I’ve been watching Ron Paul for about a year now—reading his weekly posts and listening to his speeches on the floor of Congress. If there is anyone I can say I would trust with the mantle of President of the USA, this is the man. Yes, even above Barack Obama. The news I just received is that he’s begun his presidential exploratory committee to gauge interest and raise funds. I am so thrilled!

Why has he so clearly won me over? I will list a few points:

• Ron Paul was one of only 6 Republicans to vote against the Iraq War. He maintains a non-interventionist foreign policy.
• He voted against the Patriot Act, a deceptively named bill that successfully diminished our rights and redirected power to the White House for an indefinite period of time, the period we call the “War on Terror”.
• He is an economist from the good ol’ days. He supports the gold standard (the only thing that keeps the ultra-rich honest). He is fiscally responsible—and unlike most politicians who make the same claim, Ron Paul is actually a minimalist when it comes to government policy, so I believe him when he says our government can and ought to have a balanced budget. (By the way, have you seen the historical debt and deficit charts lately?) Basically, his views align with recently deceased Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist who advocated the Free Market.
• Ron Paul supports a truly independent re-investigation the national tragedy that occurred on September 11th, 2001.

If you’d like to see Ron Paul on film and listen to some of his economic positions and thoughts, there’s a 20 minute clip on Google Video from The Korelin Economics Report that was worth the watch for me. Here are some quotes I took from this video, from Rep. Ron Paul:

[I was an] obstetrician. I delivered 4,000 babies, so I was very busy, and enjoyed it too! Matter of fact, getting in to politics was sort of a lark. I didn’t expect to be elected.

I think what has happened is that we’ve lost respect for the rule of law. We’ve got a good constitution and it’s very important, but we’ve abused it. … we don’t follow the constitution, and that’s how we’ve gotten ourselves in to trouble.

We’re running our welfare and our warfare on borrowed money that we created out of thin air.