Liberty Maven

The first major event during Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign was a disagreement on foreign policy between he and Rudy Giuliani. At that time, foreign policy was the major issue of the campaign. I’ve always maintained that the only issue anyone would care about come election day would be the economy. Everything we do is based on the economy. It is always the number one issue. Of course, no one really cares much about it when the perception is that it is doing well.

Now that it is not doing well at all, foreign policy is almost an afterthought. Ron Paul has always tied the two “issues” together. Austrian economics teaches us to look at the entire picture and the long term implications of human action. Ron Paul rightly links our wasteful overseas spending to the economic problems we are facing at home. Yesterday he released another of his weekly columns on his Congressional web site. In it he focuses on America’s foreign policy of intervention and calls upon us to truly think about how we would react if another country’s soldiers were patrolling the streets of our country.

This, in my view, is his strongest argument for a non-interventionist foreign policy. It is the oldest argument in the book, the golden rule argument: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And, as always, in the end he ties it back in to our precarious economic condition. With Obama continuing the Bush foreign policy we are merely prolonging the inevitable and worsening the pain.

“Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up check points on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.”

Read his entire argument here. What do you think?