The Opposition…

The Revolution: A Manifesto

Ron Paul

Why we're reading this: author guest September 4, 2008
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Jan 20, 2012 Max rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, economics, politics, history

A great primer into the mind of a politician who wants to slash the government down to size, eliminate the Fed, eliminate all income taxes, bring home the troops, and use our absurdly bloated military spending to tackle our mounting debt.

I think using the word "Revolution" to describe his way of thinking is not far off the mark, when he's talking about foreign policy and the Constitution. However, I think his great ideas end there. Sure, there's also a lot that Ron Paul says in his book that's A great primer into the mind of a politician who wants to slash the government down to size, eliminate the Fed, eliminate all income taxes, bring home the troops, and use our absurdly bloated military spending to tackle our mounting debt.

I think using the word "Revolution" to describe his way of thinking is not far off the mark, when he's talking about foreign policy and the Constitution. However, I think his great ideas end there. Sure, there's also a lot that Ron Paul says in his book that's not hard to love (torture is bad! our health care system is insane! unchecked executive power is dangerous!) but it's not particularly controversial either.

What leads me to give only three stars are a couple of issues that he reveals himself to be woefully ignorant. He claims, for instance, that we can use the court system to take care of all of our pesky environmental problems by invoking the people's right to sue the business next door for pollution which causes us direct and provable harm. Ron Paul is stuck in 1970, when all the big industrial cities smelled like rotten eggs. He does not realize that CO2 is invisible and has no smell. It is incredibly naive to think that we can reverse the current levels of greenhouse gases by hauling all big businesses off to court. Wait, it's beyond naive, it's more like WTF? His claim is that IF we'd trusted the free market all along, we wouldn't be in this mess, and all our industries would be a shining utopian sea of green. Yay! Well, welcome to reality, my friends. Ron Paul wants to turn back the clock, yet offers no solutions to the reality on the ground.

Granted, the environment is the issue that I vote on, and his voting record on environmental issues is abysmal. So if you think the green movement is a bunch of hype, maybe Paul is your man. Oh, and if you don't care much about the privacy rights of women, (see his passionate pro-life argument, which uses the oh-so-sophisticated shock-and-traumatize tactics that you see from the likes of the picketers you see in front of Planned Parenthood --- CLASSY!), then maybe Paul is your man.

Enough complaining though. Ron Paul is an intelligent guy, clearly an intellectual, who is spot on when it comes to how our government should work. This book inspired me to try to wade through the tangled mess that is our current economic situation and try to make heads or tails of it. As other reviewers commented, this is a nice introduction to some revolutionary ideas, but he doesn't delve very deep. My sense is that that reflects more on what he was trying to create (a popular book) than on any limitations of his understanding of economics (if not the environment). ...more

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