January 02, 2008 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0102/p01s08-uspo.html
Ron Paul: an absolute faith in free markets and less government
The 10-term congressman from Texas has been a strict constitutionalist
since he came into
public life some 30 years ago.
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Berlin, N.H.
Ron Paul still looks surprised when his calls to follow the Constitution
and restore a
sound currency set off whoops of approval at a campaign stop.
The 10-term GOP congressman from Texas has been making these points for 30
years, with
little to show for it beyond hundreds of House votes on the short end of
434 to 1. Critics
called him a crank.
But lately, his views and values – the product of a lifetime of intense,
self-directed
study – are finding an audience. His message is basic: freedom and limited
government.
Repeal the welfare-warfare state. Get out of Iraq, now. Abolish the income
tax. End the
war on drugs. Put the dollar back on a more solid footing.
"Unlike some others, I wasn't really anxious to run for president," he
tells supporters at
Tea Bird's Café and Bistro in Berlin, N.H. "I didn't believe the country
was ready for a
strict constitutionalist."
When he says "strict," he means it. As a member of Congress, he refuses to
vote for any
bill not explicitly set out in the Constitution, earning him the nickname
"Dr. No." He
routinely votes against new taxes, deficit budgets, government
surveillance, gun control,
war funding, and the war on drugs. He would abolish the Internal Revenue
Service, the
Federal Reserve, the US Departments of Education, Energy, and Commerce as
well as other
"unconstitutional domestic bureaucracies." He has called for America to
withdraw from the
World Trade Organization and the United Nations.
At the heart of Paul's worldview is a conviction that people are born free
and should
govern themselves – and that free markets make better decisions than
governments do.
"Some people think I don't love governing, but it's different," he says in
a Monitor
interview. "I believe in self-governing and family governing. The
responsibility is put
more on the individual than on some huge monstrosity in Washington."
Family Roots
Paul traces his values of personal responsibility and self-reliance to his
early family
life. His father, Howard, the son of a German immigrant, ran a family
dairy business in
Green Tree, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where he pasteurized and bottled milk.
The third of five
sons, Paul learned responsibility and the work ethic at age 5 in the
family basement.
There, milk bottles were washed by hand, and he and his brothers earned a
penny for every
dirty bottle they spotted coming down a conveyer belt.
"We learned the incentive system," he says. The boys soon figured out that
one of their
uncles was a worse bottle washer than the other. "We liked to work for
that one uncle,
because we got more pennies," he says.
The five boys shared a small bedroom in a four-room house. From spring
through fall, they
slept outside in a small, screened porch. His grandmother and two uncles
lived in the same
family compound. His father hoped that all five sons would become Lutheran
ministers; two
of them did. "Confirmation was a big event in my family; birthdays weren't
a big event,"
Paul says. His mother, Margaret, urged her sons to read and get an
education.
"I would say that probably from the cradle, their ethic was work and
church. That was it,"
says Carol Paul, the candidate's wife of 50 years. "They weren't a family
that played a
lot. Everything was serious."
The family lived two miles from the local high school. Although there was
a bus to school,
Paul preferred to run. He won the state championship in the 220-yard dash
and ranked No. 2
in the 440-yard run in Pennsylvania. "He knew he was obligated to do with
his God-given
body the best he could," says Mrs. Paul. They met in high school at a
track meet and
married in his last year at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa., where
he studied biology.
Paul says he briefly considered becoming a Lutheran minister, but opted
instead for
medicine. He graduated from Duke University Medical School in Durham,
N.C., in 1961, and
was just starting a residency in internal medicine when he was drafted
into the US Air
Force. From 1963 to 1965, he served as a flight surgeon, then moved to
Texas to practice
obstetrics. As an OB/GYN, he has delivered more than 4,000 babies.
Paul doesn't often talk about religion, at least not in the context of a
political
campaign. There's a reason the Gospels teach praying in secret, he says.
Over the years,
he has attended an Episcopal church, which "became more liberal than we
were comfortable
with," as well as an evangelical church. He currently attends Baptist
services.
Austrian economics
The most decisive intellectual influence in Paul's life was his discovery,
while in
medical school, of a passion for economics. It started with two vast
novels: Ayn Rand's
"Atlas Shrugged" and Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago," a gift from his
mother. Both books
make a case for the threat that big government bureaucracies pose to
creativity and liberty.
Later, he read his way into Austrian economics – the counterweight to
Keynesian economic
ideas that informed the New Deal. He read Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to
Serfdom" – a book
that influenced a generation of American conservatives – and especially
Ludwig von Mises,
a libertarian who extended the influence of the Austrian school of
economics in the United
States.
For the Austrian school, government intervention in free markets isn't a
formula for
long-term economic growth. Mises warned that over time it would cripple
free markets and
lead to state control. Free markets are always superior to a centrally
planned economy, he
wrote. Mises also advocated a non-inflationary gold standard – an idea
that Paul has made
his own in his 2007 book "The Case for Gold" and a forthcoming book
"Pillars of
Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property."
In 1971, Paul and another local doctor closed their practices for a day
and drove 60 miles
to the University of Houston to hear Mises give one of his last lectures
in the United States.
"I just thought it was fascinating. It made common sense – the sort of
thing I would have
concluded on my own, but the Austrian economists were a lot smarter," Paul
says. He made
friends with American economists such as Murray Rothbard, a student of
Mises, and often
visited Milton Friedman while continuing his own study of economics and
world markets.
