Before I tell you, let me be clear: I've insisted to my kids that they are not required to agree with me or be clones of me.

But I think hanging around with me a lot does have an effect.

(You may have heard me tell this story before, but since when does a proud Dad tell a story only once?)

Someone from Lockheed Martin was set to come to Regina's school when she was in eighth grade. (In case you're wondering: Regina, who's 15 now but was 13 then, goes to a different school these days. And it's her sisters who have used the Ron Paul Curriculum.) Students were told they could ask what they liked.

So the night before, she and I crafted this question, which she was at pains to emphasize she was asking respectfully:

"Should Americans be concerned that a lot of people from Lockheed Martin wind up in government, where they advocate military spending and foreign policy that appear to benefit Lockheed Martin?"

He was not prepared for that, I don't think.

He replied that he didn't know anyone from the company who had gone into government, and that they didn't always get what they wanted anyway. He then transitioned into a warning about the importance of bring militarily prepared against our potential adversaries.

Now trust me: Regina is not any kind of provocateur. But she's also a skeptic of the establishment, including institutions like the military-industrial complex, and she thought she couldn't just sit there through questions like, "How fast do your planes go?"

This is the same Regina who, at age 7, responded to her friend's observation that "penny candy" seemed silly because a penny hardly buys anything, with: "Yeah, thanks to the Fed."