly these totally secular libertines who wanted to create a sextopia, not vigorously prosecute every small town fascist who wanted to drive porn out of the local community? Because they weren’t libertines at all. They understood that the maximum amount of liberty human beings are capable of can only be sustained by a people who are at least willing to try to maintain virtuous lives. Not that we all succeed all of the time – this is impossible for fallen man. But there is a big difference between a society that acknowledges evil even if its members succumb to it, and one that calls evil good – and good evil.

I do not believe that the federal government can create a moral society. I want the failed and oppressive “War on Drugs” to come to an end, and I don’t want to see individual porn consumers put in prison or anything like that. What I want to see is a frank acknowledgment that porn is a social menace, that it undermines and destroys families and ruins individual lives as well. I want to see spread, in the same free market of ideas, anti-pornography awareness and education. I want to see liberty used for good, instead of evil. I know that’s an insane idea, right? Because when we think of liberty in this country, we think of the freedom to be naughty. Let’s think of it the way the Church always has, and the way the American founders did too: the liberty to fight for virtue in the public square, to resist the government-media complex’s support for sexual degeneracy.

Because remember, libertarians: sexual vice is what keeps families from forming or staying together. It is what creates dependents on welfare. It is what creates criminals who violate the rights of others. The cause of liberty depends upon well-socialized individuals who have a stake in maintaining the institutions that make liberty possible and worthwhile to begin with, such as private property. Behind every person mooching off the state and even most of the stories of people in prison is most likely a broken home, a home broken by a lack of sexual restraint. When you support sexual deviancy, you support the welfare state indirectly!

I do not see, for instance, the Declaration of Independence as a sole or even primary product of the “Enlightenment”, but rather as the product of Christian natural law tradition. That isn’t to say that there is nothing new in the American experiment, but it is not the total novelty that others make it out to be either. American civilization stands on the shoulders of Christendom, whether the anti-Catholic prejudice of the American founders could appreciate it or not. I also make very sharp distinctions between the Anglo-American and Continental “Enlightenments.” The French Revolution created a horrific and monstrous tyranny that Catholics were right to resist, and sowed the seeds for an even worse tyranny in the form of communism.

But some changes were bound to happen. Our societies and our beliefs will always be shaped by the way we live our lives, and the way we live our lives has been radically transformed by technology, by the industrial and information revolutions of the past two centuries. As a result of these changes, Catholics have been forced to distinguish in a new way between what is timeless and absolute and what is largely the product of culture.

In my view, the encyclical Rerum Novarum was an acknowledgement of what had been understood by classical liberal economists since Locke: that the growth of the global economy and later, the development of industry, required a fresh look at private property rights and political liberties that would not have been called for in more static and predictable times. Prior to Rerum, what Aristotle had to say about private property through Aquinas might have been the final word. But through Rerum, Locke now enters the picture.  The acquisition and use of private property is no longer merely a preferable arrangement to communism, as it was in Aristotle’s Politics, but is in fact a natural right belonging to each individual that precedes (morally, if not historically) the creation or interest of any political community. A society that respects this natural right will, as a matter of course and not any additional policies, develop a free-market economy based upon voluntary, mutual exchange.

It then becomes the task of economists to understand how such economies work and to offer an objective account of the advantages that they bring about. But here we run into a massive stumbling block with many traditionalists and many leftists as well. Most of them simply accept the Marxist narrative of capitalist development, which sees nothing but a bloody and (oddly enough for leftists who reject objective morality) evil history of expropriation and exploitation. Of the tens of millions of lives that directly benefit from the mass production of higher quality goods and services, we generally hear nothing. When we do hear about mass consumption, it is to inveigh against the “brainwashing” of advertising, which wouldn’t sit so well if one considered the countless businesses that have been forced to shut down because they couldn’t convince people to buy their products.

A common refrain I hear from both traditionalist and leftist “social justice” Catholics is that the field of economics does not pay sufficient attention to the moral dimensions of the economy. This is one of the most ignorant and unsupported claims I have ever heard, though. The economists of the Austrian school, for instance, spend a great deal of time discussing the moral dimension of economics because they hold certain principles, such as the inviolability of private property rights and the non-aggression principle, as sacrosanct. That some may do so as agnostics or atheists is certainly a problem for those individuals, but it doesn’t change the substance of their work. They are also concerned with the real and actual common good, which they argue is best served by a free market economy. This is far from the picture of indifference and doctrinaire individualism that is often associated with libertarianism.

