It's taken a while, but America is warming to Ron Paul and his radical brand of extreme libertarianism
By Stephen Foley
Pull US troops out of Afghanistan. Leave Iran alone. Legalise drugs. Get the government out of people's private lives. Say no to the bailout of Wall Street fat cats. As a menu of policy prescriptions, you might think that this all puts Ron Paul on the Soviet wing of the Democratic party. But you'd be wrong.
The 74-year-old Congressman from Texas, with his skinny frame and his hangdog face, is about as unlikely a poster child for the future of the Republican party as you are likely to find, but his ideas have struck chords with libertarian-minded college kids. Dismissed last year as the token nutjob in the line-up of Republican presidential candidates, his insurgent campaign proved surprisingly tenacious. Young people at music festivals wore "Dr Paul cured my apathy" badges, he spawned an internet fund-raising movement that had echoes of Barack Obama from the other side, and to this day he has a stronger YouTube presence than any other Republican politician.
To the extent that Paul is known outside the US, it is as the poor guy propositioned in a hotel room by a trouser-less Sacha Baron Cohen, in his movie Brüno. Paul flees, shouting: "he's queer, he's crazy, he hit on me".
But in the US, his books now become instant best-sellers and he tours university campuses pushing a libertarian agenda. Where once he believed he was seeding the ground for a movement that would triumph well after his own career is over, to his own astonishment, policies he has espoused to almost universal ridicule for decades might just be about to go into law.
And this is why the economic and political establishment fears Ron Paul as one of the most dangerous men in America. His innocuous-sounding plan to subject the US central bank to a regular audit of its activities is a Trojan horse for the wider aim to End the Fed – the title of his latest book. Behind the liberal-sounding policies lies an audacious agenda to erase 100 years of economic orthodoxy and take the US back to a Nineteenth-century version of every-man-for-himself capitalism. Inch by inch, he is making progress.
"The college kids I think are interested in the anti-war position, in personal civil liberties and allowing them to do with their own lives what they want – but I tell them, if you ruin your own life don't come begging the government to take care of you."
Paul greets The Independent at his rooms in Congress, decked out in the formal regalia of public office, with flags and seals, but with portraits in one corner that reveal his inspirations: members of the Austrian school of economists whose founder Friedrich von Hayek predicted government attempts to intervene in the economy would set their people on "the road to serfdom".
"Ideas are the only things that count, and politicians are, for the most part, pretty much irrelevant," he says. "What was boiling out there I just brought to life. This material has been available in a quiet way on the internet and from a few libertarian think-tanks, but I was pretty shocked when college kids started calling out 'End the Fed, End the Fed.'"
