Politics & Power Quote by Ron Paul

Ron Paul’s line lands like a warning label slapped onto the romance novel of modern governance: intimacy with the state isn’t partnership, it’s exposure. The phrasing is deliberately bodily and a little nasty. “Gets in bed” frames political cooperation as a private, consensual act that can still carry consequences you don’t see until later. “Diseases” turns policy fallout into something contagious, invasive, and hard to cure - a metaphor built to trigger disgust, not debate. That’s the point: he’s not arguing about one program or one agency; he’s making dependency itself feel shameful.

The intent is classic Paul: cast government less as a neutral tool and more as a vector. Once you accept its help, you inherit its habits - surveillance, bureaucracy, coercion, moral hazard, corruption - and you lose the clean line between citizen and client. The subtext is also strategic: if politics is infection, then refusing government isn’t just ideological purity; it’s self-defense. It preemptively reframes compromises (stimulus money, bailouts, subsidies, federal disaster aid) as risky indulgences rather than pragmatic trade-offs.

Context matters. Paul’s career runs through the late Cold War, the rise of the modern regulatory state, and especially the post-9/11 expansion of federal power. In that landscape, “diseases” cues fears that government grows in crises and never shrinks afterward. It’s libertarian rhetoric at its most effective: not a spreadsheet of inefficiencies, but a moral and visceral story about what happens when you stop keeping your distance.