While I was growing up my father and grandfather sounded a lot like Ron Paul. However, the world has changed a lot since the 1950s now. I remember my father subscribing to "American Heritage" so I could be exposed to the revolutionary war thinking and paintings. So each time a new "American Heritage" publication came I would always find it very interesting to look at what Patrick Henry would say, "Give me liberty or give me death!" I looked at old Revolutionary war paintings made at that time of people being shot and massacred with blood coming out of them and found it very compelling for an 8 to 12 year old boy who had just been given his own rifle a .22 pump Remington at age 8 which had about 17 to 20 shots before you had to reload that my father had also been given when he was about 6 years old in 1922. So, often when I listen to Ron Paul it is like listening to my father and grandfather who thought a lot like the founding fathers in their basic ideas of how things should be done. Things that we have now like Social Security and Unemployment insurance and Food Stamps didn't even begin to come into America until the Great Depression. And now likely to avoid a bloody revolution by the poor in this country there likely will be more safety nets to keep the poorest fed and then retrained for the new jobs that will be there during the next 10 to 25 years which will be completely different than anything anyone has ever seen before.
I was reading an article about Ron Paul in Time magazine called "The Prophet" because of how prescient all his predictions have been over the last 20 years or so. Ron Paul reminds me a lot of the ideas of the men who founded this country originally. So, I think the question remains can we afford the social programs we have now? But an even more important question might also be, "Can we afford a bloody revolution that would result if we suddenly ended these programs when people had nowhere else to turn?"
I am going to quote from page 44 of the September 5th 2011 Time Magazine to give you an idea of what Ron Paul now believes in and what many of the founding fathers of this country believed in too.
There is a circle of pictures and captions clockwise that I will try to represent here. Begin quotes:
Ron's Orbit
The Thinkers and principles that shape his worldview
Ayn Rand 1905-82
The novelist. The "Atlas Shrugged" author championed free markets and rational selfishness
in the influential philosophy she called objectivism.
Gold
Currency. Paul believes money should be tied to scarce commodities such as gold and silver
that hold real market value; paper money is "nothing but a symbol"
Murray Rothbard 1926-95
The Anarcho-Capitalist.
The Austrian school dean thought the state in society
and considered taxation theft.
Hans Sennholz 1922-2007
The Inspiration. Paul developed a friendship with the economist,
a leading proponent of the gold standard
Friedrich August Hayek 1899-92
The Brain: The Nobel Prize winner wrote
"The Road to Serfdom', a seminal text for small government Republicans
Ludwig Von Mises 1881-1973
The Philosopher. The Austrian school
giant advocated laissez-faire economic policy
and private property rights
Pot
Liberties. Paul thinks states should be free to legalize illegal drugs, prostitution
and gambling, though he doesn't endorse any of them.
Ron Paul 1935 to the present
The Politician. First elected in 1976 Paul is serving his 12 and final congressional term.
This is his third presidential run.
end quotes from the September 5th 2011 Time Magazine from and article called "The Prophet".
Though all of this seems pretty foreign after the Great Depression and then the 1960s, 1970s, Women's liberation and every other kind of liberation imaginable, this was how most people I met as a child actually thought while I was growing up. There was this idea of everyone being self sufficient. And when you are self sufficient you also have the right to do almost anything as long as you are not harming or hurting someone else, including taking your own life with now illegal drugs.
It is a way of looking at all people as adults who have the right to live or die as they choose. It is the way things were before the great depression in the U.S. where some people chose to live and others to die and that was just expected and thought of as "Natural Selection" in action.
Though many might see this as a much crueler world it is also much more realistic and pragmatic than the one we presently live in. If people are treated like adults at every age after about 5 or 6 years of age they either become adults at an early age or they don't survive. This was the U.S. before the Great Depression and I think that was more realistic in the long run than the world we live in now.
I think the question is not "What can we temporarily do?" but "What is sustainable?" Unless we ask long term questions none of us will survive individually or en masse long term here on earth.
note: By the way I found for the first time today a web site for "American Heritage" and read the following historical account of John Paul Jones in Scotland and Ireland there:
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/%E2%80%9C-agreable-voyage%E2%80%9D
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