Adjusted For Fed Propping And Inflation, Dow At 5,600

Liberals love to point to the stock market as an indicator of economic recovery. After all, stocks are one of the few asset classes that have recovered. Unfortunately, the market's recovery is a total sham. The Fed, by its own admission, is propping up the market by 50%. This revelation alone takes the actual Dow reading below 7,000. And then there's the relatively high inflation we've been experiencing over the last few years (as a result of Fed liquidity pumping via printing and ZIRP). The government has been telling us that inflation has been essentially non-existent since the financial crisis, but many respected economists have pegged the inflation rate as high as 8% per annum. But let's just assume that it's been running at half of that--4%--since 2008, the last time the Dow reached 14,000. That would mean that 2013 dollars have approximately 20% less purchasing power than 2008 dollars. So, if the absence of Fed propping takes the Dow down to 7,000, the actual inflation-adjusted level is 5,600 (in 2008 dollars).

Here's what 5,600 would look like on a historical chart of the Dow. Notice that the last time the market was at this level was in 1996. But, adjusted for inflation, the Dow at 5,600 in 1996 would be equivalent to the index registering approximately 10,000 today! In other words, the stock market is actually in the toilet, and those who point to it as an indicator of economic recovery are severely misguided.

Welcome, New ECOMINOES Readers!

Two of the biggest names in the liberty movement, Lew Rockwell and Robert Wenzel, recently republished (with permission) my article entitled The Devil's In The (Lack Of) Details Of Obama's Gun Control Orders. As a result, traffic to this blog has skyrocketed. Some of you are undoubtedly visiting for the first time, and I welcome you! I encourage you to check out past articles (archive menu on the right side of the screen for desktop users), listen to episodes of ECOMINOES Radio, and "like" the ECOMINOES Facebook page. Thanks for reading (and listening)!

ECOMINOES Radio @ 3 ET: Guns, guns, guns!

Eric and I are going to devote much of today's show to gun control, particularly Obama's executive orders. We'll speak with a local gun shop/range owner, and we'll probably take some...wait for it...shots at one another. Listen to the show here at 3 ET, and make sure to listen to show archives!

Irony: Worse To Be Unemployed In Blue States

Unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is a pestilence that ruins peoples' lives. I know from first-hand experience. I also know that cost of living is the arch enemy of the unemployed. And Bloomberg confirmed today a suspicion I've had about being unemployed in states with "generous" benefits: the higher benefits doled out in most of these states (blue states) are effectively smaller than the lower benefits granted in most red states. Why? Because the cost of living in most blue states is disproportionally greater.

When I was receiving benefits, I was "better off" receiving the relatively meager amount my state of South Carolina sent me than, for example, an unemployed person receiving the relatively generous $406 the state of New Jersey allots. Why? Because the median income in South Carolina is between $30,000 and $40,000, while the median income in the garden state is greater than $50,000. Median income, see, strongly correlates with cost of living. Not only do residents of states with the highest median incomes bear the brunt of the highest prices, but they also pay--by far--the highest tax rates. South Carolina's median income of $30-40K "goes further" here than Jersey's $50K+ median income does in that state.

Anyway, here's Bloombergs breakdown of where it sucks especially badly to be long-term unemployed:

If you happen to be unemployed in these states and you have the means, move! Red states typically have better employment opportunities. And weather.

Happy Trails: My Homage To Neal Boortz

Neal Boortz, the "Talkmaster", will sign off for the last time tomorrow. This saddens me. Neal was one of the few rational, intelligent voices in political talk radio. And he's a libertarian. Well, for the most part. But, ideological purist or not, Neal introduced me to libertarianism more than a decade ago. And then, throughout the years, he sparked within me the flame of activism. Indeed, if it weren't for Neal's on-air brilliance, I doubt that I'd be publishing this blog. And I certainly wouldn't be attempting to follow in his footsteps on the radio. Although I've never met him, I consider Neal a mentor.

