Ron Paul is Pure American Conservatism
The Los Angeles Times contrasts Ron Paul with the other presidential candidates:
The basic question posed by the likes of Republicans Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry is: “Would this person do a better job as president than Barack Obama has?”
The basic question posed by Rep. Ron Paul’s candidacy is: “Why do we have a federal government?”
Paul isn’t saying the federal government is wasting every dollar it spends; he’s saying the federal government doesn’t need to do much of what it does. Which gets us back to the existential challenge that Paul poses to Washington. Why is the federal government performing so many functions?
It’s a good question to ask in these cash-strapped times, yet government officials rarely take it seriously. That’s true in part because every program is guarded by a phalanx of interest groups. Rather than trying to redefine government’s role, lawmakers often try to do the same things with fewer dollars.
Paul laid out a detailed vision of government that pushed me to think about what I want from Washington and what would be better left to the states, cities and private industry. I wish his rivals would do the same.
What the LA Times describes as Paul’s “existential challenge” to Washington is actually the very definition of American conservatism—a critique of the modern state.
When even Rush Limbaugh admits (“If we are serious about this, fooling around the margins on all this spending isn’t gonna get it done”) most of the candidates are simply tinkering around the edges, in their economic plans or supposed reforms, this is precisely Republicans just “trying to do the same things with fewer dollars” instead of “trying to redefine government’s role.” When candidates like Romney or Cain defend TARP and downplay or ignore the Fed’s role in the economic crisis, it is because they are looking out for, or a part of, “interests groups” that are invested in a “phalanx” of government programs.
But as the LA Times notes, Paul instead asks “Why is the federal government performing so many functions?”
Why does Paul ask this? Because Ron Paul’s a conservative. This is what conservatives have to ask in order to even be considered a conservative in any traditional American sense. Barry Goldwater asked it. Ronald Reagan asked it. And most of their Republican successors have quit asking it, doing nothing more than tinkering around the edges of big government ever since. (Said Rush of Paul’s $1 trillion real spending cuts budget plan: “Nobody on our side’s ever really seriously proposed it, and Ron Paul’s going to.”)
Barry Goldwater pretty much explained the core philosophy of American conservatism in one paragraph of his famous 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative:
The turn will come when we entrust the conduct of our affairs to the men who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power that they have been given. It will come when Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in office who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic. Who will proclaim in a campaign speech: ‘I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel the old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.’
Now, among the 2012 Republican presidential candidates—who talks like this? Who thinks likes this? Who votes like this?
