This past weekend I debated Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul on the war in Iraq. The event was FreedomFest, the annual libertarian gathering in Las Vegas, with C-Span and about a thousand people in attendance. It was billed as a Libertarian v. Conservative debate: Larry Abraham and Dinesh D'Souza for the conservative side, and Doug Casey and Ron Paul for the libertarian side.

So here is question for Ron Paul: shouldn't the United States do what it can to promote liberty worldwide? I posed this question and Paul answered that America should be an example of liberty and not try to impose freedom by force. Alas, where freedom has come to countries it has usually come by force. How did we get freedom in this country? We had a revolution. How did African Americans win freedom? It took the invasion of a Northern army to secure for the slaves a freedom they were not in a position to secure for themselves. And let's remember that America imposed freedom at the point of a bayonet on Japan and Germany after World War II, and the results have been excellent.

It seems that today's libertarians are divided into two camps: the principled and the unprincpled. The former believe in liberty as a universal aspiration. The latter believe in freedom for us but not for anyone else. Ron Paul isn't going to become president, but as America's leading libertarian he would do the group a service by upholding freedom as a universal principle, as the founders did.