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Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor says if “libertarian” is what Ron Paul is, then maybe he’d like to find something else to call himself.

In 1960 Hayek wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”  In it, Hayek pondered the conundrum that many Americans like me have struggled with since: What should we call ourselves?  This is not a problem in Europe: I would be a liberal.  Adam Smith is the quintessential liberal, in the European sense.  But as Schumpeter noted, in the US, those who supported big government and wanted to limit and control the free market started calling themselves liberal:  ”[a]s a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”  So unhyphenated liberal means “progressive” or the like in the US, and that is definitely not an accurate label for a believer in a minimal state.  Say “classical liberal” in the US and people just hear “liberal” and think “progressive”: confusion still reigns.  ”Conservatives” in the European sense, as Hayek argued, are primarily traditionalists, and hostile to many economic, personal, and civil liberties.

So what is the alternative?  By default, “libertarian”–a word that Hayek said “[f]or my taste . . . carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute”–is pretty much all that is left.  Again quoting Hayek: “But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”  So libertarian has pretty much become the default term to describe someone in the US who is not a liberal/progressive, traditional conservative, socialist, communist, or what have you.

But the “libertarian” label has been claimed by myriad people whom Hayek, and Friedman, and Richard Epstein–and Adam Smith–would find repulsive and decidedly unliberal, in the classical sense.  The most prominent of these today is presidential candidate Ron Paul.  Another is Paul’s former chief of staff Lew Rockwell.  Yet another is radio ranter Alex Jones.  (Sort of working my way down the food chain here.)

As Paul has made a serious challenge in Iowa, he and these others, and his supporters, have attracted much more scrutiny.  And what is revealed is not pretty.  Actually, ugly would be the proper word. …

Mark Steyn in The Corner has Randy thoughts.

Like many chaps round these parts, my general line on Ron Paul was that, as much as I think he’s out of his gourd on Iran et al, he performs a useful role in the GOP line-up talking up the virtues of constitutional conservatism. But this Weekly Standard piece by John McCormack suggests Paul is a humbug even on his core domestic turf: The entitlement state is the single biggest deformation to the Founders’ republic, and it downgrades not only America’s finances but its citizenry. Yet Paul has no serious proposal for dealing with it, and indeed promises voters that we won’t have to as long as we cut “overseas spending”.

This is hooey. As I point out in my book, well before the end of this decade interest payments on the debt will consume more of the federal budget than military spending. …

Toby Harnden writes on the luck of Mitt Romney.

… Romney has certainly been fortunate with his opponents – and those who ducked the chance to take him on. On paper, Rick Perry should be the nominee. The longest-serving governor in Texas history, chief executive of a huge, job-creating state, an evangelical Christian with an easy charm and the looks of the Marlboro Man, Perry seemed to be everything a Republican nominee should be.

But Perry turned out to be an abysmal candidate. Whether handicapped by pain medicine for his bad back, a lack of fire in his belly or the fact that his luck finally ran out after a charmed political career in Texas, Perry was  a dud – his “Oops” moment in a November debate a cruel epitaph for his candidacy.

Each time a new rival rose in the polls, they wilted under the fresh scrutiny and highlighted Romney’s strengths in the process. With Herman Cain gone and Michele Bachmann in the doldrums, in early December Romney found himself facing a resurgent Newt Gingrich.

If Romney could have invented a man he would like to duke it out for the nomination, he couldn’t have done better than Gingrich – a lobbyist in all but name, a creature of Washington, thrice-married and with no money or campaign structure.  Gingrich’s policy apostasies, including an embrace of elements of Obamacare, innoculated Romney.

Throw into the mix the maverick libertarian Ron Paul – a man with no chance of winning the Republican nomination but a possible Iowa victor – and the scenarios got even better. A Paul win would do little to damage Romney but would stifle any chance of his rivals building momentum.

But the position Romney finds himself in is not accidental. He is a vastly improved candidate from the Romney of 2008. …

Peggy Noonan says Romney gets stronger in this years strange nomination process.

