The truth is non-partisan

I've just finished Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto, and am once
again floored by Dr. Paul's ability to identify the most important
issues facing this country and explain their libertarian solutions in
"honest, direct language," as George Carlin would say.

In seven concise chapters, heavy with notable quotes from the
founders, American historical figures, social researchers and Austrian
economists, Dr. Paul destroys the myths of governmental benevolence
and benefit on nearly every issue of importance for the present and
future of this country.

He begins, of course, with foundational explanations of natural rights
and the limits placed on the general government by the constitution
which allows its existence. Paul then excoriates the government and
explains the solution to its problems of empire, war, terrorism,
conscription, violations of the Bill of Rights, spying, torture, the
drug wars, health care, the welfare state, regulatory state, managed
trade and the destruction of the American economy at the hands of the
Federal Reserve system. He points out that the differences in the
positions of the major parties and politicians are nearly meaningless
as our country becomes a de facto one-party state under the centrist
Democrats and neoconservative-controlled Republicans. They fight all
day about meaningless details while we descend into tyranny.

Dr. Paul, whose steadfast opposition to warfare in the U.S. Congress
extends back to his first terms in office in the 1970s, makes his
standard case that rather than leading to some abstract "national
greatness," empire, in fact, weakens America. He says the cost of
maintaining our empire is nearly a trillion dollars a year and that we
just can't afford it. Paul maintains that rather than protecting our
freedom, war is nearly as destructive to our society as those of the
people we wage them against. War leads to unchecked executive power
and the destruction of our most highly valued liberty. Paul denounces
our government's policy of "preemptive" aggressive war as always
morally and consequentially wrong and never justified. He also
explains the anti-imperialist legacy of the Old Right and the antiwar
sentiments of the more thoughtful leaders of the middle-to-New Right
such as Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. Paul explains
that there is nothing conservative about waging war; it undermines
every principle that conservatives claim to cherish (i.e., the
Constitution, the rule of law, family values, free markets, fiscal
restraint.)

Paul thrashes the War Party over the subject of the next aggressive
war on the horizon: Iran. He reminds us that he's been correct for
years in saying there was no evidence of a secret nuclear weapons
program in Iran as all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed in
their National Intelligence Estimate last fall and shows clearly that
to this administration, as with their invasion of Iraq, the agenda is
war and any excuse or varied combination of excuses will do.

Terrorism, the current excuse for our world empire, he explains, is
not an enemy, but a strategy employed by enemies. People in occupied
countries, Muslim or otherwise, have used this tactic to try to force
the democratic societies which occupy them to withdraw their combat
forces due to the expense of the predictable overreaction. He quotes
intelligence beat journalist James Bamford's reporting of Ayman al
Zawahiri's stated goal of trapping us in the Middle East to give us a
"desert Vietnam" – to bleed us dry and force us out as the Reagan
administration helped them do to the Russians in the 1980s. This being
the case, Paul concludes further invasions and occupations of their
countries is exactly the wrong policy to follow. It is the founders'
foreign policy of peace, commerce and honest friendship which best
protects Americans from terrorism. (In this section, Paul quotes
former CIA counter-terrorism agents Michael Scheuer and Philip Giraldi
from my interviews of them for Antiwar Radio.)

Paul says we should demand the immediate repeal of the Military
Commissions Act of 2006 and insist on the protection of habeas corpus
for all detainees unless the most immediate circumstances on the
battlefield prevent it and that no American should ever be held by the
military and subjected to torture as was José Padilla. He has
introduced legislation in Congress to ensure those very things, among
others, in the American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007.

Paul says that torture is always wrong and should never be tolerated
for one second by the proud residents of a free society no matter what
excuse those with power can conjure.

Paul also makes an eloquent case against conscription, calling it
"slavery" and quoting Daniel Webster and Ronald Reagan to make the
case that the draft contradicts the very premise of a free society,
the constitution forbids it and that it should never be allowed in
this country ever again.

He explains in detail how the administration has told lie after lie in
order to justify their blatantly unconstitutional, unnecessary and
illegal spying on Americans.

Economist Paul also explains his moral and practical opposition to
managed trade organizations like NAFTA and the WTO, since they are
unconstitutional transfers of Congress' delegated powers and they
actually sanction trade wars, require our Congress to raise taxes when
they feel like it and otherwise interrupt peaceful trade. He points
out that nothing new needs to be done to have free trade with other
countries; all the government has to do is stop interfering. Presto,
no tariffs, no subsidies.

It should be no surprise that a free market fundamentalist like Paul
opposes all foreign aid and "restructuring" of other countries'
economies though the IMF and the World Bank, whose proclaimed purpose
is to help the poor, when all they do is prop up governments that the
locals oppose, distort and disrupt local markets and generally
impoverish those who are supposedly being helped.