Yeah, he was a blowhard on the air. That was his act. Unfortunately, that's the way popular political talk radio hosts have been since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene. That's what conservatives like. Hopefully, that will change as more liberty-minded voices rise to prominence. But, with Neal, the vitriol was interspersed with impeccable logic. Boortz, you see, is a highly-intelligent man. He wasn't the Talkmaster because he was good at talking over people. He was the Talkmaster because he was good at overpowering people with well-formulated arguments. (He even co-authored a revolutionary tax plan. What other talk radio show host has done anything of the sort?)

Unfortunately, Neal strayed from his libertarian roots for several years. For some reason, he became seduced by neoconservatism. I don't know what he was thinking. Thankfully, he eventually saw the error in his ways, and he's ending his storied 40+ year career with a healthy disdain for the Republican Party. In the wake of the party's 2012 electoral disaster, he penned an epic diatribe about the GOP's social conservatism, and he recently posted some great anti-Republican messages on his Facebook page. It's great to see Neal end on a high note.

Speaking of high notes, his last show isn't to be missed. (Listen live here Friday from 8:30 to 1 ET.) He's sure to tell it like it is, and who knows what he'll say now that he can basically say anything he wants without having to worry about being fired:

Me love you long time, Neal! If I ever get famous, I hope for the chance to finally meet you. 

(Afterthought: Neal wrote an excellent farewell article that nicely sums up his career. I urge you to read it.)

Dissecting Juan Williams's Gun Control Claptrap

I've always disagreed with Juan Williams, but I used to think that he at least brought half-way rational liberal arguments to the table at Fox. But, either the quality of Juan's arguments has since deteriorated or I've become more suspicious of what the "other side" says. Because, either way, I've recently caught Mr. Williams both making irrational arguments and flat-out lying. Yesterday, for example, he penned an intellectual abortion of an article regarding Obama's executive orders concerning gun control. The uber-rational Tom Woods dissected it, so I'll leave it to the master to explain how far off Juan was with it:

In an article called “What Everybody Needs to Know About Our Constitution and Gun Control,” Juan Williams of FOX News writes:

Gun control is completely consistent with the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. And President Obama is on target with the great American tradition of proposing gun control laws for Congressional approval as well as by issuing executive orders on gun control.

The only opinion that matters here is the Supreme Court’s opinion. And the high court has ruled, several times, that the president, the Congress, state and local government all have the power to regulate guns.

So we discover at the very beginning of this article that “what everybody needs to know about our Constitution and gun control” is precisely nothing. All that matters is what the infallible Supreme Court has said on the subject. According to Williams’ argument, there is in fact no need to know anything about the Constitution at all.
As for executive orders, Williams writes:

Article II of the U.S. Constitution clearly grants Obama and any other president the authority and the discretion to issue executive orders with the force of law over the sale of guns and ammunition.

“Clearly”? Williams might say Article II suggests that Obama has this power (and even here he’d be wrong), but come on — clearly?

In Section 1 of Article II, Clause 1 vests executive power in the president. Regulating firearm ownership was not considered an inherent executive power in the eighteenth-century context in which the Constitution was drafted.

Clauses 2, 3, and 4 deal with the selection of electors.

Clause 5 says only natural-born citizens are eligible to serve as president.

Clause 6 deals with what is to happen if the president dies while in office, etc.
Clause 7 deals with his salary.

Clause 8 deals with the oath he has to take.

Section II, Clause 1 declares the president to be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Clause 2 covers the making of treaties.

Clause 3 deals with filling vacancies during the Senate’s recess.

Section III reads: “He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.”

Finally, Section IV deals with impeachment.

In what you have just read, Juan Williams finds “clear” authority to issue executive orders, circumventing Congress, on issues pertaining to firearm ownership. Do you find it?

Williams concludes by citing three presidents who issued executive orders involving guns. Once again, the Constitution is omitted. Three presidents have done this, so it just has to be constitutional. I mean, you wouldn’t actually be opposed to three presidents, would you?

Update: Fed Can't Produce The Gold Germany Wants Back!

