No, he is right. I was upset with the republicans for not creating a smaller government when they had the chance (94-06, especially 00-06), but I still continued to vote republican.
Excepting foreign policy, Ron Paul stands for everything I thought the Republican Party stood for. If you go back and look at the special order speeches of Newt and his back benchers in the 80’s and early 90’s, you will find a lot of Ron Paul’s talking points.
Now lets get to some of the foreign policies.
The UN. Until recently, there were a lot of conservatives that thought that we should get out of the UN, or at the very least not let the UN dictate any of our actions.
The World Bank. Probably the most disastrous UN agency. It props up socialist governments and get most of its funding from the US.
GATT. Another very detrimental agency to the US. E.g. most of Europe and the rest of the world have VAT taxes that are border adjustable. When we passed a law making our exports similar to border adjustable VAT taxes, GATT rules against us making our exports double taxed.
In general, it used to be abhorrent to any conservative that any international agency would control any of our actions. Or that any of our citizens, in the military, would serve under a foreign commander.
So that brings us to whether or not an interventional or non interventional foreign policy, both politically and militarily is in our best interests. That could be discussed sanely and intellectually, and there are points to be made on both sides.
In my view, a non interventional foreign policy is the best. Look at the difference between the eastern hemisphere and the western hemisphere. For all of recorded history, the eastern hemisphere has been in an almost continual state of war. While we don’t have the vast recorded history in the western hemisphere and we know that we had the Aztec and Mayian (sp?) empires, for the most part, the western hemisphere has not had the wars of the eastern hemisphere. I think the last war in the western hemisphere, between western hemisphere countries, was the US-Mexican war back in the 1840’s. Today, there is almost zero chance that one western hemisphere country would attack another western hemisphere country. Is there one South American country that is worried about being attacked by an eastern hemisphere country, or even by its neighbors? Other than Argentina which is worried about being attacked by the US.
So my opinion is that we should disengage from the eastern hemisphere. Let them fight their wars, as long as it doesn’t bother us.
As far as the radical Muslim threat, let the countries most threatened by it deal with it. Islam had Spain at one time and was pushed back to Africa. Kosovo was the site of stopping Islam’s advance into Europe. Russian is not going to let radical Islam advance into its area. India and China are not going to let them advance.
Bring our troops home. We will save a $trillion a year. We will become the most prosperous nation in the world again. The dollar will be strengthened again. Oil will drop back to the $30 per barrel range. Communism/socialism is a failed economic system and the people will eventually over throw those type of governments.