"Conservatives" don't understand Ron Paul

Okay, I thought I was done with Ron Paul for a while (I do have more material--there's always more!). But I was wrong. I'm hearing too much crap from people I would normally expect to know better. I need to get something off my chest.

I've heard this question, or variations of it, too many times now, usually from blowhards on the right. The basic assumption is that Ron Paul is great on domestic and fiscal issues, but he is some kind of nutjob on foreign policy and therefore not qualified to be president.

Tangent: Yes, I realize that Ron Paul has little chance of becoming president. I think he realizes that, too, which is why I don't think he will mount a third party run for the presidency. At this point he is building a movement, carving out a niche for libertarian and fiscally conservative views within the Republican Party. Leaving the Party at this point would undermine all the progress he has made (and perhaps hurt his son's future prospects within the Party).

Back to my point. It seems like people wish they could chop Ron Paul in half and retain only his fiscal policy positions, discarding his foreign policy. The question is often phrased like this: How well would a candidate do with Ron Paul's economic positions but with mainstream Republican foreign policy positions?  Essentially get only the "good" part of Paul.

People who ask this question, or variations of it, betray a fundamental lack of understanding of Ron Paul. They miss the whole point. They don't realize that you can't separate Paul's economic policy positions from his foreign policy positions.  The two positions are flip sides of the same coin. The welfare state and the warfare state, inseparable. Any candidate with "mainstream" foreign policy cannot be strong on fiscal policy because such a candidate doesn't truly believe in limited government.

Any state large enough to police the world will also waste money at home and abuse civil liberties. Even if one man could do the former and resist the temptation to do the latter, what about the next guy? And the next?

Turn the question around to see how absurd it is. Can someone who wants military bases around the world, who wants to intervene in conflicts everywhere (regardless of U.S. strategic interests) ever cut the size of government? The big government conservatives (the Republican Party as a whole) are taking the government to the same place the big government liberals (Democarats) are. Different route, same bankrupt destination.

So what do we do? Let ourselves be attacked? Of course not. But we can't police the world. There has to be a lower level of military spending that is consistent with the Constitution yet large enough to protect us. I happen to think that this level would result in a significantly smaller military than we have now, with fewer deployments around the world.