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By: Douglas French | Guest columnist
Published: February 20, 2012 Updated: February 20, 2012 - 6:00 AM

Alabama’s primaries are March 13, and this year the race is competitive, and it will matter.

When the talking heads on TV wanted to anoint Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina. When it looked like Gingrich had the upper hand, Romney won Florida and Nevada. When it’s declared a two-man race, Rick Santorum ran the table, winning Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. In the meantime, Ron Paul continues to quietly pick up delegates.

So while many voters don’t want to “waste their vote,” who can properly judge whether a vote for this one or that one is a waste? The Opelika-Auburn News recently ran a Doonesbury comic strip concerning Ron Paul’s campaign. Paul is famous for wanting to end the Fed, return to gold, and bring home the troops. His preferred income tax rate is zero.

“The fact is your philosophy is pure utopianism,” says Gary Trudeau’s cartoon TV talking head. “No modern society could function under a libertarian government, which is why none exists.”

But as far out as the mainstream media wants to make Paul’s ideas, all Dr. Paul advocates is a return to the Constitution. No war has been declared in the Middle East, so in Paul’s view these current wars are illegal. Money coined by the United States government is to be gold and silver. The Constitution makes no provision for a central bank and fiat money.

Modern political commentators make the founding fathers out to be lunatics or maybe just naïve country bumpkins who didn’t know any better. But Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are said to have both had IQs of 160. The idea of personal freedom, property rights and sound money wasn’t crazy to them but something to fight for.

The founders viewed government with suspicion for good reason. But now it is individuals who believe in freedom that are viewed with suspicion. Reuters reports that the FBI is keeping its eyes on “extremists, sometimes known as ‘sovereign citizens,’ (who) believe they can live outside any type of government authority. “The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.”

These individuals who believe that nobody has the right to take their property and that money should be gold and silver are considered dangerous by the FBI. "We are being inundated right now with requests for training from state and local law enforcement on sovereign-related matters," said Casey Carty, an FBI supervisory special agent.

“Sovereign members often express particular outrage at tax collection, putting Internal Revenue Service employees at risk,” reports Reuters.

The founders of this nation weren’t utopians, but they weren’t keen on forming a government that would confiscate their property via taxation. Thus, there was no income tax until much later — 1913, the same year the Federal Reserve came into being.

When you think about it in light of the facts, a vote for Paul is not a waste, but sends a message that freedom is to be celebrated and encouraged, not viewed with suspicion and stifled.

Douglas French is president of the Mises Institute in Auburn.

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Freedom should be celebrated, not stifled