I find it interesting that most of the individual comments are positive, yet of the 5 Editor's Choice letters, 3 are negative and 1 is mixed.

I went through the 1st 20 comments, and by my reckoning, 12 are positve, 6 negative, and 2 are mixed.

My advice to readers: Read the comments yourself, rather than looking to the Editors to promote their own bias.

Sean SIberio is amazed ...

"It amazes the amount of of people on here expressing not just support for his rather tame opinions on the war in Iraq, but his nuttier ideas, including the usual litany of Libertarian dead-horses like the gold standard, fears of some Orwellian New World Order via the United Nations, and the fear of minorities dressed up as a hatred of the "Welfare state".

But its indicative that most of his support is online, the one place where such Libertarian crack-pots can bluff and make their appearance seem much larger and important than they actually are. People wonder why theres not more real world support, and the God's honest truth is that, despite their faux anger and cynicism, its hard to rouse rich-kid political science majors and middle aged white guys until any sort practical force, since after all, they really have so little to be actually angry about."

Sean, perhaps you missed that hotbed of Libertarian activism, Bill Maher's Real Time, when he hosted Ron Paul and Paul aroused great audience support.

Steven Andresen writes:

Does Paul support unregulated corporate behavior?

This came up early on,

"...And Paul, who doesn't believe in government and who thus doesn't believe in any kind of countervailing power to corporate power, will have no weapons with which to fight back."

[...]

However, I am concerned about the problem here, that government in the hands of the people protects the population from the greed and short-sightedness of business. With a government limited by a Paul administration, you'd think that the population would be at the complete mercy of the economic elites.

I'm wondering whether the effort to limit government in order to bring policy back to our country's roots will also imply some effort to limit the power and influence of business. I suspect big business comes and goes with big government.

I would appreciate somebody pressing Paul to address himself to this concern. Does he think there would be any problem for the population if business was unregulated or unsupervised?

-- steven andresen

Steven, the corporations are to a large extent running the government, so the idea that the government will rein them in through regulation is, shall we say, a non-starter. As Ron Paul has stated, there is no such thing as an unregulated marketplace. The choice is: do you want the market to be regulated by a corrupt behemoth like the federal government or do you want it to be regulated by the forces of open competition that would exist in a genuinely free market, where superior companies will win out as they better satisfy consumer preferences? Of course, in a free market, any business that is guilty of commiting criminal acts must be subject to the rule of law as well.

Dave Weiner

Epeoples/Ondelette,

What a shocker, that an advocate of the free market believes that we would be better off if education were provided privately rather than the government. Even more shocking considering the stellar job that the government schools are doing, wouldn't you say?

I have to conclude that a lot of the readers of this blog are much more interested in looking for excuses for damning people of the wrong party (a form of stereotyping) rather than evaluating a candidate's platform on its own merits.

The fact of the matter is that Paul is running on a platform of Federalism and the Constitution. That means leaving more power to the states, municipalities, and the people. The last thing you need to worry about with a Paul presidency is the federal government trying to shut down the government schools. Get real guys.

Paul Dirks says:

"But to suggest that if elected, he isn't going to actually push for his clearly articulated agenda is just flat-out dishonest."

No Paul, I am suggesting that if elected he would push for his clearly articulated agenda of following the Constitution. And his voting record is as good a guarantee as you will get that his word is good.

You seem to be equating 2 related but nonetheless separate matters, a person's philosophy and his agenda. It is perfectly consistent to support a goal of privatizing education, while at the same time divorcing that effort from a presidential candidacy.

Epeoples said:

"Really? What other parts of his philosophy will bear no resemblance to his agenda? What else about his agenda will be missing from his campaign? Is that really a good thing or does it just make Ron Paul yet another run-of-the-mill political chameleon?"

Ron Paul has been very upfront in saying that there should be less government intervention in medicine, yet he has no intention of trying to do away with Medicare or Medicaid, as people have become dependent on them. There is nothing duplicitous about this. He realizes that the country is not prepared for those types of changes and has other goals in mind, most notably ending the wars and the empire. He has been very upfront about all this. And given his 10-term record, his word is actually worth something, unlike 99+% of the politicians out there.