Foreign policy ... I'd like to see our foreign aide terminated. Pakistan is imprisoning a Doctor who aided us in getting Bin Laden; and Pakistan got $1.656 Billion and likely in excess of $1.4 Billion in economic aide from us last year. WTF? They hid a terrorist that killed 3,000 americans and are punishing a citizen for helping us get Bin Laden (he got 30 years).
We are not making friends when we "give" the money away, in fact we are creating enemies. Look how the world views Canada vs how they view us. We give money away, with strings. Countries hate the strings, but want the money. How about we keep our money, fix our problems at home, build a strong military, and alieveate the problems we have?
I'm not a drug user, I don't drink either ... my choice. But, I'm unwilling to have my life, my family, my possessions placed at risk by denying some idiot who wants to poison himself, the poison he craves. Want Crystal Meth? IMHO, help yourself. Make it cheap, and plentiful and pure - hopefully the dregs of society will OD and we can just toss the bodies in a landfill somewhere. Society will be better off (ie. return to where it was before the laws prohibiting drugs were in effect) and we won't have the crime we all enjoy today. Further, there will cease to be the efforts put into making more addictive and concentrated drugs - no profit in it. The criminal carels will go bankrupt, innocent lives will cease to be lost, gangs will disolve as their revenue stream will dry up. We won't have a prison population with 1/6 incarcerated for doing what our esteemed President did - numerous times, and wrote about in his book. He is only President because he didn't get caught; yet for those who were caught, their lives have been ruined.
“hopefully the dregs of society will OD and we can just toss the bodies in a landfill somewhere”
I was a “dreg” once. But there were laws in place that kept it from being as bad as it might have been, and as a result I survived long enough to experience redemption. That’s a good thing. Christians have for two millennia seen good law as the hand of Providence, creating a world safe enough for the Gospel to prosper, and for virtuous living to proper. Only since the Enlightenment, and particularly since the advent of Kantian autonomy, has freedom been seen as a supreme good unto itself.
Various methods have been deployed to balance freedom with virtue. Enlightened Hedonism, the real “liberty” at the root of both LIBeralism and LIBertarianism, simply redefines virtue down to the lowest common denominator, the self. Do all for self-interest alone, and everything else will work itself out. This actually works to some degree in economics. Not because it works perfectly, but because it works better than anything else we know, and significantly better than centrally controlled systems.
But the success of economic life presumes a functioning culture in which “selves” may operate with relative safety, and no culture can function without attempting to restrain certain corrosive evils, which, if left unattended, would make impossible the kind of human relationships necessary to sustain a relatively free economy.
For a blazing obvious example, no one is “free” to commit murder. Theoretically at least. Yes, murders will happen, but there are consequences, and those consequences are limits on freedom, and they are good limits.
Likewise, a law that limits access to poisons of the mind can also be good. I live in Illinois, near Springfield, but more rural than that. I want the meth labs shut down. I fear for the safety of my children. I have learned through one of my former criminal clients with “underworld” connections that not far from here is a place where young people are systematically funneled into drug dependency, then prostitution, then far worse, with the complicity of big name pols in Springfield. This corruption is not based any “prohibition makes drugs cool” meme. It is based on coercively creating “chemical slaves” who then generate an income stream.
This kind of corrupting influence cannot be fought in some hippie nirvana of a no rules society. Human nature is too perverse to permit it. “Enlightened Hedonism” based on self-interest, but without the inhibition of virtuous law, will lead many to the conclusion that clawing your way to the top over the bodies of the innocent is perfectly acceptable. That’s what’s happening here in Illinois. That is why we are so corrupt. Announce there is no real rule of law, and the animals will come out of hiding.
But the theory goes, make drugs cheap and the big money players will leave. No. Drug dependency is still power, and that temptation will not go unnoticed. Those accustomed to power through drugs will find creative new ways to use that power under any economic theory. It is better to draw a line in the sand, to start standing firm somewhere and fight a war you can never fully win, than to give up and lose entirely to the barbarians.
We cannot create Heaven on earth. The Marxists tried to do it, and they ended up killing millions on their “Road to Nirvana.” Libertine philosophy cannot do it either, because it shares a common flaw with Marxism, an undue optimism over the nobility of human nature. We are a corrupt people, and prone to great evil. The law is a preservative. It doesn’t cure the disease. That remains the province of God. But it can keep things from getting as bad as they might otherwise be, and that’s all good.
Ron Paul is against a lot more than foreign aid.