The Dept of Education isn't working. Social Security is bankrupt. The NIH is redundant. Shutting them down saves a lot of money that can be directed elsewhere that it is urgently needed. This is how budgets used to be balanced back before people instantiated money out of thin air.
He does not oppose the Civil Rights Act. He said it didn't work:
"[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife."
He is not a racist. His publication over the history of its existence had exactly one racist comment in there that he didn't write, and that he doesn't endorse.
From Wikipedia on Paul's stance on the gold standard:
He opposes dependency on paper fiat money, but also says that there "were some shortcomings of the gold standard of the 19th century ... because it was a fixed price and caused confusion." He argues that hard money, such as backed by gold or silver, would prevent monetary inflation (and, thus, would inhibit price inflation), but adds, "I wouldn't exactly go back on the gold standard but I would legalize the constitution where gold and silver should and could be legal tender, which would restrain the Federal Government from spending and then turning that over to the Federal Reserve and letting the Federal Reserve print the money."
On abortion, he believes states should decide, not the federal government, which means costs go up because you need a flight out of Mississippi. That sucks, and it definitely is going to create a huge financial burden and lower the odds the poor will leave the state for an abortion, but on the flip side, if we like him had watched people put "breathing, crying 2.5lb babies into buckets to die", I think we might have slightly different views on abortion as well. It's not an easy black and white subject. There's a fuzzy point in there where you have to decide when is too old to kill.
I like Ron Paul because he's smarter and less afraid of speaking his mind than other candidates. He's less fake, and that's a big deal. However, his proposals are so big and extreme that they would never be passed in Congress. I'd prefer Ron Paul stage a coup and overthrow the US so that he can dictate by fiat. Being elected President would just set the stage for the most dramatic face-plant on campaign promises in the history of same.