The undisguised truth about liberty in America
by Ron Paul
Review by Brian Wright

2008, Grand Central Publishing, 167 pages

“The Revolution is an important and timely work, yet its fiery title belies the quiet, more scholarly approach it advocates.  This is most likely a temperament issue: where Jesse Ventura would pound on the podium and call us to the streets to depose modern royalty through mass protest like the 1960s antiwar movement, Dr. Paul would have us read several good books and vote.”

From my trip to Ron Paul’s Rally for the
Republic—which I briefly describe in notes to the VIP list in last week’s column—there in

the Twin Cities after Labor Day, I could tell the Constitutional Liberty (CL) movement is alive and well.  But exactly what direction it will take is still up in the air.  As this column goes to press, the Libertarian Party candidate for President, Bob Barr, has sent Dr. Paul a letter inviting Dr. Paul to join the LP ticket as Barr’s vice-presidential candidate.  I think that’s a great idea, and a fitting way to further Ron Paul’s ongoing Campaign for Liberty.  Whether Ron Paul will see it that way, who knows?

On the key day of the Rally, several notable speakers addressed the assembled freedom fighters, including Dr. Paul and, most notably, Jesse Ventura—former professional wrestler, movie actor, governor of Minnesota, and author of Don’t Start the Revolution without Me. Well, in a matchup of charisma, Ron isn’t even in the same league with Jesse.  But in the ability to lay down his own prose, Paul has few equals when it comes to message simplicity, focus, and persuasiveness.  And, though I haven’t read Jesse’s book yet, I have to believe The Revolution: A Manifesto handles your basic elements of libertarian theory uniquely adroitly.

The chapters break down as follows:

1. The False Choices of American Politics—Right out of the chute RP decries how the media and the academic elites exclude the option of freedom from the political debate… and that they do so by substituting trivialities for real news.
2. The Foreign Policy of the Founding Fathers—Probably the chapter where I learned the most: opponents of a noninterventionist foreign policy accuse us of being isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth, and what the framers have written on the subject is stunningly brilliant and prescriptive.
3. The Constitution—Dr. Paul has what I call a strict constructionist view of the Constitution: he strictly constructs that the federal government has virtually no power… certainly none of the aggressive powers it has assumed in the past two centuries. We need to elect judges who can read.
4. Economic Freedom—He’s great on the bread and butter issues, everything stemming from the observation of the simple moral rule that “everyone has a right to his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive anyone of these things.”
5. Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom—Obviously with such recent incursions on humanity as the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments, civil liberty is an urgent issue.  Paul also takes on the Drug War, government-school tyranny, and a host of other massive nonconsensual crimes committed on peaceful citizens by the state continuously.
6. Money: The Forbidden Issue in American Politics—Ain’t that the truth.  How many American school children learn that a national bank is unconstitutional; how many realize that the Fed is a mechanism for deficit spending (government counterfeiting) and a license to steal?  What is the corporate privilege, and why?
7. The Revolution—”We are engaged in a great battle of ideas, and the choices before us could not be clearer. I urge those who agree with this important message to educate themselves in the scholarship of liberty. Read some of the books I recommend in my reading list [an appendix].

The Revolution is an important and timely work, yet its fiery title belies the quiet, more scholarly approach it advocates.  This is most likely a temperament issue: where Jesse Ventura would pound on the podium and call us to the streets to depose modern royalty through mass protest like the 1960s antiwar movement, Dr. Paul would have us read several good books and vote.

I hate to be the one to break it to Dr. Paul: even his book shows us how the deck is stacked with the two-party system.  Elections today are contests of one set of pressure groups vs. another—with the controlled media making sure the libertarian alternative is blockaded and ignored.  It just so happens this year the Democrats (when they don’t rail against the war, against the war crimes, against the corporate welfare system, against the drug war, and against the myriad state violations of liberty courtesy the Republican-fascist caucus that has held power for eight years) propose the same tired old statist nostrums that have made it possible for these neoNazis of the pseudo-right to take over.  And the Republicans are unabashedly advocating full-blown tyranny of a theocratic/imperial police state.

Naturally, Americans of any intellect or humanitarian sentiment, when presented the choice between war/tyranny and war/tyranny lite (with a forlorn hope that Democrats will embrace their libertarian origins and upend war/tyranny entirely) are probably going to pick the latter. That’s what sane people do when liberty is not an option.

But the real problem is the American “two-party system” and the Borg control that lies underneath it (and which Kleptos the system benefits regardless of party) has banned reason and liberty from the stage it needs to be on.  Whether we’re talking about the national debates or about the state elections bureaucracies that preclude Americans from rational independent choices, this democratic system has ceased to be anything of the kind.  In effect, the King has decreed “we shall eat cake,” and FOX News and all the rest of the state-propaganda machinery ensure the masses are kept blind, and (in the case of Sleazah Palin) stupid and titillated.  Sorry, King, like our colonial rebels, we’re going a different way—declaring independence.

If we don’t take it to the streets for liberty now—a la a mass movement of independents supporting the principles of our founding fathers—then we may get the chance if Obama is elected, but otherwise all is lost… including the right to disagree/protest at all. Ron Paul’s book is a perfect primer for making solid arguments to people who can vote and change things… if and only if we retain the ability as citizens to democratically make effective changes.  Failing that, it makes an ineffective projectile against stormtroopers and prison guards.

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