… The most memorable line of the first phase? There’s “9-9-9″ and “Oops,” but the best came from Mitt Romney when he was asked about the Gingrich campaign’s failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot. Mr. Gingrich had compared it to Pearl Harbor, a setback, but we’ll recover. Mr. Romney, breezily, to a reporter: “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.”

It made people laugh. It made them want to repeat it, which is the best free media of all, the line people can’t resist saying in the office. And they laughed because it pinged off a truth: Gingrich is ad hoc, disorganized.

The put-down underscored Romney’s polite little zinger of a week before, that Mr. Gingrich was “zany.” And it was a multi-generationally effective: People who are 70-years-old remember “I Love Lucy,” but so do people who are 30 and grew up with its reruns. Mr. Romney’s known for being organized but not for being deft. This was deft. It’s an old commonplace in politics that if you’re explaining you’re losing, but it’s also true that if they’re laughing you’re losing. The campaign trail has been pretty much a wit-free zone. It’s odd that people who care so much about politics rarely use one of politics’ biggest tools, humor. Mr. Romney did and scored. More please, from everyone.

Newt Gingrich in the end will likely prove to be a gift to Mitt Romney. He was a heavyweight. This isn’t Herman Cain, this is a guy everyone on the ground in every primary state knows and has seen on TV and remembers from the past. But his emergence scared a lot of people—”Not him!’—and made some of them think, ‘OK, I guess I better get off the sidelines and make a decision. Compared to Newt, Romney looks pretty reasonable.”

Mr. Gingrich took some of the sting out of Romney-as-flip-flopper because he is a flip flopper too. He also, for a few weeks there, made Mr. Romney look like he might be over. He made Mr. Romney fight for it, not against an unknown businessman but against a serious political figure whose face and persona said: “I mean business.” In the end it will turn out he was a gift to the Romney campaign, a foe big enough that when you beat him it means something.

If it is Mitt, and if he wins, we’ll have our work cut out for us if he brings along advisors like John Sununu. Weekly Standard Blog has that thought.

As Jonathan Last pointed out, John H. Sununu, the former chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush and a top adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, recently told the New Hampshire Union Leader that “Iowans pick corn and New Hampshire picks Presidents.” 

A friend of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and proud Hawkeye responded succinctly: “Yes, and Sununus pick Souters.” And another friend notes, for the record, that the last three presidents, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, all lost the New Hampshire primary. The last “first in the nation” primary winner to continue to the presidency was George H.W. Bush in 1988—whose presidency lasted only one term, thanks in part to…John H. Sununu. …

James Pethokoukis picks 2011′s Economic HEROS and zeros.

HEROS – 5. Erskine Bowles and Senator Alan Simpson. 4. Herman Cain. 3. Steve Jobs. 2. Scott Walker. 1. Paul Ryan.

zeros – 5. Lafe Solomon. 4. The Occupy movement. 3. Elizabeth Warren. 2. The White House. 1. Kim Jong-il. 

Pethokoukis also blogs on the fact too many kids are going to college.

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Real Education by Charles Murray. In the book, Murray makes four big points: a) Ability varies; b) half of the children are below average; c) too many people are going to college; and d) America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It’s the third point I am concerned about for the moment. Here is President Obama is his recent Osawatomie, Kansas, speech:

“But we need to meet the moment. We’ve got to up our game. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission — a national mission. Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now — we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college — we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn’t rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.”

Obama’s words remind me of this passage in the book:

“The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help.”

Murray makes several points that dispute Obama: …

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Charles Krauthammer wonders if we are alone in the universe.

… And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”  …

And WSJ Reviews a book claiming we are alone.

… Recent discoveries might seem to boost the likelihood of life elsewhere in the galaxy. We have confirmed the stunning ubiquity of extrasolar planets in other star systems, the latest a possible Earth-analog orbiting right in the habitable sweet spot—not too close, not too far—from its central sun. Biologists have encountered bacteria underneath a mile of Antarctic ice and nestled within rocks in a Yellowstone geyser; it’s only a modest stretch to imagine that the next generation of robotic spacecraft might find simple biota in equally hostile havens on Mars or on one of Jupiter’s moons.