I knew it! Turns out, the Fed refused Germany an audit of its gold reserve holdings in the United States last fall because OUR CENTRAL BANK DOESN'T HAVE ALL OF THE GOLD IT CLAIMS!!! And now, Germany, who recently announced that it will repatriate some of its gold from the U.S. (absolutely as a result of the refusal of the audit), will have to wait seven years for the Fed to come up with what it's supposed to have for Deutschland now! ZeroHedge has the scoop:

...the biggest news of the day comes from the official Buba announcement that, in its official capacity as a prudent central bank, it - as first of many - is looking to repatriate some 300 tons of gold from the New York Fed. That, however, is not today's news - that was Monday's news.

What is news is that courtesy of the supplied calendar of events in the Buba statement, it will take the Fed some seven years to procure Germany's 300 tons of gold. This is the same Fed that, in its own words, holds some "216 million troy ounces of gold" or some 6720 tons, in its vault 80 feet below ground level.

Putting the above in perspective, the amount of gold that Germany will have to wait 7 years for is shown in red. The amount of gold the Fed supposedly holds, is shown in yellow with a shade of tungsten. Why it will take the Fed 7 years to part with an amount of gold that is less than 5% of its total holdings is anyone's guess...

unless of course, the bulk of the gold in the column on the right has been rehypothecated numerous times to serve as collateral for countless counterparties, and it is no longer clear just who own what to anyone.



* * *

We can only wonder how many centuries it will take the New York Fed to deliver all the gold held by third parties in its vault, once the demand notices start rushing in...

This is a HUGE story, but I'm certain that the MSM will ignore it.

The Devil's In The (Lack Of) Details Of Obama's Gun Control Orders

Apart from the fact that executive orders are intended to direct the staff of the Executive Branch, not impose laws on the citizenry, the real malfeasance in the 23 orders regarding gun control Obama is expected to sign is, ironically, their generality. That is to say, they are subject to wide interpretation and have to the potential of being used to greatly expand the government's power over the American people without congressional authorization. The following are the orders that have the most potential for abuse:

Order #1: Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system. 

"Relevant data" is a highly subjective term. I wouldn't put it past enterprising bureaucrats to include web search history and Facebook activity in the "relevant" list. Order #1 is a Pandora's Box.

Order #2: Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

Again, the key word in this order is another highly subjective term. What is an "unnecessary legal barrier"? Privacy laws? Is HIPAA an "unnecessary legal barrier"? Another Pandora's Box.

Order #4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

This is some scary shit here. This is basically an order to profile innocent people to acertain the probability that they will use a firearm illegally. And again, subjectivity: the profile of a killer is in the eye of the beholder. If someone massacres a school "dressing metal", does everyone who dresses that way get placed on a list?

Order #14: Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.

This order directs the CDC to discard scientific principles and start making *guesses* (which, of course, would be influenced by ideology). Correlations can be drawn regarding gun violence, but there are far too many variables in this world to determine a *cause* of any complex cultural phenomenon. (And, make no mistake, gun violence is an American cultural phenomenon.)

Order #16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes. 

Excuse me? Why would my doctor have any business knowing whether or not I own a gun? This order makes medical providers government snoops, whose information could be accessed by more easily as per order #2.

Order #21: Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.

It would seem that medical benefits have nothing to do with the price of tea in China, but I could imagine that this order, in the context of gun control, opens the door to blacklisting. Those placed on "The List" authorized by orders #1 and #4 could potentially be denied coverage based on this order.

I'm sure some of the other orders could be abused as well. The Land of the Free gets freer every day!

Wife Of Medical Pot Grower Begs DEA Obama For Pardon

Obama, like Patrick Kennedy, is just another politician who has been bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. As such, he has reneged on his promise to not go after medical marijuana providers. As a result, a lot of decent, hardworking people face prison sentences for nothing but having operated legitimate businesses in compliance with state laws. One such person, Matt Davies of California, faces 10 years for supplying medical marijuana. Here is Davies's wife Molly's heart-wrenching plea to the anti-pot president (h/t Reason):

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing to you as a wife and mother of two young daughters, whose 34-year old husband, Matthew Davies, faces10 years or more in federal prison for providing medical marijuanato sick people in California, even though he complied with state law concerning medicinal cannabis. My questions to you are simple:

• What has my husband done that would justify the federal government forcing my young daughters to grow up without a father?
• How can your Administration ignore the will of the California people and prosecute this good, law-abiding man for doing exactly what state law permits?