"He's been a very serious student of economics since medical school, and
has read a huge
amount of history – constitutional history and monetary history. His
philosophical and
economic views drive him and everything he does," says Llewellyn Rockwell,
a former
congressional chief of staff for Paul. Mr. Rockwell is president of the
Ludwig von Mises
Institute in Auburn, Ala., and maintains the popular website,
lewrockwell.com.
As a physician, Paul says he came to resent government intervention in his
practice. In
his years as an OB/GYN, he didn't accept Medicare and Medicaid payments
because he felt
they represented unconstitutional government overreach. Sometimes, he'd
treat patients for
free.
"I found that government was interfering with my judgment as a doctor,
disrupting the
doctor/patient relationship, and making prices go up," he says.
But what drove him into public life was President Richard Nixon's decision
in 1971 to
break the last link between gold and US currency and impose wage and price
controls. "I
decided to speak out," he says.
A nation that spends, borrows, and prints too much money inevitably pays a
price, he says.
Unrestrained by a link to gold, the Federal Reserve can create too much
credit, fueling
housing and stock bubbles. The result: The dollar continues to goes down
in value, the
nation becomes ever more dependent on borrowing money abroad, and young
people pay the
price. A return to the gold standard restrains the government and restores
the value of
the dollar.
"My influence, such as it is, comes only by educating others about the
rightness of the
free market," he wrote in a 1984 essay, "Mises and Austrian Economics: A
Personal View."
In Congress, Paul often speaks of his own record of consistency in voting
against big
government and refusing the perks it offers. He says he will not accept a
government
pension and did not seek government loans to help finance college for his
five children.
Paul, a longtime Ronald Reagan supporter, even voted against awarding the
former president
a Congressional Gold Medal in 2000, saying that taxpayers shouldn't be
charged the $30,000
to mint the coin.
But critics note inconsistencies in Paul's long public record. For
example, while Paul
crusades against big government and voted against government funds for
victims of
hurricane Katrina, he has requested and won billions in special projects
for his
congressional district, which includes Galveston, Texas.
"I put it in because I represent people who are asking for some of their
money back…. And
if Congress has the responsibility to spend the money, why leave the money
in the
executive branch and let them spend the money?" he said on NBC's "Meet the
Press" Dec. 23.
At a recent town meeting in Conway, N.H., one audience member said he
supported most of
Paul's positions, but wondered whether government wasn't needed after all
in the cases of
monster storms, such as hurricane Katrina. Paul cited the case of the 1900
hurricane in
Galveston, which he said rebuilt significantly without help from
Washington.
Some libertarian critics also complain that his opposition to abortion
rights for women
violates libertarian principles of choice. In an interview, Paul says that
he came to his
views on abortion in part from his experience delivering babies. "From the
very beginning,
I had a moral and legal obligation to take care of two people, the mother
and the child,
and if I did anything wrong, I realized that I could be sued for it," he
said. "That had
an impact on me."
He recalls witnessing an illegal abortion in his first year out of medical
school that
made an impression, too. "Once I became more firmly entrenched with
libertarian beliefs, I
realized that another life was involved, I saw this as a principle of
nonaggression, which
libertarians adhere to. The baby has a choice, too."
For some Washington-based libertarians, Paul's success on the campaign
trail is puzzling.
"Because Ron Paul is personally a very traditional man, a small town guy,
his
libertarianism is embedded in a lot more traditionalism that you find in
many
libertarians," who bristle at his stance on abortion, for example, says
Brian Doherty,
senior editor at Reason Magazine, the leading libertarian political and
cultural journal.
"But many financial analysts, who are disproportionate fans of the Paul
campaign, say that
in their world, the stuff that might strike a normal American as kooky,
such as restoring
the gold standard, does not strike them as kooky, especially given how the
dollar's value
is plummeting. There isn't a single other candidate out there talking
about their world in
an interesting way – or at all," he adds.
A surge of grass-roots support
When Paul first ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate in
1988, he won 0.54
percent of the vote. In his second presidential bid, he's on track to do
better.
While Paul still polls only in single digits nationally and in early
primary states, his
supporters have raised more than $19 million since October, including a
record $6.2
million on one day, Dec. 16. This unofficial, grass-roots campaign is
out-organizing all
other campaigns over the Internet and recently launched a Ron Paul blimp.
"I'm not surprised that the views are popular, but I'm surprised to the
extent that people
have rallied and gotten spontaneously involved and done so much in
fundraising and
campaign events," Paul said in a Monitor interview.
Paul says his campaign is still working out what to do with the last
quarter's surge of
campaign contributions. "It's a real job figuring out what to do with it,"
he says. "We're
going to budget it out. It just means it's a lot easier planning for
super-Tuesday [on
Feb. 5], when we have money in the bank."
In Iowa, the campaign has used new funds to quickly ramp up a ground
operation. In New
Hampshire, it launched new television and radio ads.
Some experts say polls may be undercounting Paul's support, because so
many of his backers
haven't voted in the past and use cellphones rather than the landlines,
which pollsters
use. That's why Paul "is likely to do better on election day than polls
say he might,"
said Fergus Cullen, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party in an
interview for
C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" on Sunday.
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