But as John Gribbin points out in his grimly plausible book, “Alone in the Universe,” there is a world of difference between habitable planets and inhabited planets. Mr. Gribbin’s narrative reduces the vision of Disney’s documentary into the counterfactual fever-dream it really is. The author’s conclusion: Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life in the galaxy, the product of a profoundly improbable sequence of cosmic, geologic and climatic events—some thoroughly documented, some inferable from fragmentary evidence—that allowed our planet to become a unique refuge where life could develop to its full potential.

Chief among these, paradoxically, was a near-cataclysmic planetary collision during Earth’s infancy, which gave birth to the moon. Such encounters were relatively common in the harum-scarum chaos of an early solar system that teemed with veering planets and asteroids. In its suicidal blow against our world, the Mars-size impactor generated enough heat to liquefy both itself and Earth’s exterior. Its dense, metallic core plunged inward to join our planet’s existing metallic center, while the rest swept up part of the fiery terrestrial shell to form the moon. …

Karl Rove makes predictions. 

As New Year’s approaches, here are a baker’s dozen predictions for 2012.

• Republicans will keep the U.S. House, albeit with their 25-seat majority slightly reduced. In the 10 presidential re-elections since 1936, the party in control of the White House has added House seats in seven contests and lost them in three. The average gain has been 12 seats. The largest pickup was 24 seats in 1944—but President Barack Obama is no FDR, despite what he said in his recent “60 Minutes” interview.

• Republicans will take the U.S. Senate. Of the 23 Democratic seats up in 2012, there are at least five vulnerable incumbents (Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania): The GOP takes two or three of these. With the announcement on Tuesday that Nebraska’s Ben Nelson will retire, there are now seven open Democratic seats (Connecticut, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin): The GOP takes three or four. Even if Republicans lose one of the 10 seats they have up, they will have a net pickup of four to six seats, for a majority of 51 to 53.

• Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid or both will leave the Democratic leadership by the end of 2012. Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell will continue directing the GOP in their respective chambers.

• This will be the fourth presidential election in a row in which turnout increases. This has happened just once since 1828, from 1928 through 1940. …

Jennifer Rubin lists the year’s disasters for the president.

President Obama has had the worst year of his presidency. Or, to be more precise, his performance this year has been the worst of his presidency. Pundits and pollsters will say that his “numbers are up,” but let’s look at what he’s done or not done.

If you can recall, back in February his State of the Union address was a bore-a-thon stocked with spending ideas (on everything from light rail to salmon), with only glancing reference to the debt. His grand proposal: Freeze discretionary spending at the astronomically high level he had presided over in his first two years.

The next few months were spent bashing the only man to author a serious budget plan and put real Medicare reform on the table. He not only rebuffed Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposals but invited him to a speech, put him in the first row and then delivered a hyper-partisan attack, accusing the Republicans of taking Pell grants from college kids so fat cats could get a break on corporate jets.

Throughout the spring and summer the president failed to present his own entitlement reform plans. …

Here’s a myth that is a delight to have debunked; by a translator who was on the scene, no less. Media Myth Alert blog has the story.

The nod for the most notable debunking of 2011 goes to retired U.S. diplomat Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr. for puncturing the popular tale about Zhou Enlai’s remark in 1972 that it was “too early to say” what the effects would be of the French Revolution.

Freeman told a panel in Washington, D.C., in June that the Chinese premier was referring to the turmoil in France in 1968, not the years of revolutionary upheaval that began in 1789.

His remarks debunking the Zhou misinterpretation were first published by London’s Financial Times.

Zhou’s “too early” comment was made during President Richard M. Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972. Freeman, then 28-years-old, was the president’s interpreter on the trip and heard Zhou’s remark.

Freeman said during the panel discussion in June that the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.

In a subsequent interview with me, Freeman said it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the conversation that Zhou’s comment was a reference to the turmoil of 1968.

Freeman described Zhou’s remark as “a classic of the genre of a constantly repeated misunderstanding that has taken on a life of its own.”

