Ron Paul Wants the Government of the Strongest

It’s worth taking a break from Brazilian topics and paying attention to Ron Paul, the darling of the market fanatics in the American primaries.

Considering the ease with which we Brazilians import lousy ideas, we will soon have its derivatives in circulation here. If you still don’t understand that the anti-state ideas at work, in our epoch of history, represent a movement that culminates in anti-democracy, you only need to follow the movements of Ron Paul. He wants to abolish the American central bank, with the argument that it represents an undue interference of the state in the life of the common citizen. (I think that he just wants to liberate the financial market once and for all, but you could say that this is a question of interpretation. Laughs.) Up to that point, it just looks like a more radicalized version of the idea that the markets are capable of self-regulation and that human progress is the result of the liberation of individual self-interest, as Adam Smith was already saying in the 18th century.

The thing becomes yet more complicated when one discovers that Ron Paul also favors the abolition of civil rights legislation from 1964, the foremost in protecting the country against racist crimes. Let’s clarify. He does not question legislation on quotas, which causes controversy to this day and is opposed by the majority of Republican politicians. His point is more fundamental. He questions the idea that crimes considered racist can be punished and that the state should take measures against discrimination.

So far, we have the following: the State cannot have a bank to determine interest rates, protect jobs and money, as is written in the Federal Reserve’s charter. To do this is to interfere with the freedom of the market.

Civil rights legislation interferes with the liberty of citizens. Liberty to do what, exactly? It was discovered, recently, that Ron Paul had had a long correspondence with voters, in which racism was stoked against blacks and against Jews. Among his allies — who have more freedom to say clearly that which the candidate doesn’t explicitly mention — there are those who complain that the Federal Reserve is governed “by Jews” or who consider Martin Luther King an unfortunate presence in American history. Faced with such embarrassing revelations, Ron Paul has said that he was not the author of these racist texts, which he attributed to aides who wrote things he didn’t agree with. The credibility of these explanations is low since the texts were released in his name, for more than ten years. Another possibility is that these views are coherent with the principal vision of market fanatics, for whom individual rights are above the rights of the collective.

To block the State’s actions in the name of individual liberty, his proposal borders on the criminal. In this vision of the world, no law has the right to impede a human being from imposing his interests and will over another human being. This includes, naturally, savage and unacceptable forms of coercion, as long as they are done privately and not by public powers, considered evil by their very nature.

Although he is presented as an advocate of individual liberty, Ron Paul defends the government of the strongest. He is the candidate of savage capitalism.