A reader has taken issue with my characterization of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul as “a libertarian wingnut.” I have reflected on the phrase and stand by it. Indeed, while libertarians can be very smart, there is something a little crazy about their beliefs, a craziness that is rooted in their unbalanced view of human nature. Remember in senior year of high school or freshman year of college when you had to read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? There were some students who embraced her theories and you thought: wow, I wonder what their parents are like. Rand was a woman who came to America, looked around, and concluded that if American society were just more selfish, everything would be better. She is a patron saint of libertarians. (DC Trivia question: who was the longtime treasurer of the Ayn Rand Society in Washington?) Ron Paul’s views may not be as crazy as some libertarians – he has not advocated removal of traffic signals as unconstitutional infringements on our personal liberty. But, his isolationist foreign policy views were happily repudiated by Harry Truman and GOP Sen. Arthur Vandenberg more than 50 years ago. The Gold Standard is not the economic panacea Paul thinks it is. (I once had a libertarian disrupt a dinner party with his insistence that the government had no right to issue paper money because the Constitution only gave Congress the power “to coin” money. Ugh!) Assessing health care, Paul thinks that government needs to get out of the health care business entirely, but most people think Medicare and Medicaid work pretty well and with lower overhead than the private sector. And, while no one likes paying taxes, repealing the income tax would surely be the single most regressive policy our government could take. The libertarian worldview could not be more at odds with Catholicism. The Promethean promise the libertarians champion is a Promethean nightmare to us Catholics. We do not value human autonomy above all else, nor place freedom above truth or equality or justice in the scale of virtues. Libertarians defend genetic engineering and human cloning: there really is a book, Liberation Biology, with a chapter entitled “Hooray for Designer Babies!” and the CATO institute had a forum to discuss and promote it. Catholics defend human dignity and see in genetic engineering an assault on that dignity as well as a basic ignorance of human nature. Now, Ron Paul did not write that book. But he is running as a self-described libertarian and holds enough outlandish views to justify the wingnut label. Of course, it’s a free country and all are welcome to disagree. Just ask Ayn Rand. Michael Sean Winters