Ron Paul ...is an advocate of states' rights, free trade, fewer taxes, smaller government, strong national sovereignty, and non-interventionism. Paul supports reduced government spending and reduced taxes. As congressman, he claims he has never voted to raise taxes or to approve an unbalanced budget. He has called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the federal income tax. He also voted against the USA PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War Resolution, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.He also supports a return to the Gold Standard and since he considers spending on the Space Program to be unconstitutional, he always votes against it.
He ran for President in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket, and has not changed his views significantly since that time. He is a doctrinaire free market supporter, opposing any government intervention in the economy at all, to include the minimum wage. He wants to return health care to being paid for by the individual rather then government. He is, as nearly as I can tell, totally ideologically driven, with no consideration given to practicalities. If it is not consistent with his very limited set of ideologies, he opposes it.
Wikipedia lays out his political positions rather clearly, but here is a summary.
"The Ron Paul Freedom Principles" as follows: "Rights belong to individuals, not groups; Property should be owned by people, not government; All voluntary associations should be permissible -- economic and social; The government's monetary role is to maintain the integrity of the monetary unit, not participate in fraud; Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges; The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's."Wikipedia has a special article just on Ron Paul's political positions. I don't think it would misrepresent his views too much to say that he takes a 19th century pre-Civil War, pre-Industrialism position on Government for America, considers Friedrich Von Hayek,, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard as his economic guides, and takes a Republican social conservative position on values.
In short, Ron Paul, M.D. is no doubt a charming and interesting individual, but he is the quintessential crackpot. He is the kind of charming eccentric individual that the British have been famous for producing. He starts out from a set of assumptions that a great many of us would agree with, but then carries them to extreme, even irrational positions which he tries to get the government to adopt.
So what does it say about the Republican Party when everyone says he is the only person running for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination who makes an sense at all on the subject of Iraq?
From Talking Points Memo:
When every leading Republican candidate for the 2008 Republican Party Presidential nomination is a great deal more irrational and extreme than Ron Paul, then the Republican Party has completely gone off the rails.
Paul Berman writes in his excellent book Terror and Liberalism, that the many wars of the twentieth century have been one long battle between the freedom of Liberalism and a series of irrational, even insane, organizations which all take on totalitarian methods to enforce their forms of insanity. Those insane organizations arose in Europe many years ago as a reaction to Liberalism, and spread to the Muslim world.
It looks to me as though the American Republican Party has been taken over by one group which is insanely reacting to Liberal freedoms. It consists of economic free traders who detest any government enforcement of their responsibilities to society, allied with fundamentalist religious extremists who want to gain control of government to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone in the nation.
The free traders consist of two largely corrupt sets of business people, one group which sees government as a large pot of money to be skimmed from for their own benefit while the other is a group of business persons who consider society to be best served if it is nothing more than a set of commodities (land, labor and financial capital) which they are totally free to exploit is whatever ways make them more wealthy and powerful. Any restriction on their absolute Right to pay as little as possible for commodities and charge as much as possible for their products prevents the best of all people, Entrepreneurs, from ruling society as they properly should.
The financial Entrepreneurs demand the greatest freedom from government control, since frequently the products they create and trade in change extremely rapidly, and the first to market during each change makes the largest amounts of money. These financial Entrepreneurs, like the bankers, high interest lenders and owners of payday loan operations, want to be left alone to farm consumers of their cash. The latter groups are perfectly happy, however, to get the government certify their products like insurance so that customers have less fear of being ripped off, and to let government enforce their usurious and misleading contracts while passing laws that make it difficult for defrauded customers from suing over the fraud.
The current crop of potential Republican Presidential nominees are the most recent and most blatant examples. They are the modern "movement conservatives."
Congressman and Dr. Ron Paul fails to join the rest of the so-called movement conservatives who have taken over the Republican Party because they are outcome driven. They will for the most part take any position, idea or action that will lead to the destruction of Liberalism's government-enforced freedoms and protections against personal exploitation. Thus the movement conservatives could advocate reducing the size of government in the past while lauding the way their party has presided over the largest expansion of the Federal government ever seen during the Reagan - Bush 41 - Bush 43 years. Contradictions? Not a problem as long as they change society to increase their own wealth and power.
Dr. Paul, however, demands consistency with his ideology above all else. His set of positions is ideological rather than outcome based, and his methods of decision demand logical and rational consistency with the ideologies he starts from. The result is that while the rest of the Republican Party repeatedly demonstrates its insanities, Dr. Paul comes across as a very rational and (in comparison) sensible man.
Movement conservatism is pushing America rapidly towards being an authoritarian nation run as a plutocracy. The fact that Dr. Ron Paul can stand up in front of America and appear to be the most sensible man running for the nomination for President in the Republican party demonstrates how very UnAmerican and dangerous the Republican Party has already become.
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