Protector of the People from warmongers, incompetent statists, and state-capitalist plunderers and predators, Ron Paul will run for president

From:
Ron Paul: The Doctor's In and Seeing Voters
(The New American) -- by Jack Kenny --

The doctor is in.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a 12-term Texas Congressman and retired obstetrician, "officially" announced his candidacy for President on ABC's Good Morning America Friday morning and a few hours later told about 300 supporters at a Town Hall rally in Exeter, New Hampshire, that he would carry the battle for personal freedom and constitutional government into the 2012 campaign.

"The revolution is spreading and the momentum is building," a beaming Paul told the cheering crowd, as he preached the message he brought to New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary and to other primary and caucus states in 2008, a message of spirited opposition to a federal government that "goes so far as to pretend that it can take care of us from the cradle to the grave and police the world." Paul, who ran for President for the first time as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1988, said people are now more receptive to "the things I've been talking about for the past 30 years." A disciple of the Austrian school of economics, which preaches minimal regulation of free markets, Paul said the housing bubble that burst at the start of the current recession was created by artificially low interest rates and government-backed loans. The government bailout of the financial institutions that followed was something sold to the American people as a measure needed to avoid an economic depression, he said.

"So they bailed out Wall Street and dumped the depression on the people," said Paul. A sizable chunk of the bailout money went to foreign banks, he said, including a bank one-third owned by Moammar Ghadafi, the Libyan ruler whom U.S. and NATO forces have lately been opposing with air attacks in support of the anti-government rebellion in that country. Paul, a critic a U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, said our nation's policy in the Middle East is often contradictory and is particularly dangerous with regard to Pakistan, where the U.S. and NATO allies have been fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.

"We're giving [Pakistan] billions of dollars and we're bombing them," he said, adding that the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy appears to be, "Do what we tell you and we'll give you money; if you don't, we'll bomb you. In Pakistan we're doing both." He said he supported giving President George W. Bush the authority to go after the al-Qaeda after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but Bush "abused that authority" by waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, who successfully resisted occupation by the Soviet Union for more than a decade. They are still resisting occupation by the United States now, he said...

Paul said at the rally that he would not vote for raising the debt limit, allowing the federal government to borrow more money, adding to the current national debt of more than $14 trillion, despite warnings by government officials that failure to authorize more debt will cause the government to default on its loans. The government is already defaulting, he said, by printing more money to cover its borrowing and thereby devaluing the currency. The government defaulted in the early days of the Republic when it refused to honor the Continental dollars issued under the Articles of Confederation, and again when it repudiated the "greenbacks" printed during the Civil War, Paul said. In the 1930s the Roosevelt administration banned ownership of gold by U.S. citizens and refused to redeem gold certificates. In the 1970s, President Nixon did the same to foreign bondholders by severing the tie between the dollar and the price of gold, he said.

Paul said the real rate of inflation is now at 10 percent annually and is going to get worse. The author of the bestselling End the Fed, he noted his bill to audit the Federal Reserve has passed the House. He drew loud and sustained applause when he called for abolishing "the Fed."...MORE...LINK