The Ron Paul Moment Has Only Begun
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Whatever your expectations for Ron Paul’s book The Revolution: A Manifesto, I can say with confidence that they have been exceeded. By a mile.
Ron Paul has produced the kind of book that changes the person who reads it. It is one of the most persuasively argued and beautifully written defenses of the free society I have ever encountered. No president, no presidential candidate, indeed no American politician has ever written anything like this. But that is such faint praise, and such an unjust understatement, that I almost regret uttering it.
From the first page of this book to the last, Ron Paul tells his fellow Americans things that – if the usual political and media fare we are offered is any indication – they are not supposed to hear. As I’ve said in another context, Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto is, to the establishment, rather like the man who shouts out in the middle of the show how the magician is really sawing the woman in half.
What does it cover? Oh, just the Constitution, war, terrorism, the economy, trade, civil liberties, the war on drugs, the dollar, gold, abortion, executive orders, taxation, the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve, education, health care, the environment, conservatism, entitlements, foreign aid, regulation, and presidential war powers.
In order to make progress toward liberty, economist and libertarian Murray Rothbard used to say, the benign façade of the state has to be dramatically torn down. The people must be made to understand that this institution, which they’ve been taught to venerate since elementary school as the expression of the popular will, is ripping them off.
Well, this is the book Murray was waiting for.
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.
Now trust me that I am not doing this book justice, but here’s a sample of its style and content.
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Ron Paul Book Bomb
I think it will turn out to be his biggest selling book ever. The message of liberty will continue to spread as more and more people wake up to the truth.
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