What do you think about Ron Paul? Was he the hope and dream of our movement or just a republican quack?
I liked Ron Paul. I didn’t always agree with him, but he had principles that he stood by and fought for. He was one of the few people in DC fighting the Bush forever-war surveillance-state in the years after 9/11.
I lost all hope for the Republican party when I saw the crowd at the Republican primary debate in 08 (iirc) boo him for saying that the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you) should apply to international relations.
He was ultimately a Don Quixote figure. Nobody wants a libertarian state. The right wants authoritarianism, the Dems want crony capitalism, the progressives want socialism or social democracy. He was shouting into the wind about freedom and privacy, the public shrugged, and the two parties established a surveillance state and dragged us into a twenty year quagmire.
I think Ron Paul was pretty inspirational to me at one point. Recently, I wonder whether he’s just another Russian shill.
Yeah. I’m pretty disappointed with his more recent statements and actions.
But he was at one point very inspirational to me as well. People change, so I’m just going to attribute his latter behaviors with getting older and losing his mind/principles.
That’s a little bit narrow, putting the person of Ron Paul into one of those two categories lol that’s so harsh. Also, the online Libertarian community seems to me to be pretty small, so not sure that “Our movement” was ever that close to its dream. Sadly, I think of Ron Paul as I think of most of the people like you and me; honest and principled freedom-lovers who unsuccessfully try to persuade the masses that freedom really is better and that peace and cooperation is better than war and division. Maybe you’re saying Ron Paul was the closest Libertairanism got to mainstream? I guess I would agree 100%to that. Lemmy is maddeningly left-leaning and everywhere I look people seem to attribute lots of non-libertarian things to pure Libertarianism. Lots of hatred for voluntary cooperation and peaceful coexisting without governmental control 🤷
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I don’t know exactly who this Ron Paul is but I really hate it when the libertarian philosophy is being reduced to a political agenda even more to an american one. Of course, one has to appreciate the important influences from america but libertariansim is by far more than that.
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Libertarianism is a philosophy independent from any political system that callsxitcselfclikecthat. It is based on the fundamental value of what freedom is and puts it before everything else. The non agession principle is concerned with maximizing the personal freedom of all. As long as you don’t restrict anyone’s freedom or interfere with their abilities, you can do anything. As long as you adhere to these principles you can call yourself a libertarian.
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Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, and I see a lot of Libertarian-doubters have similar issues with the philosophy. You can point to a specific situation and say “Libertarianism doesn’t work here. Libertarianism must be trash.” But really I’ve been seeing the same thing with other competing philosophies right? Like “Our world is a mess. This is what Capitalism does? Capitalism is trash.” And then right wing people say “look at the communism in Venezuela. Is this what the Left wants? Communism is trash” And the Libertariand are all “its not TRUE Libertarianism” It’s not TRUE capitalism It’s not TRUE communism Etc. But really it’s just a lot of arguing over small matters that necessarily arise between people who hold different philosophies. There are some people who legitimately believe that governments are better equipped to decide what people need and better equipped to provide those needs to individuals. Others believe that the individual knows best and is in a better position to provide. Because of this one simple outlook on life there are necessarily thousands of differences in opinions about daily life choices, controls, limitations etc simply because of a higher disagreement. Yes, people find the non-aggression principle to be useless, but we Libertarians find war-making and unprovoked aggression to be less beneficial than peace, mutual cooperation, and the resulting division of labor.
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