longeyes, you're missing the point. The point is, we either vote for Ron Paul, or we sign on for more foreign wars and daily cavity searches in every home and office, forever.
There is no middle ground. Ron Paul is our only Hope for Change.
Let us be rational here.
The welfare state can be either abolished rapidly (over the course of, say, a decade), slowly (in the same manner it was instituted, over the course of fifty or sixty years), or continued for generations, with slight adjustments (it can also collapse in a violent perturbation like the Russian Empire. I think it won't happen in our lifetime, and certainly not this go-around).
In the American 2012 Presidential Primary we (you, actually, but I'm hoping you respect my opinion despite me not having a horse in this race) have the following groups of political candidates available to us:
A. People who want to abolish the welfare state (Ron Paul and Gary Johnson).
B. People who want to reduce the welfare state meaningfully (Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, and no doubt some others I've not listed).
C. People who want to keep the welfare state but adjust it to suit their political sensibilities (Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich).
People in Group C are basically Democrats rebranded. If they are nominated and elected it would be terrible news, perhaps even worse than an Obama nomination - it would instruct t he pundits that 'radicals' can be safely ignored, and the GOP would, like in pre-Goldwater years, become simply another part of the establishment.
People in Group B might improve the situation somewhat and one of them is nominated it would be a good thing for America and, in the long-run, for the world. But it would resign us - at the very least for the next eight years - to the option of gnawing sadly, miserably, on the welfare state, like Edmond Dantes gnawing on the walls of Castle If.
Ron Paul (or, on the outside of things, Gary Johnson, or, if this dilemma re-occurs in a future nomination, Someone Quite Like Him, there's no reason it needs to be this specific Pennsylvania-born Texas doctor) being nominated (much less winning) would be a glorious and wonderful thing for civilization, for reasons I will explain in my next post.
The important thing to understand is that this dilemma is not the dilemma of Ron Paul the specific person. Ron Paul the specific person has drawbacks and shortcomings, and quite likely is going to lose the primary. But the principles apply to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, whatever Future Ron Paul someone will run in 2016.
