Did Ayn Rand ask for Ron Paul?

[ronpaulitician]

Was re-reading "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", and ran across Ayn Rand's "The Wreckage of the Consensus" essay.

It was written about the Vietnam war, but could just as easily apply to the Iraq War.

"A proper solution would be to elect statesmen, if such appeared, with a radically different foreign policy. A policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America's rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. On such a policy we could withdraw from Vietnam at once, and the withdrawal would not be misunderstood by anyone, and the world would have a chance to achieve peace. But such statesmen do not exist at present. In today's conditions, the only alternative is to fight that war and win it as fast as possible, and thus gain time to develop new statesmen with a new foreign policy before the old one pushes us into another 'cold' war, just as the cold war in Korea pushed us into Vietnam."

The essay also goes in depth about the immorality of the draft.

Listen here (http://video.aol.com/video-detail/21-the-wreckage-of-the-consensus-25/789661919) to part 2 of 5 of this essay (the other 4 parts are available as well), which contains the above extract.

[ronpaulitician]

Typed up more of the text in another forum, so...

"No, there is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: it is a war we should never have entered. To continue it, is senseless-- to withdraw from it, would be one more act of appeasement on our long, shameful record. The ultimate result of appeasement is a world war, as demonstrated by World War II; in today's context, it may mean a nuclear war.

That we let ourselves be trapped into a situation of that kind, is the consequence of fifty years of a suicidal foreign policy. One cannot correct a consequence without correcting its cause; if such disasters could be solved "pragmaticall," i.e., out of context, on the spur and range of the moment, a nation would not need any foreign policy. And this is an example of why we do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an idealogy. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic premises on up, is what today's anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign policy is bipartisan.

A proper solution would be to elect statesmen-- if such appeared-- with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America's rights and national self-interest, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. On such a policy, we could withdraw from Vietnam at once-- and the withdrawal would not be misunderstood by anyone, and the world would have a chance to achieve peace. But such statesmen do not exist at present. In today's conditions, the only alternative is to fight that war and win it as fast as possible-- and thus gain time to develop new statesmen with a new foreign policy, before the old one pushes us into another "cold war," just as the "cold war" in Korea pushed us into Vietnam."

[Dustancostine]

Which message board did you post it on?