Two sides of Ron Paul

I was covering a City Council meeting last week when Ron Paul came through town, so I missed his appearance, sad to say. I like his libertarianism, particularly on social issues. For example, of all the candidates, including President Obama, he’s the only one with a sane approach to the drug war, which is to end it and treat addiction as an illness.

But I also remember the Republican presidential debate early on when Paul, asked what should happen to a man in a coma who didn’t have health insurance, said in so many words that it was the man’s fault—that he took the risk and was paying the consequences. It was a strange thing for a doctor to say, though I suppose it makes sense if you believe that the government shouldn’t be involved in health care in any way, as he does.

I credit him with consistency. He believes the proper role for government is defense, a court system, a police system and little else. And his notion of defense does not include the operation of more than 800 military installations around the world, nor the conduct of wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s for a limited defense designed to protect American soil, and no more.

Otherwise he’s a free-market ideologue who would abolish Medicare and gut Social Security, eliminate most federal agencies, and in effect take government back to the 19th century. It’s a nostalgic notion, but it wouldn’t work. I’m all for the judicious trimming of federal bureaucracies, but we need the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, among others.

Also, I don’t think Paul is being honest about the newsletters he published in the 1990s that have drawn so much criticism. Behind that grandfatherly mien is a reconstituted racist.

According to Wikipedia, Paul and his associates published the newsletters as a business, earning in excess of $900,000 a year. “A number of the newsletters … contained material that later proved highly controversial, dwelling on conspiracy theories, praising anti-government militia movements, and warning of coming race wars,” The New Republic has reported.

Among other things, the newsletters called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “pro-communist philanderer” and “a lying socialist satyr,” equated his national holiday to a “Hate Whitey Day,” suggested that 95 percent of the black males in Washington, D.C., were “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” and quoted Paul saying that “in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”

Paul has said he didn’t always know what went into the newsletters. But in January 2012, according to Wikipedia, “the Washington Post reported that several of Paul’s former associates said that Paul … had allowed the controversial material to be included as part of a deliberate strategy to boost profits. Paul’s former secretary said, ‘It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product…. He would proof it.’”

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.