It's not that I don't like Ron Paul. I think he's a good senator, but it remains to be seen whether or not he will make a good president. As I have written before, Paul is definitely a libertarian, and while he may own Rudolph Giuliani in presidential debates, that doesn't mean that he would make a good president.

Ron Paul was debating the other day with SEDHE Villain of the Forever candidate Glenn Beck about abolishing the income tax. It's funny to watch Beck say that he agrees with Paul, and then proceed to disagree with him. Beck, of course, is a Christian conservative who believes that the government should be fiscally conservative and dictate morality. Paul is a fiscal conservative who also believes that the government shouldn't dictate morality. Beck, it seems, doesn't understand how someone can be in favor of small government and a government that doesn't care whether or not you are gay (even though Ron Paul does care if you're gay; see above link). But that's a writing for another day.

The problem with Ron Paul is that, while he wants to eliminate the income tax, he really has no plan for replacing it with anything. Paul's answer to this is just to make the government smaller. But there are a lot of government programs that are good -- like Medicare and Medicaid -- that would suffer from Ron Paul's idea of a bare-bones government.

Paul's website mentions nothing about his desire to destroy the IRS and the Federal Reserve. There are vagueries about returning to the Constitution (whatever that is supposed to mean in this case -- unless the sixteenth amendment isn't part of the Constitution?) and lowering taxes, but nothing to indicate the nature of his position. How many Ron Paul supporters know what he really thinks? You certainly wouldn't gather that from his web site. The Internet loves Ron Paul for saying what he thinks, but even on the Internet, he doesn't say what he really thinks. He reserves that for television.