In a Republican primary race largely consisting of slick suits and sweater-vested cultural reactionaries, Ron Paul is by far the most interesting candidate to have emerged from the fray. He campaigns without any expectation of winning the nomination.

Instead, he runs to increase the visibility of his own unique political philosophy.

The tremendous interest that he has garnered this primary season, particularly among college students, shows that there is a clear and growing appeal for his kind of thinking, an appeal that breaks through traditional divides of left and right wing.

What exactly is this message that some find so appealing, others terrifying? The trouble with answering that question is that it’s hard to discern a candidate’s message from press coverage. News commentators dismiss Dr. Paul with a knowing smile, but their glib comments demonstrate a complete unfamiliarity with his ideology. Some outlets take his growing stature more seriously. As a matter of fact, it was through a Time magazine article that I became acquainted with his ideas – so it goes both ways. But regardless of Paul’s treatment by the media, libertarian thinking is a growing movement in America, and it behooves the educated reader to at least be familiar with its basic tenets.

All of Ron Paul’s economic ideas, from lowering taxes to abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard, stem from an intellectual tradition known as the “Austrian School” of economics. Most academic economists dismiss this school out of hand, but this is hardly a reason for everyone to do so. The different traditions diverge in the very assumptions they begin with, ensuring their proponents will always disagree.

Austrian economists espouse a “subjective theory” of value – neither money, nor goods, nor services have any inherent value but rather have different values that individuals impute upon them according to their needs and desires. Because in every voluntary exchange the buyer values the goods bought more than his or her money spent, and vice versa, every voluntary exchange is said to increase subjective value for both parties.

It follows that any government restrictions upon voluntary exchange necessarily inhibit the growth of subjective value (the fulfillment of the wants and needs of individuals). It is this view that gives rise to the tremendous importance Dr. Paul and other libertarians place upon free markets.

A corollary to this view is that taxation should be as minimal as possible. In taking funds away from their use in voluntary exchanges, taxes place those funds in the hands of the government. By definition, the government cannot increase subjective value, since it can’t know the wants and needs of every individual.

Furthermore, because government acts by coercion, it operates outside of the system of voluntary exchange and achieves whatever ends it seeks far less efficiently than private actors. Therefore, the government’s only end should be improvements that facilitate commerce, national defense and protecting the rights of individuals from illegal intrusion.

Currency is understood as the means by which voluntary exchange takes place – the medium that facilitates commerce. Devaluation of currency by the government, therefore, is an indirect tax.

When the Federal Reserve expands the circulation of money, the value of currency held by individuals necessarily decreases. For this reason, libertarians call for a return to currency exchangeable for gold. In such a system, currency is backed by something which has value in itself, instead of being merely paper. Since the government cannot mine gold at will, it prevents the government from inflating and manipulating the currency.

Libertarian philosophy places an emphasis on means rather than ends. It renews the ideals of classical liberalism by stressing that the government doesn’t know the goal of human existence, and it shouldn’t tell individuals how to lead their lives. Instead, this philosophy seeks to ensure the health of the system that is best suited to individuals seeking whatever ends they see fit: the free and voluntary exchange of unimpeded commerce.

We have countless examples from history of the great lengths to which individuals have gone, exposing themselves to financial risk and mortal danger, in order to circumvent the meddling of the government. We saw this during Prohibition in the 1920s, and the same thing today with the costly and disastrous “war on drugs.” Billions are spent, drug users are incarcerated and people still find ways to make and use drugs.

The libertarian view is that if these funds hadn’t been spent to try and prevent a phenomenon that would be happening anyway, they would have generated genuine value back in the hands of taxpayers.

Objections to libertarianism tend to focus on its refusal to protect more than property rights. But should these so-called rights be codified in law in the first place?

Take the example of the right of same-sex couples to marry. The left generally wants to enshrine such a right in law, while the right seeks to prevent it with a constitutional amendment. This eternal butting of heads could be overcome by the simple acknowledgement that it’s not the government’s role to define such an intimate bond as marriage. Why do couples feel they need the acknowledgement of their love by the government, anyhow? If it’s for legal or tax purposes, these exceptions shouldn’t exist, since they’re an imposition of morality by the government.

We need to get away from the idea that we can impose our own morality upon others and that the government is the arena for this to happen. This, more than anything else, is what threatens to tear this country apart, when we derive so much economic benefit from being a big, diverse, unified nation. Morality is the domain of individuals and communities – not the government.

Dr. Paul’s views stem from a primarily economic viewpoint, but there are important philosophical dimensions to libertarianism as well. It is the difference between trying to codify every aspect of life to make it safe and fair and trying to embrace the freedom of the unknown future that has made America such a wonderful and ennobling place to live. It is the idea that government exists to perpetuate life and liberty, not to define the form liberty takes.

It requires a tremendous leap of faith to resist the urge to meddle in the economy, but the momentous lesson of Austrian economics, borne out of countless disasters of the 20th century, is that the more governments try to direct economies towards a certain end, the more they destroy the very mechanisms by which prosperity and agency are generated: voluntary exchange.

Gavin Beeker is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].