It seems to me that if no major member of our political establishment is willing to address our out of control spending in a substantive–or even meaningful–way, that Ron Paul ought to give serious thought to a third party bid.
Logistically, of course, you lose the support of a party apparatus with long experience. Regretably, though, that experience is not in the political expression of principle, but rather in getting people elected who have a certain letter next to their name, and about whom we can infer little else.
The history of third party bids is not good. Perot, arguably, gave Clinton the Presidency, as Teddy Roosevelt certainly gave Wilson the presidency (only one Democrat having been elected otherwise since Abraham Lincoln, the Democrats having been blamed for the Civil War, which was of course a valid claim).
Yet, the history of financial disasters is not one of gradual declines from top to bottom. Rather, a tipping point is reached in which an apparently steady state, stable situation, suddenly tips over. Other than the people who consciously cause such events, no one can predict when they may happen. What we can certainly say is “WE ARE VULNERABLE”. We have points in which attack is possible, and thus at some point likely.
Only Ron Paul has the integrity to acknowledge the fact that we cannot continue to borrow trillions a year, and that increases in taxes do nothing but validate the enormous expansion of our government that has happened under Bush and Obama. We spend $2 trillion a year in Clinton’s last year. Obama this year wants to spend some $3.5 trillion. This is not a problem of undertaxation, but rather vastly excessive spending.
There is no correllation between GDP and government. The second need not expand pari passu with the first. It is always a false correllation when people try to explain away spending as a percentage of GDP. The fact of the matter is that every time the government grows, our freedoms shrink. This is inevitable, since all the bureaucrats hired with our money have to find something to do, or they are out of cushy jobs with fantastic benefits.
In my view, it would be a huge mistake for him to run as a Libertarian. Most people–which I will here define as me, with the perhaps overly presumptive assumption that this belief is shared widely–view Libertarians as either hippies upset that marijuana is illegal, or Ayn Rand zealots who have read Atlas Shrugged ten times and memorized large sections of the dialogue.
Something like the “Save America” Party, or Fiscal Sanity Party, or something on those lines would be good. It would be interesting to see that if he brought out a sizable following, if he would be invited to debates. I suspect not, but TV is not the only medium for the communication of information.
It really does seem to me we are being asked to choose the pace of our failure, and ignored entirely as to whether or not that is the outcome we want. Our problems are solvable and preventable. That so few are working with integrity to protect us does nothing to change this obvious fact.