On today’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly did a segment with Dick Morris, in which O’Reilly taunted Republican presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul, for not accepting O’Reilly’s invitation to appear on his show, and Dick Morris stuck his nose in the air and said the reason was that Dr. Paul was afraid to answer three candidate-destroying questions on these topics:

• How would a President Paul prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb that could threaten Israel;
• How could Ron Paul seriously propose putting the U.S. back on the gold standard since gold, as a commodity whose supply can only be increased slightly by more mining, could not be used to foster U.S. economic growth by expansion of the money supply; and
• Does Ron Paul really want to legalize drugs, which in O’Reilly’s long-argued position would lead to a greater number, rather than a fewer number, of lives destroyed by drug abuse.

I’m not a spokesman for the Paul campaign, nor the Campaign for Liberty.

But back in 2008 I was a Ron Paul-pledged delegate to the Nye County Nevada Republican Caucus. If not blocked by McCain machine parliamentary tactics reminiscent of how Karl Marx threw the Bakuninists out of the First Communist International, the 2008 Nevada Republican State Convention would have sent Robert Terhune, Marla Criss, and Pat Kerby to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the Ron-Paul pledged Nevada delegation.

Oh, yeah. Ron Paul said this about my first novel:

“Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

(See how seamlessly I worked in the plug for my book? Discerning_Taste, Ponzer, and RARanieri, pay attention!)

The point is, it doesn’t take anyone with the decades of interview experience Ron Paul has, not to mention Dr. Paul’s rock-solid understanding of history and economics, to answer these lame challenges. I don’t even need to go to libertarian principles; mainstream practical analysis can answer them before you even get to basic principles needed for a functioning free society.

I can do it in three paragraphs.

• How would a President Paul prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb that could threaten Israel?

Instead of getting mired in still another multi-trillion dollar/boots on ground war like every other Republican candidate would — and in the unlikely event Mossad couldn’t handle this themselves — President Paul could use the U.S. intelligence community, and special forces like Seal Team 6 that put bin Laden out of business — to use sabotage and destabilization tactics to prevent the Iranian A-bomb from ever getting on line. But even if President Paul were too much of a libertarian purist to do that, Israel and the United States have been collaborating on Strategic Defense against missile attacks since the Reagan years; and unlike the United States, Israel is actually competent at controlling its borders well enough to prevent anything with a radioactive signature from being smuggled into the country.

• How could Ron Paul seriously propose putting the U.S. back on the gold standard since gold, as a commodity whose supply can only be increased slightly by more mining, could not be used to foster U.S. economic growth by expansion of the money supply?

In a nutshell, this is the problem with economically ignorant pundits like O’Reilly and Morris believing the popular junk science that is Keynesian economics. Increasing the supply of money to “grow” the economy doesn’t work. As Ron Paul points out endlessly, all expanding the money supply does is send wrong signals to investors who misdirect their investments into bubbles that pop as soon as the price rise caused by the monetary expansion has run its course. It either requires ever higher doses of new money expansion to prevent the unsustainable growth from collapsing, or the “bust” part of the business cycle as the unsustainable bubble pops, ending in the economy we have now, in which even banks with rich reserves find no real growth enterprises to invest in.

• Does Ron Paul really want to legalize drugs, which in O’Reilly’s long-argued position would lead to a greater number, rather than a fewer number, of lives destroyed by drug abuse.

The fact that is unanswerable by either Bill O’Reilly or Dick Norris is that drug prohibition empowers drug lords and street gangs who use school children as the opening markets for their trade. When the legal tobacco industry tried this marketing tactic with Joe Camel, Congress came down on them — effectively — like a ton of bricks. Decriminalizing possession of drugs and establishing above-ground distribution outlets where sales to children can be foiled by effective ID checks, is a practical policy for reducing an epidemic of drug abuse that eight decades of substance prohibition has only assured that illegal drug traffickers are government-protected cartels.

How many times have John Stossel and Judge Andrew Napolitano answered this question for O’Reilly? Bill O’Reilly is a graduate of the Catholic Chaminade High School and surely understands the concept of “invincible ignorance” — that when you simply ignore a fact for which there is no reasonable answer, you have betrayed the commitment to truth that an honest soul requires.

Dr. Ron Paul has this commitment to truth and principle. Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris are spin doctors — in a so-called “No Spin Zone — who don’t.