Mr. President, my husband is not a criminal and shouldn't be treated like one. Matt is not a drug dealer or trafficker. He's not driving around in a fancy car and living in some plush mansion--trust me. My husband is a regular guy, and we're a regular, middle-class family. Yet even though Matt took great pains to follow state and local law, he is currently facing a severe prison sentence. This all seems so surreal.
Last month you told Barbara Walters that federal law enforcement authorities would not go after people in Colorado and Washington for marijuana-related crimes because it makes no sense for the government to "focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal." You said that the federal government has "bigger fish to fry."

If that's true, why are federal prosecutors in Sacramento threatening my husband, Matt, with 10 years to life in federal prison for providing medical marijuana to California patients who are legally allowed to possess and use it? Matt did nothing illegal under our state and local laws. He has no criminal record. He is a hard-working family man and a loving, kind husband and father.
We are confused and absolutely terrified.

We'll see if the White House responds to this plea or just ignores it as it has ignored so many. Remember, often times, the casualties of the pharmaceutical industry-sponsored War on Drugs are innocent people with families.

Obama Considering CIRCUMVENTING CONSTITUTION To Get Gun Control

This is serious. According to Joe Biden, Obama is considering circumventing the Constitution to pass new gun control laws by issuing them as executive orders. Politico reports:

The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban, universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But Biden, who has been leading Obama’s task force on the response, spent two hours briefing a small group of sympathetic House Democrats on the road ahead in the latest White House outreach to invested groups.

The focus on executive orders is the result of the White House and other Democrats acknowledging the political difficulty of enacting any new gun legislation, a topic Biden did not address in Monday’s meeting.

The executive actions could include giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to conduct national research on guns, more aggressive enforcement of existing gun laws and pushing for wider sharing of existing gun databases among federal and state agencies, members of Congress in the meeting said.

I can't believe that no one is going ape shit over this. If there's a time to go ape shit, it's now. Executive orders aren't supposed to be used in this manner. "Executive power", as granted  in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution, allows for the creation of executive orders to help officers and agencies of the executive branch manage the operations within the federal government itself. Not to pass constitutionally-questionable legislation by presidential fiat. (I say "constitutionally-questionable" because the laws conflict with the guarantees provided by the 2nd Amendment.)

If Obama does this, he should absolutely be impeached.

And yes, Bush used executive orders to pass constitutionally-questionable "War on Terror" legislation. And he should have been impeached for it.

Leery Germany Repatriating Gold From U.S.

Germany, the world's 2nd largest holder of gold reserves, threatened to repatriate its gold held by the Federal Reserve after America's central bank refused an audit of its holdings last fall. Today, Germany has announced that it will begin collecting some its gold held here as well as some of its gold held by other central banks. Here is the Google translation of the key paragraph from the announcement:

The German Bundesbank is developing a new approach as to where its gold will be stored. According to exclusive information, to be fully announced on Wednesday, the bank will in the future hold less gold in the New York Fed, and no more hold in Paris (Banque de France). As a result, the distribution of German gold, of which 45% is held in New York, 13% in London, 11% in Paris and 31% in Frankfurt, is about to change.

We won't know until Wednesday how much of its gold Germany will repatriate. But, as you can see from the following infographic, this move could affect a very large quantity:

"Recovery": 7,000 Apply For 200 Target Jobs In Albuquerque

Contradicting the government's (and the MSM's) narrative that the employment situation is improving in this country, Americans continue to apply by the thousands for menial jobs during hiring blitzes at national retail chains and service providers. The latest example of this phenomenon took place this past weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where 7,000 applied for 200 jobs at a Target job fair. From KOAT:

Thousands of people applied for 200 new jobs at Target over the last three days in Northeast Albuquerque.

