April 28, 2010 3:24PM

Ron Paul, the Chamber of Commerce, and Economic Freedom

By David Boaz

Tim Carney has a blog post at the Examiner that’s worth quoting in full:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its 2009 congressional scorecard, and once again, Rep. Ron Paul, R‐​Tex. — certainly one of the two most free‐​market politicians in Washington — gets the lowest score of any Republican.


Paul was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers not to win the Chamber’s “Spirit of Enterprise Award.” He scored only a 67%, bucking the Chamber on five votes, including:

  • Paul opposed the “Solar Technology Roadmap Act,” which boosted subsidies for unprofitable solar energy technology.
  • Paul opposed the “Travel Promotion Act,” which subsidizes the tourism industry with a new fee on international visitors.
  • Paul opposed the largest spending bill in history, Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill.

(Rep John Duncan, R‐​Tenn., tied Ron Paul with 67%. John McHugh, R-N.Y., scored a 40%, but he missed most of the year because he went off to the Obama administration.)


I wrote about this phenomenon last year, when the divergence was even greater between the Chamber’s agenda and the free‐​market agenda:

Similarly, Texas libertarian GOPer Rep. Ron Paul—the most steadfast congressional opponent of regulation, taxation, and any sort of government intervention in business—scored lower than 90% of Democrats last year on the Chamber’s scorecard.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., had the most conservative voting record in 2008 according to the American Conservative Union (ACU), and was a “taxpayer hero” according to the National Taxpayer’s Union (NTU), but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says his 2008 record was less pro‐​business than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
This year’s picture was less glaring, but it’s still more evidence that “pro‐​business” is not the same as “pro‐​freedom.” The U.S. Chamber is the former. Ron Paul, and the libertarian position, is the latter.

I suspect that on issues such as free trade agreements and immigration reform, I might be closer to the Chamber’s position than to Ron Paul’s. But to suggest that Paul is wrong to vote against business subsidies — or that DeMint was wrong to vote against Bush’s 2008 stimulus package and the $700 billion TARP bailout — certainly does illustrate how much difference there can be between “pro‐​business” and “pro‐​market.” Instead of “Spirit of Enterprise,” the Chamber should call these the “Spirit of Subsidy Awards.”