Ron Paul's "The Revolution: A manifesto"

Ron Paul, the Texan Libertarian who ran for President on the Republican ticket this year so he could participate in the "phony" televised debates, is also a 70-year-old retired doctor and economist who lived through World War II, Vietnam, the creation of HMOs, Watergate, the Kennedy Assassination, the Cold War, Alan Greenspan and both Gulf Wars. Paul released "The Revolution: A Manifesto" in April. That being said, what makes him and his platform different from all the other well-off old white guys running the government these days to warrant the attention of the average American?

Paul's political message is simple, yet eloquently and concisely stated in his 167-page book: Follow the Constitution and read about our founding fathers, who predicted many of the situations we find ourselves in. Doing this would solve many of our national woes - monetarily, militarily and domestically. Given the events on Wall Street this week, Paul's message in the introduction becomes eerily prophetic.

Paul cites the Federalist (and Anti-Federalist) Papers, the Farewell Addresses of the Virginian Presidents, the original Constitution, court records and congressional proceedings as far back as Daniel Webster, John Ashcroft on government infringements upon privacy and his economist buddies at the Ludwig von Mises institute to support his Jeffersonian argument that American government should be downsized and that the military should be withdrawn from across the globe, that our freedoms are being chipped away at and that all this mindless borrowing puts America in a more perilous economic position than ever before.

Paul has been called a joke candidate because of his position on legalizing marijuana. Feeding his argument that the media focuses our attention on trivialities in order to distract from the more important issues, the section of the book that addresses the war on drugs is seven pages long, hardly a portion large enough to be representative of Paul's entire platform. Yet, he is able to relate the problems arising from criminalization to the big picture:

"We seriously mistake the function of government if we think its job is to regulate bad habits or supplant the role of all those subsidiary bodies in society that have responsibility for forming our moral character. … When you actually study the beginnings of the federal war on drugs, you uncover a history of lies, bigotry and ignorance so extensive it will leave you speechless."

Paul's prose is easy to digest, his solutions common-sensical and his message less political than it is dire. With chapter titles like "The False Choices of American Politics," "Money: The Forbidden Issue in American Politics," "Economic Freedom," "The Constitution," "Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom" and "The Foreign Policy of the Founding Fathers," Paul appeals to our sense of history, our conception of what freedom really is and to the growing air of political discontent in America. He even includes a reading list so the curious reader can further his or her knowledge of the issues at hand.

Paul's book is an industrious, ambitious wake-up call to the sleeping masses. In the information age, knowledge is power, and in this metaphor Ron Paul becomes a guerilla arms dealer. He documents the absurdities and downright inanities that have wrenched control of the American government from the people who fund its actions and suffer the consequences of its policies. He warns against such policies that were disregarded. But Paul does one better than all the other informed gripers out there: He poses solutions. Paul could be the leader of the discontented masses, if only they would turn off their TVs and listen to him.