Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion. …

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. …

F.A. Hayek (June 1932)

The Ron Paul Portfolio

Dr Ronald Ernest (“Ron”) Paul, MD, is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine. Between 1963 and 1968 he was a medical officer in the U.S. Air Force. From the 1960s until the 1980s he practised as an obstetrician-gynaecologist, and during those years delivered more than 4,000 babies. At a special election in April 1976 (which was held in order to fill a vacant seat), Paul was first elected to Congress. He narrowly lost at the regular election in November 1976, but regained the seat in November 1978. In 1984 he stood unsuccessfully for election to the Senate, and in 1985 he left the House of Representatives and returned to his obstetrics practice. He returned to Congress in 1997, and since then has been the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 14th district. He has announced that he will not stand for re-election in 2012. Dr Paul is also a three-time candidate for President (as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and 2012). When his son, Rand, was elected to the Senate for Kentucky in 2010, Ron became the first U.S. Representative to sit concurrently with his son in the Senate.

According to Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, on a scale measuring American politicians’ advocacy of government intervention in the economy (as opposed, among other things, to positions on non-economic issues), Paul’s voting record has been more consistently anti-interventionist than that of any other member of Congress since 1937. He bases his political philosophy – and his votes in Congress – upon the conviction that “the proper role for government is to provide national defence, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else” (see Ron Paul, Political Power and the Rule of Law, 5 February 2007). Dr Paul has been nicknamed “Dr No” – reflecting both his medical vocation and his insistence that he will “never vote for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorised by the Constitution.”

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