Last week Bret Stephens, a pundit for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ), breathed the following prayer of relief: “With so much at stake in this election, it's no small blessing that Dr. Paul remains a man of the fringe.” Not a week later, however, more Nevadans voted for him than for a “frontrunner,” John McCain. In fact, Nevada is where Paul has broken through to double-digits, i.e., 14%. (CBS News’ Bill Whittaker reported last Friday, and repeated on Saturday, that Mitt Romney, who won Nevada, campaigned “alone.” That same news outfit’s grey eminence, Bob Schieffer, intoned on Saturday that Romney’s campaign was “uncontested.” Anyone who searched "Ron Paul Nevada" last week, however, would have found several local press reports on the contesting Schieffer said didn’t happen. CBS News’ thrice-told falsehood can be explained, as far as I can tell, in one of only two ways: ignorance of the news or an intention to suppress it. Neither possibility squares with pretensions to being a news organization.)

Two days after Stephen’s op-ed, LewRockwell.com published Independent Institute scholar Robert Higgs’ response to it, Libertarian Foreign Policy in the Hobbesian Crosshairs: Reply to Bret Stephens. It addressed most of the pundit’s historical and philosophical errors, but a couple of points not handled were the subject of an e-mail I sent to Stephens the day his column appeared:

You’re right, Mr. Stephens, “Mankind is not comprised solely of profit- and pleasure-seekers; the quest for prestige and dominance and an instinct for nihilism are also inscribed in human nature.” That’s precisely why no such flawed creatures ought to be put in charge of managing Leviathan.

Rolling back empire is not “disengagement from the world.” It’s just rolling back empire. The quip Senator McCain’s that you cited accurately reflects the heft of the bombardier’s “thinking,” as does the condescending grin he wears when Dr. Paul is outlining his Taft-Republican positions.

After thirty-years of reading on the subject, I have yet to find a libertarian who believes that “things go better when left alone.” Libertarians believe that what you must leave alone are things that don’t belong to you. The world is not comprised wholly of peaceful co-operators on free markets, of course, but a world of free markets is the optimal one for handling violent non-cooperators. By the latter I especially mean Leviathan’s convenient terrorist bogeymen du jour, whose ranks would be much diminished without the daily incentives that the empire provides around the globe (to the applause of papers like The Wall Street Journal).

As “non-fringe” candidates break open their piggy-banks to see what they have left to invest in Super-Duper Tuesday, it is no small blessing to libertarians, as it must be no small curse to you, that pro-empire editorialists still find it necessary to wield their pens against Dr. Paul and his “fringe” movement.

The major dead-tree media continue to hemorrhage. The Journal itself lost one percent of its readership last year, according to today’s Knoxville Voice (which is where I had to go to get facts about dead-tree disease, from which, the Voice itself admitted, it was not immune). Our prayer is that in a few years the WSJ will be a fringe newspaper on the order of, say, the People’s Weekly World. Meanwhile, Ron Paul’s campaign is enjoying its third biggest fund-raising day. (Its first two were for the record-books.)