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• Monday, December 3, 2007 07:09 AM

  Ron Paul supporters see themselves as freethinkers

  but they have fallen for the claptrap the right has been spewing forth for years about how the "guvmit" is always the enemy. Just dismantle the laws, services, and agencies that are necessary to operate a modern, functioning society and see what happens. I guess that would be the hard way for Americans to learn just how important government is, but we would all suffer, as several previous commentors have ably pointed out -- those few who are not Paul-worshippers on this thread.

  Paul would throw the baby out with the bathwater. As our neighbors in Europe demonstrate, however imperfectly, you can have rational government, offering health and human services, and still have freedom and basic civil liberties. This is the message that the right has fought desperately to deny.

  The compromise and dull workings of a modern industrial democracy are just not sexy enough for the purveyors of our current dumbed-down political discourse. So we have Ron Paul, lionized because he believes government is the problem, ignoring the fact that without enlightened government, based on truly democratic decision-making, we will revert to social Darwinism, where the only law is the law of the jungle, the survival of the economically fittest -- the old, sick, and the disadvantaged be damned.

  —CarolynC Read CarolynC's other letters
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