The Ron Paul Moment Has Only Begun
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. at LewRockwell.com - a review of Ron Paul's new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto ($14.28 pre-order from Amazon), scheduled for official release on April 30, but, according to Mr. Woods, in stores and shipping from Amazon.com next week. [lew]
After describing the income tax as merely a species of forced labor, for example, Dr. Paul concludes: "Strip away the civics-class platitudes about 'contributions' to 'society,' which are mere obfuscations designed to engineer the people's consent to the system, and that is what the income tax amounts to." The word "exploited" appears several times in the book -- to refer to government's treatment of its subject population. He likewise writes, after having shown how the so-called distribution effects of inflation hurt the middle class and the working poor, that "the average person is silently robbed through this invisible means, and usually doesn't understand what exactly is happening to him. And almost no one in the political establishment has an incentive to tell him."
One of the things that frustrated me most during 2007 was the way Ron Paul's enemies employed predictable "anti-American" and "appeasement" rhetoric against his foreign policy views. Dr. Paul gets the last laugh here: his chapter on foreign policy is the most persuasive short statement of the non-interventionist position I have ever read. It turns the tables completely: suddenly it is the neoconservatives who are on the defensive, and Ron Paul the knowledgeable and wise statesman steering his country to safety. As a former neocon myself -- who knew my enthusiasm for this book would elicit that awful confession? -- I can confidently say that I would have changed my mind a lot sooner if I had been exposed to arguments like these.
It's also a little unusual for an American presidential candidate to refer to and quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, Frédéric Bastiat, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Nozick, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, John Adams, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, William Graham Sumner, Ludwig von Mises, and other figures of comparable renown.
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