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Dave Barry rings out the old year.

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill. …

January  saw a change of power in the House of Representatives, as outgoing Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi hands the gavel over to Republican John Boehner, who, in the new spirit of Washington bipartisanship, has it checked for explosives. …

February  a massive snowstorm paralyzes the Midwest, forcing a shutdown of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after more than a dozen planes are attacked by yetis. President Obama responds with a nationally televised speech pointing out that the storm was caused by a weather system inherited from a previous administration. …

March  On the national political front, Newt Gingrich, responding to a groundswell of encouragement from the voices in his head, reveals that he is considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination. He quickly gains the support of the voter who had been leaning toward Ross Perot. …

April  a major crisis is barely avoided when Congress, after frantic negotiations, reaches a last-minute agreement on the federal budget, thereby averting a government shutdown that would have had a devastating effect on the ability of Congress to continue spending insanely more money than it actually has. …

May  As the month draws to a close, a Twitter account belonging to Anthony Weiner — a feisty, ambitious Democratic up-and-comer who managed to get elected to Congress despite looking like a nocturnal rodent that somehow got a full-body wax and acquired a gym membership — tweets a link to a photograph of a pair of briefs containing what appears to be a congressional member rarin’ to filibuster, if you catch my drift. This member immediately captivates the nation, although, surprisingly, President Obama fails to deliver a nationally televised address about it. …

June  the Republican field does in fact continue to grow as Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum,Mitt Romney, the late Sonny Bono and somebody calling himself “Jon Huntsman” all enter the race, bringing the Republican contender total to roughly 125. …

July  Speaking of drama: In Washington, as the deadline for raising the federal debt limit nears, Congress and the Obama administration work themselves into a frenzy trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the government is spending insanely more money than it actually has. After hours of intense negotiations, several walkouts, countless press releases and of course a nationally televised address by the president, the Democrats and the Republicans are finally able to announce, at the last possible minute, that they have hammered out a historic agreement under which the government will continue to spend insanely more money than it actually has while a very special congressional committee — A SUPER committee! — comes up with a plan, by a later date, that will solve this pesky problem once and for all. Everybody involved heaves a sigh of relief and basks in the feeling of satisfaction that comes from handling yet another crisis, Washington-style. …

August  With the stock market in a steep nosedive, economic growth stagnant and unemployment relentlessly high, the White House, moving swiftly to prevent panic, reassures a worried nation that President Obama will once again be vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, where he will recharge his batteries in preparation for what White House press secretary Jay Carney promises will be “a real humdinger of a nationally televised address.” …

September  In domestic news, President Obama returns from his Martha’s Vineyard getaway refreshed and ready to tackle the job he was elected by the American people to do: seek reelection. Focusing on unemployment, the president delivers a nationally televised address laying out his plan for creating jobs, which consists of traveling around the nation tirelessly delivering job-creation addresses until it’s time for another presidential getaway. …

October  On the domestic protest front, Occupy Wall Street spreads to many more cities, its initially vague goals now replaced by a clear sense of purpose as occupiers focus on the single issue that is most important to the 99 percent:bathrooms. Some cities seek to shut down the protests, but the occupiers vow to remain until there is a reawakening of the national consciousness. Or, winter. …

November  the congressional Supercommittee, after months of pondering what to do about the fact that the federal government is spending insanely more money than it actually has, announces that, in the true “can-do” bipartisan Washington spirit, it is giving up. This means the government will continue spending insanely more money than it actually has until 2013, at which time there are supposed to be automatic spending cuts, except Congress would never let that happen, and even if it did happen, the federal government would still be spending insanely more money than it actually has. …

December  The economic outlook is also brighter in Washington, where congressional leaders, still working night and day to find a solution to the problem of the federal government spending insanely more money than it actually has, announce that they have a bold new plan: They will form another committee. But this one will be even better than the Supercommittee, because it will be a SuperDUPERcommittee, and it will possess what House and Senate leaders describe, in a joint statement, as “magical powers.”