 I have always been a very great believer in what I identify as a Leonard Reed model of intellectual and social change because he, on the libertarian scene, was sort of the first big popularizer of it, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, this notion that it is a game of individual change, mind to mind, and that the forces of politics are going to be lagging indicators of what most people believe and a political solution too soon may well not work the way we want it to work. They're sort of trying to centrally plan or fool our way into getting a libertarian philosopher king. It's not going to have the results we want if the massive people do not accept libertarian ideas. I think it's rooted in the whole classical liberal understanding of the state, that the state is rooted in violence but the state does not ultimately actually rule by violence, that the state rules by ideas. In any given culture, the public has more power than the state. That's a little complicated in the age of nuclear weapons, but I think it's still largely held true. It is a matter of convincing mind to mind to mind. I doubted that mainstream electoral politics was an efficient method of mind change until Ron Paul did what he did in the last two elections. He has surprised me pleasantly. I think that movement will lack a leader in the sense that Ron Paul has stood as this almost unquestionable monument of integrity and sustained demonstration of his seriousness and his belief. No one is like that on the scene now. I'm enough of an individualist to hope that that doesn't matter. I actually think that what's happened in just the last day since Ron Paul has sort of ramped back his campaign and the reaction of most of his fans seems to be, we're doing what we're doing, we're going to keep doing what we're doing. I think that with or without the name of the banner, Ron Paul, the YouTube videos will keep being made, the rallies will keep being held, the books will keep being read, the candidates will keep running. By the very fact that there's now tens and probably hundreds of thousands of new people who passionately believe in these ideas, I have to be more hopeful for the future. A lot of people insult his runs as sort of ideological exercises. I think they sense a certain reluctance on his part to be president of the United States. I believe that arose from a rational assessment of the situation on his part. I don't think it's not that he would have wanted to win. I think he understood more than many of his younger followers with his perspective that this is a long project. The classical liberal libertarian project is like a thousand-year project in a way. It's not something that's going to turn around in a couple of elections. What pundits recognize about Ron Paul and I think made him suspicious of him as a candidate is that it wasn't just about winning for him, nor was it just about getting an ambassador ship or whatever. He has a reason to run and he has victories to win, whether or not he ends up the candidate of the Republican Party. I think he has clearly won those victories because his project as a Republican presidential candidate was a distinctly libertarian project of changing people's minds. He chose the vehicle of running for president and it turned out to be a good one.