The Huffington Post had a an item about Ron Paul and the Civil War.

The item linked to a video on Talking Points Memo showing Ron Paul’s appearance on Meet The Press.

The comments on TPM were very enlightening about what was and wasn’t true about Ron Paul’s remarks.

Since I only have commenting privileges on The Huffington Post, I left the following comment there:

One can put together self-consistent philosophies, like Ron Paul has done, without those philosophies having anything to do with the real world, like Ron Paul’s don’t.

 

Reading the recent book “American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic” by Joseph J. Ellis, is very enlightening about the issues of slavery, Federalism versus Republicanism, and the paranoid nature of Thomas Jefferson.

 

It is also instructive that George Washington was also a Virginian who owned slaves, but he was a Federalist not a Republican.

A lot of the paranoia displayed by Ron Paul can be seen in the Republicans of Virginia at the time of this country’s founding.

 

Of course it may be true that Joseph Ellis is not an unbiased observer. However, if I am to believe his interpretation of Jefferson and probably Madison, it makes me think that they just did not understand issues of macro-economics just as Ron Paul fails to do.

 

They believed in the agrarian way of life and could just not understand the economic issues that drove Hamilton and Washington to see the need for Federalized economic policies. Does that also sound like Ron Paul?

My wife was mis-educated in the same Texas school system as Ron Paul. She thinks the War of Northern Aggression was about states rights, too. (This is the term for the Civil War that I learned from my Southern colleagues when I was in the Army.)

In the feedback on my post I learned, among other things, that Ron Paul did not get his mis-education from the Texas school system. He is originally from Pennsylvania.

At the time of the writing of my comment for The Huffington Post, I had not read the final chapter of American Creation. This final chapter was about the Louisiana Purchase.  It was amazing to see how relevant this chapter was to the discussion of Ron Paul’s misguided thinking.