Will Ron Paul Run For President in 2012?

I hope he does. Signs point to this though...

From the Bloomberg,

U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas announced today in Iowa that he is forming an exploratory committee for a third presidential campaign.

Paul, a longshot 2008 Republican presidential candidate whose anti-tax, anti-government politics struck a chord with a swath of voters and fueled fundraising, will make a decision on whether to run by the middle of next month, said Jesse Benton, his political director.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm,” Benton said. Paul plans to participate in a Republican primary debate May 5 in South Carolina.

Before his 2008 bid, Paul ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket.

Paul, who heads the House Financial Services subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve and wrote a 2009 book “End the Fed,” has long pushed for legislation to increase scrutiny of the central bank. He joined with his son, Rand, who was elected as a Republican senator from Kentucky in November, to introduce legislation this year to require an audit of the Fed by the Government Accountability Office.

Of course I don’t expect Congressman Paul to win. I don’t even think that this could even be the primary goal for Mr. Paul.

As Jacob Huebert aptly points out in this great talk (above), Ron Paul could simply be raising the level of awareness of classical liberalism or libertarianism to the public as he has successfully done so in the past by running for the top post.

The US is hardly a libertarian society (the youthful Mr. Huebert points to some 14% of the population as libertarians) which essentially makes Mr. Paul’s winning the Presidency seemingly against the odds.

However bringing the libertarianism platform to the political arena gradually opens the eyes of the public to the essence of liberty.

Aside, Mr. Huebert cites the internet as another complimentary driving force to Ron Paul as increasing the public’s interest on libertarianism.

One would note that since it is innate for people to look for role models, many libertarians may have seen Ron Paul as having assumed this function.

Besides classical liberalism or libertarianism requires some serious ruminations on economics and philosophy, something which most people appear averse at.

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people, said former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Yet ideas are hardly the favored topic of mainstream media. Where ideas mattered, it could be seen in the context of social compassion but whose application implies compulsion to achieve this goal. (of course this would be embellished by math models)

Nevertheless the last word from hopefully Presidential candidate Ron Paul, (bold highlights mine)

To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.