Google Ovates Ron Paul

“You don’t reach perfection in freedom — but you don’t reach perfection in socialism either.” — Ron Paul

Ron Paul appeared on July 14th, 2007 before an overflowing room of Google employees and delivered a STUNNING interview following what can only be described as a profound ovation. Ron Paul enumerates his stances on the supremacy of the Constitution (calling it the best Constitution ever written), the irrationality of the US foreign policy of “nation building” and the inevitable failure of the US if it continues to police the world.

Paul spends a good amount of time talking about problems with NAFTA and the problems of government-imposed tariffs (which he calls a tax on the poor) and government management of trade economics. He compares economic voluntarism to sexual and interpersonal voluntarism, enumerating for the first time that this author has seen his stance that gay marriage should be honored as a form of voluntarism (“whatever you’d like to call it,” says Paul).

Citing Houston as an example of a city constructed without zoning laws, Ron Paul sounds more Libertarian in this interview than I have ever seen. Ron Paul supports the 2nd Amendment fiercely, saying that gun laws most strongly hurt inner-city minorities who aren’t allowed to defend themselves, and further says that gun deregulation may well have prevented 9/11, since terrorists might have thought twice about hijacking a plane with armed citizens on it.

Paul would like to slash the defense budget to about 1/3 of the level it is at now, but only because he’d like to do away with the military-industrial complex. He would like the taxes for national defense to come from a UNIFORM tariff (not a specialized tariff), eliminating the income tax and thereby freeing American citizens from having their lives “owned by the government.”

If you really care about people, says Paul, it’s capitalism that eliminates famine and poverty. Paul blames the dissolution of charity healthcare and the rise of university costs on government intervention. Paul attacks America’s currency policy, essentially calling our current prosperity an illusion created by a constant flow of lending from China and Japan — lending which *will* run out and bring our country to its knees if we do not return to basing our currency on a gold standard or some other form of hard assets.

In response to a question about requiring collective action to protect the environment, Paul calls environmental destruction a failure on the part of the government’s role in protecting private property (and thereby allowing companies to destroy rivers with toxic dumping). Paul supports local city ordinances to protect individuals from environmental damages just like local noise pollution laws with the advent of the automobile. He finds significant flaws with environmental lobbies which become entities that begin to live for themselves and fund bureaucrats and lose their purpose. Paul advocates for environmental groups to behave like consumer groups, advocating for environmental reform by reporting on companies that commit environmental atrocities to remove popular support for those companies (instead of relying on an administrative bureaucracy which is, by nature, inefficient).

Ron Paul goes on to answer a number of questions about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, illegal immigration, his campaign strategy, and the American defense of Taiwan, and the rights of pharmacists to deny birth control on religious grounds, the decriminalization of marijuana, and opening up medical care without licensure. Ron Paul is written a check by a Google employee *on the spot* during his interview — do you see that happening for other candidates? No, you don’t.