KOAT Action 7 News went to Target's job fair at the Marriott Uptown every day and continued to find lines snaking around the building.

Candidates only have a one in 35 chance in getting a job, but many have said they're confident they can stand out from the pack...

The list of events similar to this is as long as it is depressing. Here are some highlights:

• In American Airline's hiring blitz of late last year, 20,000 applicants competed against one another for 1,500 flight attendant jobs. More would have applied if the airline didn't stop considering new applicants at the 20K mark.
• Last May, Target accepted more than 2,000 applications for 200 jobs in the first day of a 3 day job fair in Surfside Beach, SC.
• More than 1 million applied for 50,000 openings at McDonald's in its 2011 hiring blitz.

I've noted time and time again on this blog that government unemployment data can't be trusted, primarily because the methodology it employs is fundamentally flawed. Anecdotal evidence such as these mass-application events and mass-layoff events (most recently at American Express), combined with statistical analyses of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, makes a good argument that the unemployment rate is much higher than the government reports.

Ron Paul's Legacy And The Future Of The Liberty Movement

Reason's Brian Doherty notes that, while the liberty movement currently has no figurehead, it does have a number of possible "heirs". To me, an "heir" to the movement is an oxymoron. I believe that true American liberty has grown from one man's vision into the nation's next manifest destiny. Indeed, the absence of a single "leader" or handful of "leaders" is in itself a revolutionary concept that's fitting (and healthy) for the movement in this stage of its development.

Anyway, here's what Doherty said. My commentary continues after the article:

Ron Paul is officially no longer a congressman. Gone from the Washington scene is his tendency to cast lone votes, his unique willingness to point out that government is inherently basedon violence. Paul will continue to be a public spokesman for liberty—about the only part of his job as congressman he liked anyway. 

He leaves behind a contested legacy. As Paul’s detractors will tediously point out, being one of 435 in Congress with views vastly different from your colleagues’ means you will neither pass many laws, nor prevent many laws from being passed, nor shape the ethos of the House. Paul did, though, succeed in shifting “Audit the Fed” from an issue no one knew or cared about to a bill that has passed the House twice.

Through his Republican presidential runs in 2008 and 2012, he conjured a large and dedicated army of libertarian activists and politicos where one hadn’t existed before, though we don’t know how many of the 2.1 million people who voted for him in GOP primaries in 2012 are as hardcore libertarian as Paul. Two thriving organizations, Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans forLiberty, arose from those campaigns and survive his congressional career.

But can lasting change within our sclerotic political system arise from a movement as insurrectionist and outside the mainstream as Paul’s? And will he have any heirs to keep what he started rolling? A vote total of 2.1 million is a surprisingly impressive number, to be sure, especially for such a harsh critic of empire, drug wars, and fiat money. But it still represents a decidedly losing portion of what was, nationally in 2012, a losing party.

What the Paul revolutionaries are trying to do, they insist, has been done before. They are trying to use a rowdy, young-skewing throng to force a major party to embrace ideas that seem fanatical to existing party hierarchies. Remember the Barry Goldwater kids in 1960, uniting fervently behind a strongly anti-government author of a best-selling book of popular political philosophy, freaking out the party powers with their youth and outsider enthusiasm? It’s impossible to read a history of the Goldwater movement without seeing how similar the Goldwater and Paul stories are—the anti-state energy, the mistrust and warring with the hidebound establishment, even the streaks of weird paranoia among some of the activists.

Goldwater and Paul were both legislators known more for sternly saying “no” than passing laws. Like Paulites today, the Goldwater movement in the Republican Party in 1960 was “experienced by the old regulars as if it were an alien invasion,” in the words of Rick Perlstein in his great history of the Goldwater movement, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of theAmerican Consensus. When Goldwaterites took over state parties, like in Nebraska, the old party regulars fought back to change rules to blunt their opponents’ victory. Both candidates lived off a huge number of small donations, cared more about being right than being president, and were blessed with masses of young, passionate volunteers willing to overturn their lives to knock on doors for their man in bitter cold. Both even saw their delegates involved in scuffles where cops got called at state conventions. And both, their admirers insisted, were leaders of a new American revolution to purify and revive the first one.

