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"Congressman Ron Paul (TX-R)--presidential candidate, popular ideologue, debate favorite, and creator of one of the …

Review of 'The revolution' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Ron Paul is awesome. I have yet to find any point that he makes that I disagree with. I was not necessarily surprised by anything in The Revolution, as I was a pretty ardent follower of Dr. Paul's since before he was a presidential contender for the second time (in the 2008 election cycle). Nevertheless, it was refreshing to read all of his views in a single text that is clear and well-written.

Dr. Paul starts out in a fashion that some might consider ironical given that he wrote the book during his bid for the office of POTUS. He basically describes the situation that anyone who has ever seriously investigated a "third-party" candidate already knows about: Namely, that the "choices" offered by the two major parties are effectively not really choices. There are a whole lot of assumptions built into the political race process that Dr. Paul says we are never allowed to question: Like, why do we assume that the government has the right to take any taxes from us, rather than arguing what the appropriate amount of taxation (which would theft if anybody else tried it) should be?

I won't go through the book chapter by chapter, but he basically works his way through various issues that most candidates simply aren't willing to question fundamentally. He tackles foreign policy (why do we still need 64,000 troops in Germany?), trade (why do "free trade" agreements need 3,000 pages of legislation?), economics (what is the purpose of the Fed and do we even need it?), civil liberties (why do some people get so uptight about rights affirmed by the first amendment but willingly give up rights affirmed by other amendments?) and many other topics.

The only qualm I have with the book is an inconsistency in the citation of sources for various data, but considering it is written for a popular audience and not a scholarly one, it might be forgiven. Dr. Paul does give a bibliography at the end for anyone who wants to know more about the various topics he discusses. I am sure to tackle many of the books on the list in the near future (some of them I already own...).