Club for growth has done a fine job throughly analyzing Ron Paul’s voting record and gives a fine summary judgment.

When it comes to limited government, there are few champions as steadfast and principled as Representative Ron Paul. In the House of Representatives, he plays a very useful role constantly challenging the status quo and reminding his colleagues, despite their frequent indifference, that our Constitution was meant to limit the power of government. On taxes, regulation, and political free speech his record is outstanding. While his recent pork votes are troubling, the vast majority of his anti-spending votes reflect a longstanding desire to cut government down to size.

But Ron Paul is a purist, too often at the cost of real accomplishments on free trade, school choice, entitlement reform, and tort reform. It is perfectly legitimate, and in fact vital, that think tanks, free-market groups, and individual members of congress develop and propose idealized solutions. But presidents have the responsibility of making progress, and often, Ron Paul opposes progress because, in his mind, the progress is not perfect. In these cases, although for very different reasons, Ron Paul is practically often aligned with the most left-wing Democrats, voting against important, albeit imperfect, pro-growth legislation.

Ron Paul is, undoubtedly, ideologically committed to pro-growth limited government policies. But his insistence on opposing all but the perfect means that under a Ron Paul presidency we might never get a chance to pursue the good too.

While Ron Paul supporters will deny it, Ron comes off as an isolationist to me, both in foreign affairs and free trade. Besides, for whatever reasons, I don’t feel like Paul really understands free markets completely enough to convince me he supports them on a very basic level. It seems like he is pro free markets because for him, its the thing to do, and not because he realizes and see the transforming power free markets has on any group that allows them to do their work. Both Guilani and Romney have done better at convincing me that they truly appreciate the power of markets then Paul has.

Its interesting to note also that my voting choices are not completely dictated by fiscal policy. I really dislike Paul’s foreign affairs policy and that in of itself is a deal breaker for me.

Oh yeah and also Ron Paul is crazy. That does not help either.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.