RON IS BACK; BACK RON!!!

5/13/11

Congressman Ron Paul announced today that he will run for president yet again and, as most of you may suspect, I will be supporting him again; I have only once failed to vote for Dr. Paul whenever I have had the opportunity, and that was one of the votes I most sincerely regret.

Do I have some misgivings about once again supporting Ron Paul for president? Certainly, but not the big misgiving that people assume I would have, i.e., that I am “throwing away” my vote. The way I, and most clear thinking people, see it, we are confronted in this country with a choice between one party that has never seen a foreign quagmire into which we should not insert ourselves and would like to make 50% of the American citizenry wards of the state and another party that perhaps might see one or two quagmires into which we should not insert ourselves and would like to make 75% of the citizenry wards of the state. The American voter today, if s/he insists on not “throwing away” his or her vote, is confronted with an opportunity to change the direction of the growth of government by, at most, three or four degrees. Choosing between two parties, both of which have views of government that are diametrically opposed to mine, would indeed be “throwing away” my vote. Voting for a guy who agrees me on most (not all) issues is standing for principle and showing respect for the vote for which so many people gave their lives.

But why are the almost indetectible differences between the two parties an issue, since Dr. Paul is running in the GOP primary? Dr. Paul remembers his showing in the 1988 presidential race (0.5% of the popular vote, still the second highest percentage ever for a Libertarian candidate) and has concluded that a Third Party candidate has no chance of winning a presidential election. That is why he is running as a GOPer. In the Republican contest, he is running against a flock of candidates, with some fringe exceptions, who pledge loyalty, with narrowly varying degrees of adhesion, to the GOP “big government on a global scale” approach to public policy. So a vote for Dr. Paul remains a vote against the two party system that, of late, has led our country to the door step of financial, moral, and societal dystopia.

My misgivings on Dr. Paul are two-fold. First, he has been in Congress for over twenty years. It becomes increasingly difficult to make the argument that one is opposed to the further insertion of government into our lives when one has been on the public payroll for twenty years. One starts to suspect that if Dr. Paul really believes what he says, he would make like Cincinnatus and return to the plow or, in Dr. Paul’s case, to the practice of obstetrics and gynecology in Texas. His reluctance to do so, and the increasingly growing disparity between his background and that of Herman Cain is one of the reasons I find Mr. Cain’s candidacy so attractive, but that is another issue.

Despite this misgiving, I will adhere to the wisdom of Frank Raispis, the greatest Latin/Greek teacher in the history of St. Ignatius (and therefore, of the world) and write, regarding Dr. Paul,

Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi.

Translation for those of you who did not have the good fortune, as did yours truly, of learning the language of the saints and scholars from the likes of Frank Raispis, Sister Florence Marie Gerdes, Father Florian (“Ridicule his first name to his face, I dare you!” was a common taunt for three decades at Ignatius involving that former amateur boxing champ from St. Pius Parish, God rest his soul.) Zimecki, and Don Hoffman (But do I digress here or what?):

What is allowed for Jupiter is not allowed for an ox.

My second misgiving involves a question regarding whether it is too late for a small government approach. According to those who hold this view, things have gotten so bad, with the citizenry, preferring to figuratively excrete away its time on such trendy piffles and cotton candy for the mind as television, ignoring its responsibilities under a system of self-government and thus turning over its governance to the highest bidder, that a system that puts more responsibility into the hands of an addle-brained electorate would result merely in expediting the inevitable…the utter ruin of our society due to our own indifference, self-indulgence, and sense of entitlement. Therefore, with the overwhelming majority of our population having at most a vague familiarity with the Constitution yet possessing a healthy disdain for its provisions and obligations when they impinge on their comfort or desire to take from others to give to themselves, a stronger, perhaps authoritarian, system is needed at this stage to right things, to return us to a point at which Constitutional government would once again be viable.

While I have some sympathy for this view, I adhere to the wisdom of Milton Friedman who said (paraphrasing) that he was not in favor of limited government and freedom because he was sure he was right but, rather, because he was constantly aware that he could be wrong. If I am wrong and everything is going wonderfully in this country, that our best years are ahead of us, and that Americans are at least as hard-working, insightful, and wise as they have ever been, letting such Olympians have a larger role in their government would only intensify these salubrious trends. If I am right and we are headed straight into the crapper, limited government would make it glaringly obvious that the American people will have only themselves to blame for the smoking and odoriferous wreck of the inheritance our forefathers left us that will remain.

So I will be voting for Dr. Paul…again.