Is Medicare, the Department of Education, the Civil Rights Act, Social Security, and essentially the entire existence of interstate commerce laws worth trading away for legalizing pot and withdrawing from Colombia?
Department of Education and other social programs, mostly, plus shutting down the federal reserve.
Thing is, "vital" doesn't REALLY mean vital, as in impossible to get rid of - very few government programs are that. It just means it would suck a lot for a lot of people if they got slashed. You can, very much, trade them off.
And Paul has stated multiple times he'd pretty much immediately end the war on drugs (or at least as quickly as possible), while most of his more insane plans would be things he'd introduce gradually.
Yeah, he could never do hardly any of that if he was actually elected. What he is selling is a philsophical ideal, not so much a plan for what he'd do if elected. Like any other philosophical idea, it sounds really good, makes a lot of sense untill you actually get down to the business of trying to actually impliment them as government policy, where it then turns into a tragic disaster, like how communism turned out.
Thing is presidents don't have that much power in our system of government. Like how even if Obama was as much a leftist commie pinko as he's advertised, he could never succeed in his obvious ambitions to turn the USA into a communist, agrarian worker's paradise anymore then Ron Paul could bring back the gold standard and close down all the orphanages or whatever.
So I imagine if by some incredible set of circumstances he was elected, he would likely simply sit at his desk and veto every single bill that had the government take some sort of action that landed on it. He'd then introduce a few moderate bills that he thinks might actually get passed through congress. He'd probably also badly mismanage the routine functions of the office and have some racist cabinet member who'd say inane stuff on camera and make for funny youtube videos and fodder for TV pundits.
Anyways, even if he could create some Randian minarchist regime, in theory, it'd all work better then the system we have now. Anything is possible if you believe hard enough, right?