My thoughts are he’s a 76 year old future President who doesn’t spend his days hanging out on Internet forums with a bunch of purists elitists attacking people for not identifying as “anarchists”. He was on national television having to speak on the spot and just happened to use a word in the way it is commonly understood to simply get his point across.
I honestly don’t know how anyone could see the video that began this thread (and Graham’s other Ron Paul’s Ideas one) and still think Paul is not a voluntarist…let alone actually reading what he writes and watching what he does. I don’t even know why this debate still exists. Paul is just proceeding in line with Rothbard’s point about interacting with non-ancaps. I explain this here.
And seriously just stop and think about it. If the public were demanding abolishment of so much of the federal government that it would be de facto non-existent…do you really think Ron Paul would object? Give me a break. This whole thing is nonsense. The guy simply has the 2 brain cells necessary to realize you don’t get elected President by going around calling yourself an anarchist, and people are actually wasting time attacking him and his supporters for being statist. And now you think you’ve found “a big problem” because he used the word “anarchy” as a synonym for “chaos”, the way 99.9% of the population does. I say again. Give me a break my friend. Give me a break.