In The Revolution, as on the House floor, Paul takes a heroic stand
against the federal government's war on drugs and the entire policy in
general. It is the creation of the black market by the congress and
state legislatures which creates the environment in which murder,
extortion and gang wars prevail, he explains. He gives special
attention to the long history of frauds perpetrated by government in
order to criminalize marijuana possession and sale. It was simply
racist bigotry against Mexicans and a desire to persecute them which
motivated the early American drug warriors. Their legacy is one of
lives destroyed not by drugs, but by the state in its
post-constitutional, "we own you and will decide what's good for you"
role it now plays in our society.

In the book Paul brings up the issue of race in terms of a limited
national government, the unfair prosecution and sentencing of
minorities in the drug wars and in terms of the impossibly burdensome
regulatory state. The solution, he maintains, is a belief in
individualism and a willingness of people to enforce their rights from
the bottom up rather than looking to Washington DC. He explains how
government serves only to divide us more even when attempting to
ameliorate the problems of the past.

Paul also explains how government drives up the cost of health care
for everyone and how the current welfare state is simply unaffordable
and unsustainable by any measure. He explains how government
interventions have led us to our current crisis and how real
laissez-faire – not corporatist or socialist – reforms would fix the
problems.

Another example of government failure cited is the current state of
public education in this country. While not calling for abolition of
all public schools, Paul does demand we get rid of the federal
Department of Education and also explains how incredible amounts of
resources are wasted into oblivion by the bureaucrats in ways that
would never happen at private schools, making a strong case that
parents could afford many more choices in education without the
oppressive tax burdens they carry and that they would be well served
to seek education outside the strictures of the state. Always tying
political questions back to individual liberty, Paul also asks a basic
question almost unheard of in polite company: why should anyone be
forced to pay for the education of another and particularly when that
person disagrees with the slant of the instruction? As just one
example of the direction DC is leading us, Paul points out a little
noticed but obviously dangerous move by the pharmaceutical companies
and the national government to give mandatory "mental health" exams to
all school children in order to force many millions more of them to
take psychotropic drugs at the threat of removal from their parents.
He rightly complains that even 20 years ago the people of this country
would have been absolutely outraged. Maybe it's the Prozac.

Dr. Paul also excoriates the modern regulatory state and explains how
it makes us all poorer in order to benefit those who are already rich.
Paul sticks up for the individual and his property rights against all,
the rich, the poor or anyone else's attempts to separate him from it
with force – personally or through the state. It is our free economy,
not government intervention which has made us so prosperous. Paul's
argument is nowhere close to an apologia for big business. It is they
who have pushed all along for the governmental cartelization and
regulation of business. The state is the mechanism by which those
connected to its power can stifle competition and socialize their
costs onto the rest of society. Questions of environmental pollution
are one of Paul's favorite examples of the failures of regulation, and
for good reason. Really, no EPA is necessary – to protect the victims
of the crime. Pollution can be handled simply by protecting people's
basic property rights with local courts. In fact, the purpose of the
EPA is to protect the polluters from competition first and the
consequences of polluting the environment second by claiming "public"
ownership of the affected area (the air, bodies of water, etc.) and
then providing immunity to those politically connected corporations
who are within the "guidelines" they set for themselves. The right of
the average guy to seek redress in a local court is then circumvented
by the regulation of the executive branch. The explanation of why this
is so, contained in The Revolution, should be enough to educate even
the most pointy-headed of your liberal and leftist friends.

Paul, a supposed student, but really an Austrian school economist in
his own right, also gives a concise explanation of the criminal
Federal Reserve System which robs the poor to benefit the bankers and
merchants of death. Inflation, Paul explains, is a hidden tax, one
that hurts the poor, working and retired people most for the benefit
of these war-mongering plutocrats. They try to make the system seem
too mysterious for the average guy to understand but it's not.
Stealing is stealing. The central bank causes the booms and busts they
claim to "smooth out" with their process of artificially inflating the
supply of money, causing bubbles of malinvestment in the market and
setting us up for recessions. The popular line that "we the people,"
through "our" Congress, use the state's regulation to protect us from
the "excesses" of capitalism must be the greatest line of bull fed to
a population since the Aztec Flower Wars. Again, the light shed by
Paul provides clarity to a subject extremely important and yet opaque
to the people most affected.

Dr. Paul ends the book with a celebration of the wide and varied
millions who've rallied around his campaign and a call for those of us
who love liberty to stand up for ourselves and put our out-of-control
empire back in its place.

The joy I feel knowing that millions will eventually read this concise
libertarian primer just makes me want to celebrate.

The heroic Ron Paul has done it again.

// posted by John Fisher @ 5:28 AM