It's Paul-Some

Ron Paul's still out there, and the longer the economic crisis lasts, the less insane his ideas start to look. I'm not sure if that's a function of just how bad the economic picture is (with foreclosures still topping record figures for the first six months of the year and poised to get much worse) or the function of having the Obama administration generally run out of things to try that aren't crazy Ron Paul ideas.

TechTicker's Aaron Task goes over the Ron Paul plan:

Had he been elected, Paul said he would be doing "a lot less" than President Obama and blames Keynesian economics - which advocates increased government borrowing and spending during times of duress -- for our nation's current ills.

While admitting a transition to what he views an "ideal society" won't be quick or simple, Paul's economic prescription includes:

• Allowing bankruptcies to occur vs. rewarding failure with bailouts.
• Stop inflation by dismantling the Fed and returning to the gold standard.
• Encourage savings and liquidate debt.
• Deregulate.
• Give tax credits to those who take care of themselves, or the doctors who provide their care.
• Cut government spending, especially on international endeavors. "We spend hundreds of billions of maintaining our empire around the world. Let's bring that money home," he says.

These recommendations will be familiar to anyone who followed (or supported) Paul's run for the Presidency in 2008. Given all that's transpired in the past year, one suspects he'd be getting a lot more votes if the campaign were happening today.

While that first idea seems like a capital one, the rest are pretty deep into Libertarian Limbo. I respect the guy's consistency (and his plan to audit the Fed is something that we should definitely be considering at this point) but abolishing the Fed altogether is not feasible, practical, or even mildly helpful to recovering the economy, and there's enough evidence against deregulation over the last 8 years that nobody's going to really stick their neck out in Congress over it.

Cutting goverment spending of foreign aid at least makes some sense.

Still, as I've said, the longer Obama's plans take to work, the more people will come around to the Libertarian/Ron Paul point of view, or at least become people like myself who think a couple of his ideas aren't all that terrible.