While my surprise quotient dipped into the negatives long ago, what still surprises me is how fast the United States has been turned completely upside down. Mainstream media coverage of Dr. Ron Paul implies that both major parties are supposed to be identical, and that disagreement should only be over transitory issues of little or no significance. In other words: it's okay to disagree over the details, but not the direction.

Getting us into no-win wars all over the globe is "acceptable," pursuant to establishment orthodoxy. Recognizing that the war was a mistake to begin with, making it a mistake to stay any longer, is "unacceptable." The only "electable" formula is to argue over how many troops "need" to be kept in Iraq, how much body armor the troops need, whether or not they should remain for decades or centuries, and when the attack on Iran should begin.

Dr. Ron Paul is the only candidate that is willing to point out the obvious: viz., that we are already bankrupt. This is why the government prints more money to finance promiscuous spending. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, inflation is repudiation of debt. This is because, rather than the government actually dealing with its insolvency by curtailing expenditures, the government extinguishes liabilities with a devalued dollar.

When the mainstream media covers Dr. Ron Paul, many times the host or reporter will go out of their way to say that Dr. Paul wants to eliminate some government program - e.g., abolishing all government funded education - to imply that Dr. Paul is some sort of anarchist. Their analysis is overly simplified. Suppose the entire federal government was shut down overnight - i.e., a position Dr. Ron Paul does not take - we would still be left with state government, county government, and municipal government. But we still don't have enough federal government?  Evidently, people have forgotten about this plurality of bureaucratic layers and these overlapping jurisdictions of government power.  If we abolished the federal Department of Education, this would still not mean we had no government funded and public schools.

For all of Barry Goldwater's faults, his short book, The Conscience of a Conservative, taught us some valuable lessons. In it, he dispelled the notion that somehow we "save" money, or get "more" money, by having the federal government usurp the role of local government. That idea is a corollary of the myth that government is a philanthropic institution, that politicians are philanthropists spending their own money, that the government gives us something for nothing. As somebody who ran for a municipal office myself, one of the biggest messages I wanted to bring to the voters was that fighting for a piece of state funding was not a net benefit for the community. Every community does the same thing, they all end up subsidizing eachother, and with it the community loses control over how the money is spent. The same can be said about individuals.  We all fight for our subsidy, end up subsidizing eachother, and then lose control over our personal lives.

Court intellectuals try to reduce everything down to "Dr. Ron Paul-is-an-anarchist" because, to the dismay of these costumed political hacks, Dr. Paul actually advocates objective cuts in government expenditures. How quirky to have a candidate that believes the present size of the federal government need not be left intact.

Dr. Ron Paul has never advocated the complete deconstruction of the federal government, let alone doing so overnight. One thing Dr. Ron Paul understands very clearly is that the government has made a lot of people - through both corporate welfare for the rich, and entitlement programs for the poor - dependent upon itself for their survival. Government spending makes us that much less self-sufficient, curtailing economic opportunity for the lower classes, and then fueling dependency upon itself. Dr. Ron Paul understands that, and he also understands that transitioning towards a free market won't be easy.

Ron Paul has no intention of cutting the elderly off of Social Security, or eliminating assistance for veterans. It is the spending orgy on things such as the war which devalues the dollar, leaving retirees and veterans with less and less. It is politicians who promise to subsidize everything under the sun that threatens assistance for the needy. By spending trillions overseas, programs here at home are neglected. Most politicians have no problem making promises that there is no way of keeping in order to get votes. When somebody like Ron Paul tells you how things really are, without making promises that many people would like to hear, you know he is telling the truth.

Ron Paul would not throw people off of programs they are dependent upon for survival. Ron Paul does, however, recognize that we have to start cutting government somewhere. If we don't, everybody will be cut off all at once after the government gets done inflating the dollar into hyper-inflation, at which time the dollar will be good for literally nothing. So, where do we start? Getting rid of corporate welfare: e.g., slashing expenditures on the military-industrial complex. Sounds good to me.

Dr. Ron Paul is a rare Constitutionalist in Congress.  He does a salient job at reminding us about the separation of powers and that the President hasn't the Constitutional authority to get us into wars, which is no small or anachronistic idea.  Let us ask ourselves: should the President be able to decide Supreme Court cases? Suppose President Bush started to rule on Supreme Court cases, reversing court decisions he disagreed with. How would we feel? So, why do we believe the President should have the authority to get us into wars?  If the President has the power to bypass the Congress on the war, and Congress does nothing to stop this, then what stops him from bypassing the courts on eavesdropping?

Has the Republican Party forgotten about the lessons taught to us by Goldwater? Have Americans forgotten their history and the lessons taught to us by the founding fathers? One of my favorite founding fathers is George Mason. George Mason didn't even want a federal government in the first place. George Mason has the distinction of having a university named after him. Contrast Dr. Ron Paul's message with George Mason's, and Ron Paul will look like a radical - a big government radical.