In the comments on some post or other I opined about Ron Paul - in the negative.  Someone who stumbled across my comment PMed me at length, making the case for Paul and ending with asking if Paul now had my vote.

Bwahaha, even if I wanted to vote for Paul, I couldn't.

I told my correspondent that the PM would make a good blog. (Tho, of course, not one I'd agree with.)

In the meantime, I've decided to do my own post, just to get it off my mind.

And just now I saw Paul being interviewed on CNN calling Santorum a big fat *liberal* - because (shock, horror) he voted in Congress for international aid and help for seniors thru Medicaid.  Something else horrendous too, I think, that I don't recall.  But that's sufficient - mean-spirited and wanting people, however vulnerable, to go it alone.

Anti-government people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater - government is sometimes wasteful and does dubious things and, in many times and places, is oppressive.  SO LET'S GET RID OF IT ALTOGETHER. 

Here's Paul this weekend on the awfulness of the Civil Rights Act: 

"What you don't want to do is undermine the concept of liberty in that process. And what they did in that bill was they destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.

So if you do this, all civil liberties are protected by property rights, where it's your TV stations -- that's a piece of property -- or whether it's the newspaper, whether it's the church building, or whether it's the bedroom. This is something that people don't quite understand, that civil liberties aren't divorced from property.

So if you try to improve relationships by forcing and telling people what they can't do, and you ignore and undermine the principles of liberty, then the government can come into our bedrooms. And that's exactly what has happened."

Shaking head.

And seizing on that bit about bedrooms - the one area of *liberty* that libertarians (and Republicans) don't support is in the bedroom ... they want to pass laws against gay people and women's reproductive health (not just access to abortion).  Isn't there a contradiction there?  Shut down the government, except for the Sex Police.

And while I'm bitching, there's that Santorum person, saying manufacturing would return to the U.S. if they just got rid of regulations, reduced corporation tax to zero (for those who brought back manufacture) and generally did what China has done.  Nets around the factories to catch employees trying to commit suicide? [That's where your/my wonderful Apple products come from.] (And that he'd nullify all same-sex marriages.) (And that he doesn't want to 'help' black people by giving them other people's money.  Some other commentator pointed out that the majority of people receiving government help are white...but that's not how these guys think.)

I like this article, Conservatism, Compassion and Cruelty, about how wonderful it is when a community rallies around someone who is ill and can't afford to pay medical bills...and how cruel it is to make this people's only option. 

And charity of friends and neighbors is Paul's idea too of how people should deal with such situations. 

Thing is, in case it isn't obvious, and obviously it ain't, as a large, mobile society, community is the nation and certain forms of charity and other services have to be institutionalized.  

Otherwise we all have to build our own highway when we want to go somewhere and roll it up behind when we're finished.