I rate Ron Paul highest among living politicians, maybe among all politicians. But this just shows the limits we face in achieving social change using politics.
Ron Paul supported ideas that I mostly supported. He convinced people to donate money to get him elected, and he showed a lot of integrity in opposing bad ideas even when he could get some political benefit from compromising. He got a few things done, but mostly spent his time crying in the wilderness.
No one would find it easy to imitate Ron Paul. Even if he was not about to retire from politics, would we want him to continue as he has? If we could find a perfect replacement, would we want him to run for the US house? Ron Paul managed to get a lot of young people interested in the ideas of liberty during his campaigns of '08 and '12. Should those folks now try to find a replacement for him, someone to continue the approach of Ron Paul, or should they try to find a different way to make progress?
The Internet is the modern agora, and place where traders trade and talkers talk. Popular ideas have always enslaved politics. Change attitudes on the net and politics will follow. Maybe in the past the political stage hosted the debate among ideas that determined policy. Maybe. In the future, I doubt it.
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