Why Not Ron Paul?

I have many friends who are Ron Paul supporters and a few who support Obama but have Ron Paul as their runner up.  I find this startlingly scary.  Yes, what Ron Paul says and does is fairly straightforward and it is easy to guess his position if you understand Austrian school economics and libertarian philosophy, but there is a problem with that.  When everything is so black and white, or rigid and uncompromising, you run into the same problems that communism ran into.  Both theories are utopian in nature, but neither are 100% implementable,  when you can't implement them 100%, then they fall apart and the utopia they purport to create are never realized.  In theory, "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" is a great straightforward idea.  Everyone puts in what they can, everyone takes out what they need, no more, no less, on each account.  What's the problem with that? Well people are inherently greedy and try to get the best for themselves and their family and friends.  People in charge will give everything good to themselves and those close to them, people skilled at gaming the system will get more than their need.  When it comes to work, if people are getting things provided to them, they are, in general, not going to put forth an exemplary performance and will likely do just what they need to get by.  No reward for success means people don't strive for success.  That lays out some of the problems with Communism and Marxism.


Libertarianism claims to be purely meritocracy, people get out of society according to what they put into society.  The problem with this is that not everyone starts at the same point.  So much lies with what level of society you are born into, if you are born into a poor family that lives in the poorest neighborhood of a city, it is almost guaranteed that you will enter kindergarten already behind students from different demographics.  That right there is where a pure free market libertarian system will fall apart.  By the time people reach an age where they are able to put into the system you already have people starting ahead of others simply because their parents could afford to send them to private schools and other societal reasons that would require much more in depth analysis and would distract from the focus of this posting.  After a student reaches the age they can begin working full time and earning a real living, there is another separation point.  Some families simply have more connections than others and you will end up with people securing jobs and careers not based solely on their abilities but tainted because they know a person who knows a person.  The end result of this is almost a creation of a ruling class that keeps everyone else down and dramatically decreases social mobility.  The rich get richer, the poor stay poor.

That pseudo-meritocracy is what you get with Ron Paul when it comes to economics.  There is also his isolationist stance.  When it comes to matching my approach to the armed forces and international affairs, I definitely lie closer on the map to Ron Paul than most other candidates, but at the same time I would never agree with him because he goes dramatically too far.  Yes, we should not have been in Iraq, bombing Afghanistan to get at the Taliban was the right thing to do, but we should have gotten out long ago, Libya was more or less correctly handled, we don't need a billion bases all around the world but some, as part of a larger alliance, would not be bad.  With Ron Paul we would retreat within our borders and let chaos reign throughout the world, with little care of what people are being oppressed, starved or tortured.  Potentially, as with what happened during WWII, you could get a national build up of military strength that goes unchallenged and eventually that military demands to be used, and would be.  I think the best example of this would be the relationship between North Korea and South Korea.  North Korea has the 5th largest military in the world, the only thing keeping them from overrunning its neighbors is the American presence in and alliance with South Korea.  If we pull back completely, we're leaving millions of people who are under our protection, helpless.  Then there are the great progressive programs that have helped propell American society to the forefront in the world, the progressive income tax, medicaid/medicare and social security.  You can judge a country based on how well it takes care of its needy, if you look at the US budget over the last few decades, huge chunks are devoted to keeping those people safe and healthy.  Without social security people would need to have someone take care of them, for free, once they become unable to earn a living.  A person who at 62, who has reached the end of his ability to do his job satisfactorily would have to quit and his chances of getting hired anywhere else would be slim to nil.  He had better have saved up enough money to potentially last him up to 40 years or he's screwed.  But it wouldn't just be him screwed, if we don't leave him to die in an alley, someone has to take care of him, and that means someone is footing the bill.  That money could have been better spent in many other places.  With medicare, medicaid and the Affordable care act people with pre-existing conditions are getting the treatment they need, more effectively.  Preventative care increases, which has been proven to significantly decrease overall health costs and instead of having people with no insurance show up at hospitals, unable to pay and putting the bill onto taxpayers, everyone has coverage.  Not only that, since everyone is in the insurance pools, costs go down for everyone.   As for the progressive income tax, I don't really need to go into a lot of that.  The flatter the tax the more pain on the poor and middle classes.

The point of all this, yes, Ron Paul sounds great and yes despite being in congress for decades, he is still an outsider and sticks to his principles but in an office with such power as the Presidency, you can say goodbye to the America of the last 80 years, it's rise from horrific economic times to the internet boom.   All of that will be gone and in its place will be a glorious, free society, with glitter and bright lights all built on the backs of a very large majority of the country who never get to see the glitter and bright lights shine on them.