Friday, May 28, 2010

TIME looks at Rand and Ron Paul

The recent Senate primary win for Rand Paul in Kentucky is having repercussions throughout American politics. Apparently Kentucky Republicans like what Rand Paul is saying, much the same as Galveston Texas area voters have liked Ron Paul for a dozen years now.

Ron Paul is arguably the world's best know libertarian, and his son shares many but not all his father's views. Is Rand's win significant? Well, TIME magazine thinks so, and so does CATO. Many libertarians dismiss Rand as "libertarian-light" with some statist ideas, but for me close-to-libertarian is better than almost any other option. As the TIME article mentions Ron Paul's views don't seem so wacky now:
"Twenty years later, Paul's views no longer seemed kooky: government spending soared even under a Republican Congress and President, leaving many conservatives fed up. At the same time, the human and financial toll of the Iraq war, which Paul decried as an act of imperialism, left some Republicans angry with the so-called neocon wing of their party."
The CATO-at-Liberty article is worth a read, because coming from a libertarian perspective it places the Paul's in the American context and gives us all a hopeful message for the future.


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