David McElroy

Most people seem to have very strong feelings about who’s right in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, despite knowing remarkably little about the history surrounding it. Do the details of the Middle East conflicts make your eyes glaze over, because you’ve heard the same stories over and over again? The Onion had a classic article five years ago making the point that these news articles are basically interchangeable as far as Americans are concerned.

As the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians flares up yet again, so are tensions between supporters of the two sides. On Facebook, it’s been pretty heated. When I read the comments from partisans on both sides, you’d think that each side was reading only half of the news and facts from the Middle East — and the other side was reading only the other half of the news and facts.

You can almost take much of their rhetoric (from both sides) and switch it to the other side by changing the names. The cheerleaders for the two sides don’t seem to understand that it’s a complex dispute with fault on both sides, not something that can easily be reduced to a tale of heroes and villains.

I’ve been surprised in the last few days to get questions from people who really don’t know that much about the dispute, people who hear both sides screaming at each other and don’t know what to believe. As a result, I’d like to take a quick look at some of the basic facts of the conflict and show you why I don’t see either side as “good.”

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I found out Sunday night that the Hostess Brownie Bits — and a few other Hostess products — are still on the shelves of the Target near me. But the shelves for Hostess products was mostly empty. I couldn’t find a Twinkie anywhere. What’s really going on as these iconic brands disappear from our store shelves?

Since the company best known for making products such as Twinkies and Wonder Bread announced it was shutting down, I’ve heard two consistent narratives about it. One comes from conservatives and one comes from progressives on the left. I’d like to suggest that both narratives are overly simplistic.

For conservatives, the story of Hostess Brands is a narrative of evil unions destroying an otherwise-healthy company. For progressives, the story of the shutdown is valiant workers standing up against evil bosses in the name of fairness. I don’t think either side has the facts to really back up the story in just those terms.

Let me admit my bias right up front. I can’t stand unions. I wouldn’t be a member of a union. I think they tend to make companies function poorly, because they tend to infect the workers’ attitude with an us vs. them mentality. I still remember when my father worked for a coal mining company when I was in high school, and the miners would go on “wildcat strikes” on the first day of deer-hunting season or when they wanted a day off. They were lazy and had lousy attitudes, from what I could tell.

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As I slowly lost all respect for elected politicians over the years, I never lost respect for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul. As I came to the conclusion that the coercive state is irredeemably immoral and unsalvageable, I parted way with Paul on how to change the world. But I never lost my respect for him, even though I opposed electing anybody president, even him.

After spending 23 years in Congress (over a 36-year period), Paul is retiring this year. He declined to run for his House seat in order to focus his attention on his presidential campaign. Now that his last term is ending, he delivered a speech on Wednesday that might be his most important one to Congress.

In his 48-minute farewell speech, Paul asks tough and blunt questions. He lays out a case that you and I know well, and it’s filled with a kind of intellectual honesty that’s rarely heard in Congress. I think the core of what he has to say is a section in which he asks a series of 31 questions. The members of Congress who heard him aren’t trying to answer those questions, but they’re questions that deserve an answer in any sane world.

Since Paul chose to try to fix the problems of the state from inside the coercive state, I saw him as trying to redeem the irredeemable. I saw him as trying to tinker with something so evil that it was a very misguided approach. But if he’s been a statist, he’s been my favorite statist. And he makes a cogent and moral case for individual freedom — one which his congressional hearers can’t bring themselves to truly hear.

I urge you to read the entire speech. It’s worth your time. And if you haven’t watched it, I’ve linked the video at the end of the text.

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