Just watched Paul's SOTU response. If he's going to quote Friedman, he needs to stop being so stupid on monetary policy. Even if I agreed with Rand on every single thing under the sun, I couldn't vote for him because his position on the Fed is about the worst it possibly could be, and the Fed has by far (by far!) the biggest impact on the health of the economy

Nutshell: Paul's monetary policies would work only if Congress passed a law that allowed private currencies. This would be fantastic, but since we live in a society with a state currency monopoly, it is absolutely imperative that that monopoly (the Fed) manipulates and uses the currency in ways that keep NGDP stable and growing. As the president, Paul would usher in ever worse "hard money" sentiments into the institutional economics consensus. We can't have this because we're already suffering from many of Obama's appointees who believe in bubble hysteria, which has similar contractionary effects. However, it is possible that Paul could change on this because if he's the GOP nominee, he would be more likely to listen to current-day Friedman economists (market monetarists) than Obama types do. Interesting to note, Obama types were Friedmanites until 2007. When the economy went bad, Keynesians like Krugman swiftly diverted from some econ 101