Ron Paul. People either love him or hate him and it seems as if young people are his biggest demographic.
The reason that many people give me for supporting Ron Paul is because he is the most different from the other candidates. Just because people are jaded by President Obama and the other presidential candidates does not mean we should settle for a candidate who says a small handful of agreeable things (i.e. his foreign policy). For the most part, I do not agree with his ideas.
For one his economic proposal would seek to balance out the federal budget. Sounds good, right? But the question that people should be asking is “how would Paul accomplish it?” In an interview with Wolf Blitzer Paul said that he plans on defunding the Departments of Energy, Education, Commerce, Interior and Housing and Urban Development in order to accomplish his proposed budget. This would eliminate over 200,000 jobs.
If elected, Ron Paul would seek to eliminate minimum wage. He claims that this would be good for the economy and that eliminating minimum wage would make it possible for businesses to hire more employees. But at what cost?
Let’s say minimum wage is abolished and everyone is employed for $4 an hour. Will people be able to pay for rent, food, healthcare and other costs of living on that kind of wage even if they work full-time? To me, the numbers don’t add up and what is especially troubling about Paul is that he is against regulating big businesses.
Paul argues that it does no good to have government regulations because ultimately, big businesses are the lobbyists that write said regulations anyway. But to say that businesses will fairly regulate themselves naturally makes no sense. If anything, they’ll become even more corrupt than they are now.
As a female, one of the things that bothered me about Congressman Paul was his response to Piers Morgan regarding pregnant rape victims that want an abortion. Paul stated that if it was an “honest rape,” the woman should immediately go to the emergency room. What exactly is an honest rape?
His statement has generated much controversy amongst feminists and for good reason. Like many of his other policies, Paul is oversimplifying the matter. When a woman is raped, she’s not thinking “hey, I should go to the emergency room and get help.” There’s something called shock and fear that prevents a survivor of rape from immediately seeking help. This does not make them dishonest, it makes them human.
There are so many more reasons why Paul is a bad candidate. He has been quoted as saying that he does not support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it destroyed privacy. This is the same act that repealed the Jim Crow Laws and banned employment discrimination. I’m sure the Ron Paul supporters will find a way to defend all of those actions. After all we do live in a free country and I guess people should be free to be racist or not. Just don’t try to cover it up.
Since I clearly fail to understand what is so appealing about Ron Paul, I asked Youth for Ron Paul Charlotte President Anthony Rodriguez a few questions. The senior Architecture major explained that what initially drew him to Paul were his ideas on the role of government. He went on to say that “The first thing that drew me to him as a presidential candidate was watching a video of him on the U.S. House floor in 2001, predicting the housing bubble and economic collapse. I believe that Ron Paul as president could help us revive our failing currency, something every president of the past has failed to do.”
It cannot be denied that Ron Paul has made a few insightful points and that he promotes a certain “message of liberty,” as Rodriguez put it. At the same time, I do not believe that his solutions to our country’s problems would carry out well when put into practice.
What Ron Paul is really painting a picture of is a rogue society. You can’t assume that without minimum wage employers will give decent pay to their workers out of the goodness of their hearts just like you can’t trust that everyone will just magically not be racist if there are no laws protecting minorities.