Foreword

Every American who cares about liberty owes a debt to Ron Paul. From his first run for Congress in 1974 through his gallant try for the Senate in 1984 to his present campaign as Presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul has been an outstanding leader for freedom.

I had the privilege of working as Dr. Paul’s chief of staff in Washington. And in the often corrupt and always superficial city of Washington, D.C., he was a beacon of honesty and decency.

INTRODUCTION

The People’s Manners Are Now Corrupt

Two hundred years ago the United States Constitution was written as a guide for America’s unique experiment in freedom. Today the free society that the Founders envisaged is barely identifiable.

CHAPTER I

The Concept of Individual Rights

There is a serious lack of concern for individual rights today. The concept of rights has been distorted to such a degree that the authors of the Constitution would not recognize what is today referred to as a “right.” Demands for unearned wealth, based on needs and desires, are now casually accepted as rights. We see little value placed on the traditional concept of equal rights.

CHAPTER II

Foreign Policy

The proper concept of individual rights is the most fundamental ingredient of a free society. Nearly as important to a country is foreign policy. An unwise foreign policy leads to unnecessary violence and death on a massive scale. A society built on the concept of individual rights will logically have a foreign policy of nonintervention. It is important to understand what this involves and what happens when foreign entanglements are easily entered.

CHAPTER III

The Draft or Freedom

No one argues that the military draft is not an example of physical coercion, thus denying liberty to those drafted. But it is carelessly accepted by many, except those of draft age, as necessary to the preservation of a free society.

CHAPTER IV

Sound Money is Gold

The most significant political event of the twentieth century has been the loss of the concept of individual rights in the United States.

It is now commonplace to totally ignore what the Constitution says about individual rights while concentrating on a distorted interpretation of the general-welfare clause that prompts thousands of laws mandating economic equality, quota systems, hiring practices, pay scales, insurance rules, and a lot of other nonsense. (Chapter 1)

SUMMARY

Have We Lost Respect?

The twentieth century has not been kind to the principles of freedom. The U.S. Constitution sadly has lost essentially all its meaning. This document was intended to keep the government small and the individual important, but today we find the opposite; the government is all-powerful and individual liberty is on the wane and poorly understood.

Mises and Austrian Economics

A Personal View

Ron Paul