Against The Institution Until The Need For Said Institution

Conservatives in general have a nasty habit of being against ''big government'', subsidies, taxes/services... until the need to use them, themselves, arises. We witnessed that in the wake of Hurricane Sandy when a few of the Republicans who denied expediting relief aid to New York and New Jersey victims were the same who'd received it in the past for other natural disasters.

This time, irony caught up with famed Libertarian and former Republican candidate Ron Paul, who had said this about the United Nations in 2003:

The UN increasingly wants to influence our domestic environmental, trade, labor, tax, and gun laws. Its global planners fully intend to expand the UN into a true world government, complete with taxes, courts, and a standing army. This is not an alarmist statement; these facts are readily promoted on the UN’s own website. UN planners do not care about national sovereignty; in fact they are actively hostile to it.

Yet, Paul registered a grievance this week to the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to obtain the rights to to websites created by fans, RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org. The owners of the domain names - obviously fans of free enterprise - are willing to sell him the rights, but he wants them for free.

I guess he wants to use their ''courts'' to win an exemption from his ''domestic trade laws'', under which both sites' names were rightfully purchased, and fails to acknowledge the ''labor'' the webmasters have put in it - obvious thousands of hours of it, filling the website with content and managing a 150,000-strong mailing list...

And that's the main problem with these failed politics of the Right, in general: by lacking the foresight to legislate/prevent/save, they're always caught back-tracking when Life hands them a curve ball.

This is a relatively cute, unimportant subject for which the loser will just be left empty-handed, but when it's applied to big stuff, like health, hard individual economics (bankruptcies), the quality of food and water, crumbling infrastructures - stuff that can be of ''life and death'' importance at the end of the day, then their politics become dangerous.