I don't agree with most of Ron Paul's beliefs, but I respect him. (In somewhat the same way I USED to respect McCain). At least his beliefs follow a coherent train of thought, and logically follow a line of thinking, unlike the mess the rest of the Republican field tend to spew. Even as the most liberal Liberal there are several points I can agree with him on, not the least of which is getting out of Iraq. It will be a real shame if the Republican establishment manages to exclude him from future events - his is a voice that needs to be heard right now.

Most of Paul's ideas are half-baked wishful thinking. I work with a die hard Libertarian, and we disagree about all sorts of things since he has a major conspiracy theory streak. But, I figure that he is far more optimistic about people while I am very cynical. When I hear about removing controls, I think about Enron and the exploitation of illegal immigrants. I think about not testing beef for mad cow. I think about the heads in the sand philosophy of people who drive gas guzzlers then complain about high gas prices.

Ron Paul's ideas sound great, but they are not realistic. They rely too much on the goodwill of other people. And, I see a great deal of selfishness in people.

Amusing piece, Mr. Scherer. What's funny about Ron Paul is that he's just speaking his mind, which amounts to being revolutionary in the preprocessed candidate packaging business that happens these days, where even the rhetoric feels reheated, all the rough edges smoothed out via focus groups and polling. And, weirdly, I agree with a lot of his points...

"I don't think we have a republic anymore," he tells me, sitting up in his chair. "I think we have a very domineering federal government, where we have a world empire we have to manage every single day."

True enough! I agree with about half of his laundry list of wants. It'll be interesting to see what happens, how the GOP scuttles him, assuming they'll have to.

The free market wants to test and the government doesn't want to let them.

That's the silliest thing I've ever read. Don't blame that on government, blame it on an incompetent GOP run government. We have a bunch of political hacks running what once was a functioning government. And one company wanting to test is not the "free market". The big difference between Bush and Ron Paul is that Ron Paul says he would basically dissolve the federal government. Bush needs the federal government to give his incompetent cronies cushy jobs. Bush also campaigned on limited and smaller government. How'd that work out? Some very otherwise intelligent Americans are often ill-informed, a little too gullible and politically unsophisticated for educated members of the industrialized world. Thank your useless media and cable news for that. Ron Paul is a racist and anti-semite, just like Lou Dobbs, and I'd sooner let your your crazy uncle you keep in the basement babysit my kid. This is not a smear, this was widely reported years before he hit the national scene.

http://www.latestpolitics.com/blog/2007/05/ron-pauls.html

Yes, he makes noises that sound sane to those of us fed up with our shameful foreign policy and the war in Iraq, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Paul would make life even worse than Bush. He'd privatize everything, including the military police and courts. Furthermore, there is a middle ground between trying to colonize the planet and retreating entirely from it, like Paul would do. He's a politician. He says what he thinks people want to hear. He read a poll. No real genius there. He has no chance of getting the nomination so why not speak that one truth and pander to 72% of the American people.

This article quotes Ron Paul thusly:

"To maintain our current account deficit we borrow almost $3 billion a day. It's unsustainable. It will end. And it's going to end in a worse fashion than it did in 1979 and 1980, when interest rates went to 21 percent."

It is true that we had high interest rates during the latter days of the Carter administration, but the Federal debt grew at a lower rate in all four years of his administration than during the two years of the Carter administration and all eight years of the Reagan administration.

The dirty little secret that Republicans don't want to talk about is that Ronald Reagan is the undisputed champion of deficit spending--in the second through fifth years of his Presidency the National Debt grew by 16.4%, 17.8%, 17.9%, and 17.0%. The only other year in that ballpark since WWII (where the info is easily available) is 1975, Ford's first full year.

Reagan's administration disproved the link between deficit spending and inflation, as we had huge deficits but low inflation.