13 Shares 0



13

0







In an appearance on the Fox Business show Varney & Co., former Texas Congressman Ron Paul spoke about his son’s drop from the 2016 GOP presidential primary race and warned against establishment politics.

Both Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky, have long maintained residence in the Republican Party as self-avowed libertarians. Their disgust with a strong federal government and supreme advocation of state’s rights coupled with their isolationist foreign policy has allowed both candidates to hold favor with a minority of the GOP, especially younger and more radical libertarian constituencies.

With Rand’s suspension of his presidential campaign earlier this week in order to focus on his reelection to the Senate, there is a big question as to where his supporters will migrate.

Host Stuart Varney flippantly asks Ron Paul who is the most libertarian of all the other GOP candidates.

Speaking with his usual candidness, Paul cannot find a suitable alternative libertarian candidate among the GOP. Instead he says that Democratic front-runner in the upcoming New Hampshire primary Bernie Sanders has shown the most restraint against the neoliberalism and neoconservatism of all the other candidates—either Republican or Democrat.

“Strange as it may seem, on occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the cronyism on Wall Street.” Paul adds that “occasionally [Bernie] voted against war.”

It is no secret that U.S. interventionism over the past decades has netted continued unrest in the Middle East, Northern Africa and South America; not to mention a complete and utter regard for the self-determination or wellbeing of civilian populations in places like Libya, Syria and Iraq.

And both Rand Paul for his small part, and Bernie Sanders continually have galvanized supporters of a tempered U.S. foreign policy—in stark contrast to the blundering imperialism the U.S. military industrial complex and its proponents advocate.

Bernie Sanders famously voted against authorizing the Iraq war in 2003, whereas his opponent Hillary Clinton voted not only for that war, but every other armed conflict that came up for vote during her tenure as Senator and then Secretary of State. Sanders did in fact vote for the war in Afghanistan, but so did nearly every other Senator on the floor. Clinton supported the war in Afghanistan unequivocally. Sanders spoke out against the CIA’s 1983 war against Nicaragua, opposed authorizing war in Kuwait with Iraq and voted against the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

In the interview, Ron Paul goes on to chastise the other members of the GOP primary race for their corporate and special interest influences.

On the economy, Varney asks Paul what candidate is the “free market guy?”

Paul responds that despite being a businessman, Donald Trump is in favor of tariffs, thus nullifying his support among libertarian voters that want to see an unfettered free market. And Ted Cruz is “owned by Goldman Sachs.” He adds that “[Cruz] and Hillary have more in common” than any of the other candidates.

Speaking to the corruption of the entire presidential system that necessitates corporate support, Ron Paul does not draw much distinction between the establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats.

“You have to be an interventionist, you have to be an economic planner, you have to endorse the Federal Reserve. You have to do all these things in order to get to the top spot because that’s what the establishment wants,” Paul decries. “Otherwise you can’t finance the military industrial complex, you can’t finance all this debt that the Democrats and Republicans run up.”