Ron Paul

I like a lot of Ron Paul. However, there is a lot I do not like, too.

The main problem is that Ron Paul is an Individual Libertarian, who believes that the individual alone is the sole judge of what is right and wrong. In this he follows the ideas of Ayn Rand, a woman whom I consider to have had a career of wretched and thwarted passion layered on top of a foundation of atheism.
Rand's heroes are those like John Galt of Atlas Shrugged, individual men whose intuitions are faultless, and whose only trials are fighting against the faceless forces of some sort of group-think of the uninspired.
No particular long journeys into religion here: no 40 days in the desert, no fasting. The devil is in those who wish to do architecture differently, not in the weakness of the flesh. It is all a fight of the inspired Individual against the forces of obscurity.

The trick is determining whose intuitions are inspired. We have seen a lot of that since World War I, and not all of it came out happily...
There was the Hillsdale College case, where the college president George Roche III was an avid Randian individualist, and somehow came up with the inspired idea that a long running affair with his daughter-in-law would be just the right thing for a Randian Hero like himself...
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/10/hillsdale-day-october-15.html

I think of myself more as a Social Libertarian, someone who yearns for inspiration, yet realizes that it must come to exist within a community - it needs to exist with Gelassenheit - maintaining composure while in a crowd of others.

Consider the miracle of the loaves and fishes: Jesus did not take the bread and fish and have merely enough to sate His own hunger; He made provender for the multitude.
Furthermore, the Sermon on the Mount means little if it be interpreted as applying solely to individuals, for what does it mean for the Meek to inherit the earth, if there is no 99% that is downtrodden or lower on the social scale? It means nothing.

In as far as Ron Paul admires Ayn Rand - and he did name his son after her - he is an atheist.
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has no room for a God.
God is subservient to the politics in Individual Libertarianism, for the moral agent and the moral code are within the same Individual, the Randian Hero.

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