A common theme of the various candidates for the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency of the United States is Ronald Reagan. Candidates compete with each other to be the true heir of Reagan and his legacy.
Ron Paul, however, looks back to an even earlier time in American politics when the word “conservative” had a different meaning.
Most Republican candidates favor a muscular American foreign policy advocated by the neo-conservatives who advise our current president. This is a far cry from the foreign policy our nation once had.
What do World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and our presence in Kosovo have in common? These wars or police actions were all started by big-government Democrats and opposed by conservatives. I don’t think that any of the current crop of Republican candidates would agree that these wars — by any stretch of the imagination — might have been unnecessary. Instead, these men argue at debates about who supported the surge in Iraq first and strongest.
Ron Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy is simply the policy that our party once had. Non-interventionist does not mean isolationist. It does not mean that we cower at home and hope that no one notices us and attacks us. Instead, it means that we honestly assess threats against us, and respond to those that are real. This is why Ron Paul was in favor of the efforts in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, but against the war in Iraq. And we now know that the case for war in Iraq was fabricated largely from falsehoods.
With regard to economic policy, most of the current Republican candidates admire Ronald Reagan because he cut taxes. That was the easy part. The more difficult thing to do, what Reagan couldn’t accomplish, is to drastically cut spending by government. This is something Ron Paul believes in and will do.
As in foreign affairs, Ron Paul believes in an economic policy that is non-interventionist. You may be asking “Doesn’t someone need to manage the economy?” Well, there is someone managing — or at least attempting to manage — a large part of the economy: the Federal Reserve System. It is that system, though its policy of low interest rates, that is most directly responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crises we are now facing. Hundreds of billions have been lost in market value of securities and homes, and tens of thousands of families have lost their very homes. It is now believed that this crisis is leading our country into recession, and cries for even more intervention into and management of the economy are heard across the land, even from Republican presidential candidates.
It is economic interventionism itself that harms the economy. The Federal Reserve System, which creates money from nothing with its printing presses and open market operations, creates the inflation — with its accompanying uncertainty — that harms our economy and prosperity.
Further, the Federal Reserve System and its policy of inflationary money and credit creation provides extra income for government to spend without having to tax. That is quite lucrative, as printing hundred dollar bills is inexpensive, and creating money in computerized ledger entries costs even less. Even worse, he who prints the money gets to spend it first, before its value is diluted by inflation.
Among Republican candidates, only Ron Paul recognizes this. Only Ron Paul calls for an end to the Federal Reserve System and its monopoly on the creation of money out of thin air.
Non-interventionism in foreign affairs, non-interventionism in domestic economic policy — non-interventionism is a theme with Ron Paul.
How so? In other ways:
Stop government intervention in private property, through the taking of property from one party and giving it to another, more politically favored party through the process of eminent domain.
Stop government intervention into the environment. Today, it seems as if environmental policy is written by those who are enemies to capitalism — the “watermelons” — green on the outside but red in the center. Instead, Ron Paul promotes reliance on property rights and markets to solve environmental problems.
Stop ever-increasing government interventionism into education. Ron Paul supports freedom for parents to choose where and how to educate their children. That freedom should be backed up by tax credits, so that the freedom is a real choice that parents can exercise.
Stop government intervention in the types of drugs people may use. The unwise war on drugs has created criminal gang empires that affect us all, as we have witnessed here in Wichita recently. The government response is more law enforcement, which only makes the drug trade more profitable and increases the violence on our streets.
These policies of non-intervention that Ron Paul believes in may seem strange and incredible to some of you. That they may, however, is only an indication of how far we have strayed from the vision of freedom and liberty that this country was founded upon.
If you believe in freedom, if you believe in liberty, if you believe that “we the people” can solve problems without the heavy-hand of government interventionism, you should cast your ballot for Ron Paul.