What Does Ron Paul Stand For? On Education, the Federal Reserve, Finance, and Libertarianism

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• published: 07 Jul 2012
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Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician, author, and politician who has been the U.S. Representative for Texas's 14th congressional district, which includes Galveston, since 1997, and a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and currently 2012. He is a member of the Republican Party. He has libertarian views and is a critic of American foreign, domestic, and monetary policies, including the military--industrial complex, the War on Drugs, and the Federal Reserve. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He served as a medical officer in the United States Air Force from 1963 until 1968. He worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s, delivering more than 4,000 babies. He became the first Representative in history to serve concurrently with a child in the Senate when his son Rand Paul was elected to the United States Senate for Kentucky in 2010. Paul has been an active writer and publisher since the late 1970s, when he created the first of several newsletters bearing his name. As well as publicizing the ideas of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises Paul has contributed literature to the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has published many books, beginning with The Case for Gold (1982) and including Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (2011), End The Fed (2009), The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008), Pillars of Prosperity (2008), and A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship (2007). Paul has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement. Beginning in 1978, for more than two decades Paul and his associates published a number of political and investment-oriented newsletters bearing his name (Dr. Ron Paul's Freedom Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report, the Ron Paul Investment Letter, and the Ron Paul Political Report). By 1993, a business through which Paul was publishing the newsletters was earning in excess of $900,000 per year. A number of the newsletters, particularly in the period between 1988 and 1994 when Paul was no longer in Congress, contained material that later proved highly controversial, dwelling on conspiracy theories, praising anti-government militia movements, and warning of coming race wars. During Paul's 1996 congressional election campaign, and his 2008 and 2012 presidential primary campaigns, critics charged that some of the passages reflected racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic bigotry. The newsletters included statements such as: "... I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." "Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day!" "An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth [to defend yourself against armed robbery], you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible.... I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." "I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came 'out of the closet,' and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don't believe so, medically or morally." "[Magic] Johnson may be a sports star, but he is dying [of AIDS] because he violated moral laws." "[T]he criminal 'Justice' Department wants to force dentists to treat these Darth Vader types [people with AIDS] under the vicious Americans With Disabilities Act;" and "[W]e all have the right to discriminate, which is what freedom of association is all about, especially against killers [AIDS patients]." Other passages referred to former Secretary of Health & Human Services Donna Shalala as a "short lesbian" and Martin Luther King, Jr. as a pedophile and "lying socialist satyr" -- while offering praise for former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke and other controversial figures. In later years, Paul said that the controversial material had been ghostwritten by members of a team that included 6 or 8 others and that, as publisher, not editor, he had not even been aware of the content of the controversial articles until years after they had been published. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_paul