The righteous protest against Wal-Mart, for instance, is often a series of grievances that emanate from very narrow constituencies; weighed against the tens of millions of individuals and families, most of whom are of poor or average means, who benefit directly from Wal-Mart’s low prices, it is not hard to see where the common good actually lies. It is time to stop conflating the narrow interests of workers whose skills are becoming obsolete or small businessmen whose products are noncompetitive with “the common good”, and start calling them what they are: special interests lobbying a coercive institution to arrest the free development of the economy and invalidate the choices made by consumers. Even if such lobbying could be morally justified in itself, the irrationality of using force to override the rational decisions of consumers will create economic problems that cause far greater harm.

To create the kind of society we want to see, we must ultimately persuade people. This is all most businesses engage in (when they aren’t relying on the state), and it is what our own religion teaches. The early Christians did not need a king to force everyone to become a Christian. They won hearts and minds by way of example. Nothing in a free market economy prevents people from deciding, on their own, to pool their resources and commit to a certain way of life. We might call this “voluntary collectivism”, to which no libertarian can possibly pose a moral or legal objection. No one has to be some sort of individualist, a doctrinaire Objectivist who despises the poor and dies miserable and alone after a lifetime of hate.

In the classical liberal view, which is also the Catholic view, natural rights are corollaries to natural laws. Our rights to life, liberty, and private property derive from our obligations to preserve our lives and those of our family, to educate our children, and to obey the moral law. These obligations are imposed upon us by God. The modern libertarian has lost sight of the connection between natural law and right, but insofar as he defends natural rights as they are articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which at least acknowledges a “Creator”, he stands in the Christian natural law tradition.

In the view of those who call themselves progressives or leftists today, rights are simply whatever people desire and believe they are entitled to. For example,  heterosexuals never created a “right” to marry. Marriage is considered a “right” only insofar as it is necessary to fulfill an obligation, in this case, to be fruitful and multiply, and to avoid the sin of fornication.

But radical homosexuals have demanded a “right” to marry. From whence does such a “right” arise? There is no natural obligation to have a romantic relationship with someone; to have a romantic relationship publicly recognized as something “normal” or even praiseworthy is a privilege. We have seen the same phenomenon with feminism, with various minority ethnocentrisms, and others: they never seem to acknowledge or admit that they want equal (or superior) privileges with men, or with whites. They conflate privilege and right, and believe somehow that they have a right to a privilege, or at at least to live in a society in which there are no privileges at all. Whether or not their ought to be privileges is one question; whether or not they could ever actually be abolished, at least without the mass murder and mayhem that typically accompanies communist revolutions, is another.

Things get uglier when we consider scarce goods and services. Many Catholics, for instance, have bought into the notion that “health care is a basic right.” Of course everyone has a right to healthcare, insofar as they have a right to exchange their private property for that particular batch of goods and services. The “right to healthcare”, properly understood, is subsumed under private property rights. But we know that this isn’t what is meant by those who say that “health care is a basic human right.” They mean that everyone is entitled to a specific batch of goods and services.

It is simply absurd to think that something that has only been available for mass production and consumption for the past century can be considered a “basic human right”, and that a situation of profound injustice exists whenever and wherever someone does not possess it. The same reasons that prevent everyone from having immediate possession of top of the line health care today are those which prevailed a thousand years ago, and they are summed up in a word:  scarcity. We don’t take this seriously today because our imaginations have been stimulated, wildly so I would say, by what modern methods of production and distribution appear to make possible.

So wildly stimulated has the human imagination become, in fact, that it would even seek to arrest the very process that made such possibilities imaginable in the first place, the process of free-market capitalism. In the 19th century, men such as Marx were ready to declare capitalism as a completed historical stage on the progressive super-highway to a communist utopia before it barely even got off the ground. Several dozen failed dictatorships and tens of millions of corpses later, we ought to have realized that the progressive narrative was fatally flawed. We almost did, in fact. Some went so far as to say that we had reached “the end of history.”

But in spite of horrible fiscal problems, despite the fact that national healthcare systems the world over are showing signs of serious strain for various reasons, the fanatical entitlement mentality continues. We are lectured on what “ought” to be without any consideration of what “is”, another “ought/is” problem if you want to put it that way.

The problem of scarcity is thought to be avoidable by forcing everyone to pay into the health care system. After all, the one limitless resource, in the mind of a progressive as well as a bureaucrat, is the pocket of the taxpayer. But there is a price to be paid here as well – a political price, in the form of widespread anger and revulsion from a people who still remember their actual, natural rights and who reject the arbitrary, fraudulent rights dreamed up by progressives.