Because Total Freedom Doesn’t Seem to Work: Chris Matthews on Ron Paul |

At 4:00 into the video, Chris recounts that he was enthusiastic about libertarianism in his youth but no longer espouses those views “because the idea of total freedom doesn’t seem to work.” You can tell by the way Chris moved on from that statement so quickly that he was caught in a candid moment. Ron Paul’s principled position on all the issues, informed by a single theory of government, brings out the fundamental question: do you believe in freedom? If you believe total freedom is “disgusting,” understanding that total freedom is the ability to do anything you want so long as you do not cause harm to others or infringe the property rights of others, then Ron Paul is probably not your candidate.

Does Chris Matthews really believe that if the federal government did not criminalize heroin, that heroin use would be any greater a problem than it is today? Doesn’t government cause more problems than it solves by telling people what they can and cannot put in their own bodies? Does Chris Matthews believe that property owners would brandish their stores with “whites only” signs if the government did not tell them to do so today? Were not government laws mandating segregation and “whites only” signs the reason why those practices persisted well into the 1960s? Are these failures of freedom or failures of government?

If the only ideological counter to Ron Paul is that freedom is a broken system, he has an entirety of human history to soundly refute those arguments. This candid moment in Chris Matthews’s interview sums up the entire debate so succinctly that Dr. Paul’s ideological opponents should simply adopt this “freedom fails” philosophy as their campaign slogan:

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