From 1960 to 1964, Goldwater morphed from dangerous joke to candidate. And his '64 defeat famously bore fruit in the form of Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan's rise to world power 16 years later. It’s a story whose echoes sound encouragingly in the heads of many political operatives surrounding the Paul revolution.

A more recent development in the Republican Party—and a more cautionary tale for the future of Paulism—is the aftermath of Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 run. United in outsiderhood, Paul partisans such as Drew Ivers from his Iowa operation were often former Robertson supporters. Robertson advised his people to organize and try to take over the GOP from the grassroots. Thanks to Robertson’s campaign and its aftermath, the Republican Party of the past two decades has been influenced by the Religious Right more than their raw numbers might justify.

The fate of the Christian right reveals a trap the Paul movement must avoid, even as it emulates the Christian right's tactics of inhabiting the party from the bottom up—tactics that have given Paul forces significant control already of state parties in Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota. For giving electoral fealty to the GOP without question, the religious right received little but lip service to its traditionalist ideas, and few actual achievements. The libertarian wing could easily see itself similarly neutered, voting for Romney manqués as far as the eye can see and getting in return just a contemptuous, “What are you going to do? Vote third party?”

Goldwater is not the only example of “radical outsider to candidate” in postwar American politics. While their ideology matches directly only on opposition to war, Paul’s style and success most emulates the Democratic Party’s antiwar challenger Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) from 1968. McCarthy’s youth appeal, anti-war stance, intellectuality, and fights with the party establishment on the caucus and state convention level over delegates, all track Paul’s story closely.

Both were being trounced within their own party, yet polled strongly against or ahead of their presumptive other-party competitor in the general election. Both ran more as themselves than faithful or committed Party members; Paul never endorsed Romney, and McCarthy only endorsed Hubert Humphrey grudgingly in the last week before the election.

Lawsuits over proper delegation allocation were filed on behalf of both McCarthy and Paul. Both were supported by young zealots who were willing to tear down their existing party and build it anew. Both had unconventional, intellectual political styles, and were aware that what success they had came from decentralized efforts of fans more than their own official campaigns. Both saw their active campaigns fizzle in the summer without ever dropping out, and both felt it necessary to steel their supporters for disappointment by admitting they knew they couldn’t win before it was all over (though Paul did so much earlier). And both saw their campaigns as ultimately educational, and about creating a reform movement within their respective parties.

While McCarthy himself fizzled when he tried to run again in 1972, George McGovern’s winning ’72 campaign was in most respects the rise to power of Eugene McCarthyism: anti-war, anti-establishment, and opening up the Democratic Party’s rules and delegate selection in a more populist manner.

Historical analogies don’t prove further victories for Paulism are destined; just that we know it isn’t impossible for factions seen as small, outré, failed, and repudiated to quickly dominate a political party. If Paul’s general outlook has any validity, history is on his side. The problems he and his movement provide unique insights into and solutions for—overstrained fiscal and monetary policy, overreaching foreign and domestic mission—are not likely to disappear in the next decade unless a Paul-like solution is attempted.

But his ideas won’t march on in a vacuum; actual human individuals and groups need to further them. Various possible and presumptive heirs remain or are arising in Washington—including, most literally, his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Ron Paul had a very precise and detailed set of positions, attitudes, and strategies that no single remaining politician shares precisely. But it’s not just Rand Paul and second-term Paul fan Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) around now; an entire mini-caucus of people Paul explicitly endorsed (which he didn’t do a lot of) are currently in D.C., including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Reps. ThomasMassie (R-Ky.), Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.) and Steve Stockman (R-Texas)

Most of them have already shown their insurrectionist stuff by feuding with House Speaker John Boehner, refusing to vote for his preferred fiscal cliff settlement, or for his continued speakerhood. The Paul-identifieds are just one faction of a larger bunch of new Republicans who Politico is calling the “Hell, No!” caucus. They are, Politico writes, “opposed to any new spending, willing to risk default to force spending cuts, dismissive of new gun laws and deeply skeptical about immigration reform…. Many in the media…often underestimate just how conservative and how impervious to criticism and leadership browbeating these members are when appraising the chances for change in the next two years.” The fact that such Paulite tendencies, at least when it comes to taxing and spending, stretch beyond his self-identified admirers is key to those tendencies sticking and thriving in the GOP.

