My Flashreport Column on Ron Paul

Jon Fleischman of Flashreport asked me to pen a column about the Ron Paul campaign here in California. I was happy to do it. I thank Jon for giving me the opportunity to reach a large GOP audience in California and the nation. Here is the piece:

THE RON PAUL REVOLUTION

There is something happening out there in the country right now. A not so quiet revolution is brewing against the governing classes. You could say another Boston Tea Party is around the corner. A candidate is running for President out there that is speaking the language of freedom and the US Constitution. His name is Ron Paul.

I can't tell you how refreshing Dr. Paul's run has been for myself and a lot of others. The last six years of GOP rule in Washington, D.C. is something most Republicans would like to forget about. Unfortunately for us, the voters haven't forgotten about it and they threw us out of office in 2006. We have a chance to get it right again though by supporting Ron Paul.

He has been running a very unconventional campaign up to now. Instead of wasting the money he's raised so far on over rated political consultants, he's relied on the Internet to get his message out to the masses and it has paid big dividends. In fact Ron is dominating the campaign online right now. He's brilliantly leveraged the online social networking groups like Meetup, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and others for a huge advantage. These groups have harnessed his campaign because the message is very appealing to them. There's a funny story about this that Ron told me at a recent fundraiser on the USC campus. Apparently, some operatives from one of the other GOP campaigns tried to infiltrate his headquarters to find out why he was doing so well on the internet. They wanted to see what "his secret" was. He laughed and said that the internet has harnessed him. They didn't do anything special except talk about the message of freedom and the Constitution.

In one day back on November 5th, the campaign made major headlines by announcing they had raised over $4.3 million dollars in one day from 37,000 different small donors. You can go to his website and watch his donations add up in real time with the real name of all his donors. This is another revolutionary concept in politics. It's a true open source campaign.

So you say, well that's all great Allan, but talk about some of the issues that he's running on. First he's a big believer in Austrian economics. This is the study of small government, individualism, and sound money to name a few of their tenets. It's NOT Arnold Schwarzenegger's way of spending your way into oblivion and creating a 20 billion dollar deficit, but I digress. He wants to get rid of the income tax and abolish the IRS. I tell this to people and get a lot of well earned skeptical looks. This is what Ron said about this subject at the first GOP debate at the Reagan library...

"We can only do this if we change our ideas of what the role of government should be. If you think the government has to take care of us from cradle to grave, if you think our government should police the world and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a foreign policy that we cannot manage, you can't get rid of the IRS, but if you want to lower taxes and if you want the government to stop printing the money to come up with the shortfall that's causing all the inflation, you have to change policy,"

Amen.

As a ten term Republican Congressman from Texas, he has:

* never voted to raise taxes
* never voted for an unbalanced budget
* never voted to raise Congressional pay
* never taken a government paid junket
* never voted to increase the power of the executive branch
* voted against regulating the internet
* does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program
* repeatedly been named the "Taxpayers' Best Friend" in Congress

On immigration he wants to end birthright citizenship for illegal aliens. He wants to end welfare and social benefits for them. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. He wants to end this. He's a strong opponent of granting any form of amnesty and he's got the voting record to prove it. The current reform proposals in Congress would allow up to 100 million more illegals into our country according to a Heritage Foundation Study by Robert Rector. This is insanity. We need to follow the rules.

Dr. Paul is strongly pro-life. As an OB/GYN doctor, he's delivered over 4000 babies in his career. This has obviously made him a strong advocate for the unborn. He wants Roe vs Wade overturned and has authored legislation to strip jurisdiction of this issue from federal courts. He wants the issue returned to the states.

On foreign policy, he follows the advice of the founders and advocates a policy of non-intervention. We should mind our own business. He believes we should have free trade with all nations and entangling alliances with none. This is not being isolationists like some would believe. In 2000, George W Bush ran on a humble foreign policy. He did not want to police the world and did not want to get into nation building. We've seen him do the opposite though during his Presidency.

We cannot afford to keep our empire going anymore. It is bankrupting the nation. Recently Ron was interviewed by our ownCalifornia State Senator Tom McClintock. Tom asked Ron what a President Paul would have done the day after 9/11. Ron voted to go after the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was disappointed that it turned into a nation building mission and we still haven't found and killed Osama Bin Laden to this day. He wants to target our enemies better by using the constitutional principle of Marque and Reprisal.

We didn't need to start World War III because a bunch of renegade thugs attacked our country. He wants our troops pulled home from around the world. We have troops in South Korea, Japan, Germany and many other countries. Let these countries pay for their own defense. We've also been sending our Border Patrol men & women to Iraq. They need to be here protecting the border, not in Iraq. It's not surprising that this message has resonated with the younger generation. That's one of the most pleasant surprises of the campaign so far is all the young people becoming freedom activists. The GOP needs these voters of the future. We should be appealing to them instead of the mythical hispanic vote.

If you have opened the business section of any paper, you can see how this disastrous foreign policy has been affecting our falling US dollar. It's in a freefall right now and it's causing big time inflation. It's not in our countries' interest to have a weak dollar. The biggest culprit for this is our unconstitutional Federal Reserve System. Ron wants the Fed abolished. The founders had bad experiences with a fiat money system. Inflation ran rampant. The phrase "not worth a Continental" came from the fact that the Continental dollar was not worth the paper it was printed because of inflation of the day. That's why the founders stipulated in the Constitution that only gold and silver are allowed to be legal tender. Andrew Jackson was re-elected for a second term because he fought to end the Second Bank of the United States. Ron wants to let private commodity backed currencies compete side by side with the dollar. It's the same principle as Fed-Ex and UPS competing against the US Postal Service. It's good for the system. A little competition never hurt anyone. As a student of history and licensed commodity broker myself, it is my recommendation that people have some gold and silver in their portfolio because of our governments propensity to always inflate the money supply. They never make the tough decisions to cut spending.

These are some of the issues at stake in this campaign. To find out more about Dr. Paul's positions and get news about the campaign, you can always follow the advice I give to strangers to learn more about him and it happens to be one of the motto's of the campaign...Google Ron Paul.


So on February 5th, 2008 I encourage all Republicans to vote for freedom and the constitution. Vote for Ron Paul for President.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Bartlett was born and raised in Southern California.

He's a licensed Commodity Broker and hedge fund manager. He is the proprietor of the political & financial blog Powder Blue Report.

He 37 years old and lives in Irvine with his wife Lynn of six years.

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