Why Ron Paul is the wrong choice in 2012.
Let’s play a game. Don’t worry, it’s easy! It just takes a bit of common sense to answer these questions.
Do you remember what happened the last time that the “free market” was allowed to run itself? When, you know, trillions of dollars were trading hands in the form of confusing derivatives, some of which were based on confusing mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them by the banks who made, profited from, and invested in said derivatives?
Oh, that’s right. That was the deepest recession since the Great Depression. A recession that America is still recovering from, one which has destabilized the economies of countries around the world, and one which still threatens the economic prosperity of virtually every person alive. It hardly makes sense to let the actions of major banks go unwatched and to defer completely to the “free market” which knocked the world over less than four years ago.
Would you cut funding for special education? How about environmental protection? Would you essentially shut down the thin barrier that prevents coal and oil producers from blowing off the tops of whatever mountains they please and polluting whatever oceans they want? Would you devastate some of the neediest people in the country by completely revoking their rights to affordable housing? Would you let businesses run virtually unaccounted for? Would you prevent the distribution of funding to states on projects that run the gamut from forest protection to environmental cleanup?
I seriously doubt that anyone would. Yet there is one man, running in third place for the Republican nomination, who plans to do just that. He also wants to cut taxes on businesses by almost half, cancel regulations on the ways that big banks operate, close down the sole real method of regulating the economy (the Federal Reserve), extend huge tax giveaways to the rich (and make sure their heirs can inherit all of their money, untouched by any governmental body), and slash the jobs of thousands who currently work within the federal government.
This man wants to “return…responsibility for security to private property owners”, which ostensibly means that everyone in America should arm themselves immediately. He wants to do away with accounting requirements that ensure that at least some of what businesses do is, well, accountable. He wants to make sure that America walls itself off from the world by eliminating foreign aid — because people who are dying of hunger in the Horn of Africa can obviously sort out their whole famine situation without one of the world’s largest donors — and he wants to substantially cut back on American defense spending.
Paul insists that he is the candidate of personal liberty, a man who would restore America to its great former self. Yet his platform of endless spending cuts, and the elimination of virtually every regulation that has survived the onslaught of business-sponsored conservatism manifest in every Republican executive and legislative branch since Reagan’s heyday will not do that. It will splinter an already-unequal nation into a dystopia with an insanely wealthy minority that has its tax-evading fingers in the halls of Congress (almost like the one which exists today!), and a middle class that will slowly be crushed under the constant maneuvering that businesses take in search of profit.
If Ron Paul were really a libertarian, he wouldn’t be a Republican. He wouldn’t associate himself with a corrupt party that essentially serves as the public relations department for the American corporation. He would stick to his obviously flawed principles, unfettered by the dainty fringe of lobbying money and a commitment to destroying the government that once made America the great country it is.
Our game’s almost over. Just a few bonus questions remain: What about a woman’s right to choose? What about the separation of church and state? Someone who focuses on individual freedom and has a powerful commitment to reducing regulation would never touch either of those liberties, right?
Well, no. Not if you’re Ron Paul. If you were he, you would support the complete integration of church with state —blatantly ignoring an interpretative statement of Thomas Jefferson that has been repeatedly cited by the Supreme Court as a logical way to understand the First Amendment — and arguing, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, that America was founded as a Christian nation.
If you were he, you would plan to pass a law that would undo Roe v. Wade and prevent women from seeking abortions for any reason, while simultaneously defining life as beginning at conception. You would regulate deep into the personal lives of women around the country in a standoffish, paternalistic way, and disregard American constitutional traditions which keep religion out of government and ensure the right to free association.
You would pretend to be a libertarian. You would pretend to be the answer to America’s problems, a panacea for the angry white man whose votes you seek. But even then, you would be a horrible, horrible choice.
Gary Gerbrandt ’14 (garygerbrandt@college) is arming himself with liberalism before his right to defend himself is taken away.