Because, make no mistake, Paulism or even any kind of mild support for tougher, less compromising, more small-spending measures is under attack from the party and its media enablers (and even its media detractors). Amash was booted from his Budget Committee seat, and John Podhoretz in the New York Post characterized the mini-rebellion against Boehner as “cannibalism.” Michael Tomasky at Daily Beast considers them “vandals” and David Frum is appalled the Republican Party is so full of maniacs that it can’t get its members to vote for crappy bills that barely touch spending. With self-identified Tea Partiers shrinking and losing independence, there is room for a new dominant anti-establishment wing of the party, and Rand Paul and Justin Amash are well-positioned to lead it.

On the national level, a former Maine Paul delegate, a George Mason University law graduate and former U.S. Army Security and Intelligence Command man named Mark Willis, is running an insurgent campaign against Republican National Committee Chair Reince Preibus, vowingto repeal various rules passed at the Tampa convention last summer that centralize power over rules and delegates nationally. Willis vows to return power to the insurgent grassroots. But being from the Paul team does not necessarily mean one is a bomb-thrower in the party—former Paul Iowa campaign worker A.J. Spiker, who recently won re-election as Iowa’s state party chair (and is still dueling with the old guard), is sticking with Preibus.

The GOP is staggering, and proving itself incapable of meaningful change in the direction its core voters are supposed to care about. Some strong shift from Romney/Boehnerism is desperately needed, though some suggest instead a doubling down on the GOP’s social conservatism rather than flirting with libertarianism. Liberal journalist Peter Beinart has made a convincing case that a confused Republican Party will be primed for a convincing “political outsider” to dominate in 2016. With Ron Paul gone, few people of any political heft are more outside the general Washington attitudes about spending, taxing, and foreign policy than Rand Paul.

Ron Paul both embodied and inspired a no compromise libertarian radicalism, one that no one on the scene now fully embodies. Rand Paul upsets some of his dad’s foreign policy fans by seeming too solicitous of Israel on his trip there this week; Justin Amash admits he’d consider tax hikes as part of a serious entitlement cut deal; Kerry Bentivolio explicitly denies being a Paul guy—he’s a Reagan man. Thomas Massie told me in an interview in the forthcoming March Reason that he doesn’t want Ron Paul’s mantle.

Ron Paul is gone from American politics. But important aspects of Paulism—a willingness to seriously cut government spending and functions, an unwillingness to be a good party member at all costs, a willingness to rethink our foreign military and aid commitments and respect civil liberties—still have a scattering of staunch defenders, one of them also named Paul. And if federal irresponsibility on spending and debt continues as it seems it will, these radical solutions may start seeming sensible and necessary to more than just the 11 percent of the GOP primary voters who made Ron Paul a legend.

Clearly, the liberty movement faces pushback from "traditional" conservatives fighting to retain power and maintain the status quo. Dr. Paul's delegates and supporters were treated like second-class citizens in the 2012 GOP primaries, and, now that liberty-minded people are starting to change the face of the GOP, some old-guard conservatives are crying about a "fracture" developing in the party. Indeed, there is a fracture developing. The GOP isn't a monolithic party of Big Government, neoconservatism, and social conservatism any more. The development of a fracture might cost the party national elections in the short-term, but the leaderless liberty side of the fracture grows while the other side shrinks. It may take a generation, but mark my words: the liberty movement and the GOP will eventually be one and the same. That eventuality just makes sense. And, eventually, the nation's next manifest destiny will come to pass. The liberty movement will eventually transform America into the Land of the Free it's supposed to be.