How to define Ron Paul? As as leader.

The candidate is ahead of the curve on issues that Americans are waking up to.

Ron Paul’s third-place finish in Iowa bought him a ticket to New Hampshire and beyond, but his real contribution to the 2012 presidential cycle is the challenge his campaign presents to the political establishment. Instead of following the polls, the Texas congressman is attempting to do what most politicians avoid like the plague: lead.

On three major issues, Paul has tapped into an emerging national sentiment that not only transcends party politics but speaks to a new generation of Americans fed up with the status quo and desperate for real change.

Monetary Policy

A topic that tends to make the eyes glaze over has finally caught the attention of college-age conservatives everywhere. Free from the shackles of Federal Reserve tradition, young people of the Austrian persuasion are actually debating the gold standard once again. They apparently understand that asset bubbles in tech stocks, housing and commodities have precipitated a boom-and-bust cycle that threatens long-term economic sustainability. Absent the discipline of a hard monetary rule, easy credit and artificially low interest rates continue unabated until balance sheets are so polluted the whole thing comes crashing down. Sooner or later, the debt must be paid back. Worse yet are calls for international “coordination” among central bankers. If the debacle known as the European Union has taught us anything, it’s that a country that gives up control of its currency gives up its sovereignty.

War on Drugs

After four decades and $1 trillion, America’s drug war has succeeded only in handing over the channels of distribution to violent cartels outside the United States. Until the exorbitant black-market profits are wrung from the trade, you can forget about controlling our southern border. In fact, the amounts of money are so large that the democratic institutions of government are routinely corrupted all throughout Mexico. The fact is that Mexico is imploding primarily due to the endless appetite for marijuana in the United States. And, let’s face it, young adults in this country look at pot like grandpa looked at speakeasies. The taboo associated with the most prevalent of illicit substances has long since vanished. But while the failure to eradicate cannabis has made it more available on the one hand, it has also made it less tempting on the other. Good public policy should be aimed at eliminating drug-related violence, not necessarily controlling what individuals choose to ingest.

Foreign Policy

Though simplistically labeled isolationist, Paul’s position of noninterventionism has long been an American (and GOP) tradition. Even on the eve of World War II, Sen. Robert Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, wrote to his wife, “I am very pessimistic about the future of the country — we are certainly being dragged towards war and bankruptcy and socialism all at once.” Defeating the Axis powers — like defeating the radical elements of Islam — was a surely good thing, but the war also gave us the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board and the National War Labor Board — all precursors to today’s command-and-control economy. As Prof. John Willson of conservative Hillsdale College has pointed out, “what happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the national state so vast as to be irreversible.”

As the saying goes, war really is the health of the state — and it goes hand in hand with big government at home. Foreign aid, for example, is socialism writ large — and its liberal application has little in common with genuine conservatism.

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Whether Ron Paul is the right messenger remains to be seen; as the GOP field winnows, polls show that he’s unlikely to be the second choice of Republican voters looking for a new candidate. But the message isn’t going away, and the two major parties ignore it at their own peril. As the Arab Spring demonstrated, cultural and political change usually begins with a select few, but those who are pushing the envelope today are often considered mainstream tomorrow.

Published in the StarTribune, January 8, 2012