Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said he feels a “kinship” with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, noting that the two occasionally agree on some policies and oppose favors to the corporate world. “We’re both against corporatism. We’re both against the special benefits to big business,” Paul said in an interview on Politicking with Larry King.
“His answer to that wouldn’t always be the same. Mine would always drift to the free markets. His would drift to ‘well we need more government to redistribute wealth,’ but we could both attack subsidies to business or the military industrial complex,” he continued. “In that sense, there is a kinship." Paul, a Libertarian who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, also touted the relationship between Libertarians and progressives.
“I think you can come together without compromising just because we overlap. That to me would be a much better coalition,” he said.
But Paul hasn’t always offered praise to the Vermont senator. During an interview in March on CNN, Paul vowed that he wouldn’t back Sanders’s presidential bid and likened him to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
“No, because he’s an authoritarian,” he said when asked if he’d back the independent Vermont senator on “CNN Newsroom." “He’s just a variant of Trump. Even the things I worked with on Bernie, some of the foreign policy, he’s a part of the military industrial complex.”
Paul has also been very critical of Trump, saying in late March that he wouldn’t vote for the real estate mogul.
"I was very explicit about that. I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump," he said on CNN. "If you can't stand any of them and you happen to be a dedicated progressive, you ought to make your vote count and vote for the Green Party and if you happen to be a libertarian, vote for the Libertarian Party.”
He has also blasted Trump’s proposal for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I think it sounds like theft,” he said in April on Fox Business Network’s “Kennedy." "And I think it sounds like something illegal. I think it sounds like it's immoral.”
Poster Comment:
Kook.
