The brightest observation I had heard in a while.....

Ron Paul..."Liberty was split into personal liberty and economic liberty." Paul is implying that that this is not a legitimate nor useful government endeavor. Government has tried on its face to maintain personal liberty but has conducted a full assault on economic liberty over the past 80 years.

Yes, both are equally important and they are ultimately not divisible. These liberties cannot be split and then treated differently. Ultimately, one CANNOT have personal liberty without having economic liberty. With the elimination of economic liberty, personal liberties will eventually dissipate due to an almost complete intervention by an overreaching central government.

Government has been increasingly intervening in markets due to these two reasons:

1. Once you allow government any latitude in intervening in economic affairs, the first intervention becomes the reasoning justifying the next intervention.
2. Intervention by government eliminates competing free market solutions and crowds out other solutions, products and services. Markets naturally become dependent upon greater and greater market central government interventions till government initiatives almost completely controls the mechanisms of markets. A very fine example of this is the American housing market that collapsed due to extreme government meddling for decades.

However, I warn here, as government takes and takes more and more power and responsibility in the market place, they will also chip away at personal liberties. One day, we will wake up and wonder what happened to the United States.

We will wonder what happened to the great experiment in liberty. We will wonder how we allowed the leviathan central government to make decisions on our behalf and require us to its bidding.